Farm News & Useful Info

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One of the most useful things I've ever bought is portable pen panels that link together. The last batch I bought were from J L Gates near Campbellsville, KY,  Tel. (270)385-6060.. They're at 7998 Greensburg Road, Greensburg, KY 42743. The panels are light weight steel, 8 foot long, 3 foot high.  $49 each (Jan, 2021). They link together. I use them to fence off stored hay bales or equipment, to set up pens and chutes for sheep handling, or to make as temporary gates.  I've experimented making my own from wood, but it is hard to devise a good way to link them together, and wood panels are heavy to lug around. This is one item that is worth buying.

Round bale feeders are expensive! But 16' long  x 4' high cattle panels are only about $20-$25. 

You can make a round bale hay feeder out of one panel plus one third of a panel. Take a panel and bend it into a three sided "pen". Each side will be 8 squares long (and 4 feet high). To bend it, stand on the panel at the point where you want to bend to be, and lift the free end up. I weigh 135 pounds, and can manage this with only a bit of grunting and huffing. Then take the second panel and using bolt cutters cut it on the far side of the 9th vertical, so that the cut off part will have 8 complete squares. However, if you've only got enough panel for this fourth panelto be only seven squares long, it will be enough. Eight squares are optimal, not necessary. Place the folded three-sided panel around a bale, and then complete the fourth side by tying the single panel to the other panel with bale twine. Nothing fancy, just a two or three strand tie, top and bottom each side. 

If you have top quality hay that is short, you won't need to cut out any of the panel to provide wider access. Sheep can pull short hay through 6" x 6" holes. But if your hale is long-cut or full of sticks and rubbish, cat away the panel to create 12" x 12" openings, say 2 on each side. 

Periodically, you'll have to pull hay off the center top of the bale to the sides so the sheep  can reach it. 

These feeders are so cheap you can have them in each shed/field, and won't have to move them from field to field when the sheep rotate through your pastures.

If you feed your hay in the open, you could improvise a rain-proof cover on top of the bale using the panel as support.

We experimented this winter with providing covers for hay bales so they could be set out in the field and not get rained on. We bought Ondura roofing panels each about 6 foot by 3 foot, and screwed  two of them onto 6 foot long 2x4s, making a "roof"measuring 6'x 6' to put on top of a square round bale cage made from cattle panels, described in the section above. Ondura panels are not steel, and are a little more user friendly - there is less chance of getting cut by one. Their corrugations are wide and deep so require 4 inch long hex screws. We also added washers as we knew we would be handling these roof panels a lot and did not want the screws to break through the panels, which are softer than metal.

These panels would have worked better with smaller round bales, such as 4'x5', as a new 6x5 round bale is higher than the sides of the cattle pen "cage" we use as hay feeders. We found it worked best when we pulled some hay off the full bales and distributed it over the pasture, lowering the height of the bale and making it easier to attach the "roof." These roofs effectively kept the hay dry, but made it rather hard to pull hay off the top of the bale so the sheep could reach it. 

UPDATE: We are not using these haybale covers this fall and winter, 2022, as we found it was too difficult to pull the hay off the top of the bale to make it accessible to the sheep. Untying and lifting up the "roof" proved to be a cumbersome process. I have reverted to setting up hay bales inside sheds/barns. So this experiment was not very successful.

We have put the Ondura roofing panels to other uses. We used two to make a field kennel for our whelping LGD. We placed the roof over some square bales, making a dry, cosy den that the mother accepted in preference to the blackberry and rosebush thicket where she birthed the pups. I'm using other panels to cover boards and beams milled with our new Woodland sawmill, to keep the weather off them.  Ondura roof panels are not rigid, and have to be supported in BOTH directions, or they sag over time. 

8 puppies available. 10 weeks old  as of Dec. 23, 2022. 

Mother is a mix of LGD breeds, and father is pure Maremma.

Both parents work on the farm and are excellent guards. 

Color: all white.

Gender: 2 males and 6 females.

Pups are already living with the sheep and bonding well.

Only $150 each, simply because I have so many to sell, and there is another litter of seven from our other female that are already about a week old.

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