Charlie & Churchill, enjoying the sun.

I want to talk for a bit about this warm winter we’ve been having, and what that means for a sheep farmer (leave it to me to write about the weather). Because I run lots of rural small-town errands, I spend lots of time talking about the weather to my fellow rural Virginians– in line at the post office, gas station, and feed store– and most of us are a little worried.

Having grown up in the South, I’m used to a winter that doesn’t exactly line up with the cultural (which I guess is English? or New Englander?) ideal of what winter should be. There have been more Christmases without snow than with it, plenty of Januaries that have seen 70 degree days, and the daffodils are up and cheery by February. But, somehow, this year, things seem different (and it isn’t just that I feel cheated out of that heartbreaking, blanketing look of the snow on the fields and fences).

And I’m sure that part of it is that I’m more out in the weather than I ever have been before– I don’t just walk between my house and a handful of academic buildings anymore– and that the weather now has a more direct impact on both my physical and emotional comfort. By “emotional,” I mean that the health of the flock weighs constantly on Susan’s, Zac’s, and my minds. Which brings me to my point.

The parasite that gave us such a rough time last summer lies dormant over winter. If the ground freezes hard, deep down, then the eggs that infest the pastures are destroyed, and the pasture is “clean”. If not (or, perversely, if the ground is so insulated by its snow-blanket that the ground itself never freezes), the eggs are already all over the pasture, ready to hatch, and ready to bedevil the flock in increased numbers. What’s worse, a good portion of our flock in the springtime is either 1) newborn lambs or 2) lactating mothers, both of which groups have reduced resistance to parasite infestation.

We’ve had all winter to cook up new ways to get ahead of our friend Haemonchus contortus (whose name, by the way, means “twisted-up blood-hook.” Nice.). In addition to our good management practices, and one-two punch of antihelmintics plus the copper boluses we started using at the end of last season, we’ll be grazing the pastures with non-small ruminants first (before the sheep graze that pasture). This will be key, since Haemonchus only affects small ruminants. Daisy & Coconut, Madison, Monroe, and Jefferson, and even the trio of geese can ingest all the parasite larvae they want and be unaffected.

We’re crossing our fingers that a real winter– or at least a few more days of hard freeze– comes soon, because, until then, we’ll be a little uneasy.

P.S. A preemptive request: I bet we have the same views on Global Warming (or, if you prefer, Climate Change). Given my age, and my upbringing in a town known pejoratively as Commie Hill, you can guess mine. But, because this isn’t my blog, and the topic can be so inflammatory, and there’s so much to discuss, I’m really leery of starting a minor conflagration in the comments of someone else’s living room, so to speak. I just want to talk about the effect that this warm winter is having on us, please.

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