-
Brookhaven Mill Farm-North Carolina
- 2025/01/03
- 再生時間： 32 分
- ポッドキャスト
-
サマリー
あらすじ・解説
Today I'm talking with Cheryl at Brookhaven Mill Farm-North Carolina. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Cheryl at Brookhaven Mill Farm, North Carolina. Hello Cheryl, how are you? Hi, I'm doing well. How are you doing? I'm great. I was looking at your website and your story is so cool, so tell me about yourself and what you do. 00:29 Okay, so let's see, I'll just give you the brief rundown. At age 60, I purchased a farm, my first farm, and I am now 66. So I have been running this farm for the past five and a half, almost six years. I am in central North Carolina, right outside of Greensboro, and I diversify a bit as far as the farm model goes. Because I... 00:58 physically do not grow crops. I decided to grow livestock, and I am now centralized around growing sheep. I started with East Friesian sheep, and now I've diversified into a different breed that's a little more parasite resistant in this part of the country. And it's a Catawdin-Dorpor cross. Right now, I have about 30 head. But raising sheep is kind of boring. It's like golf. If you don't do it, it's kind of boring. 01:29 So what I do on the weekends is I open my farm for an agritourism destination. So I get locals from Greensboro and visiting to come out to the farm and not only see the sheep, but to see some of the other animals I've added. Sheep get along really well with goats. So I've added some goats and a couple of donkeys for a guardian, a couple of... 01:57 dogs, a lot of cats, and chickens, ducks, and geese. And it just makes for a wild menagerie of animals for people to feed and just get excited about learning. Awesome. I have two questions. I'm gonna forget one of them if I don't ask both at the same time. One is about the cross-breed of your sheep and one is about the fact that you started this at 60. So we'll start with the sheep one. The cross-breed that you have. Catodin is a hair sheep, right? 02:26 Yes, that's correct. Is the other one also a hair sheep? Yes, Dorpher is also a hair sheep. And you know, it's really just a bunch of mutts out there, but they have had four lambing seasons coming up on my fifth lambing season, Valentine's Day. We're expecting lambs. And each lambing season is getting more and more specific to the Katahdin look, the fine features, the sweet face, the little smile. 02:56 and just easy to handle, very docile, very good choice for meat. And not so much milk that I can tell. I'm going to try to milk some of my ewes in February. I morphed into this mutt breed of mostly Katahdin now, but some dorper, because the sire, the ram, is a dorper. But he's also a cross. 03:26 So he's a Dorper St. Roy cross. So these girls have all been lambing. 03:36 Some have been lambing for four years, some have been lambing for three. This year I've got a couple of first time moms, so it's gonna be interesting to see what they're offering exhibit as far as the traits that I'm trying to get to, which is worm resistant, hair, completely hair, because the original seven sheep I started with six years ago when I bought the farm were all German breed, East region, and they were wool. 04:04 So I've just about bred the wool out of the lands now. Okay, that was what I was gonna ask you about because I haven't actually talked to anybody who's bred a hair sheep and a wool sheep and how that works, because I have no idea. Is it just like any other animal that you breed with a different variety? That's why it's. 04:27 And then you get wool sheep or hair sheep or like maybe a wool hair sheep. I don't know. Yeah, you get a wool hair sheep and that's what's so funny is because it's taken a couple of generations now of lambing to get to the point where all the lambs are now starting to look like hair lambs. The first experiment, the first lambing when I crossed the dad with the, you know, the 04:57 lambs. Some of the lambs had the nubby, woolly texture. Some had sort of a half and half fill. And now they've been bred back to their father. And their offspring now exhibits very little wool nubby. But sometimes you'll get one that looks like it's... Where did this one come from? It's got almost like Velcro. 05:26 fleece, which is really hard to shear. So not only have I saved money for the farm by going to hair sheep, because it's quite expensive to shear, have a shearer come and shear 30 head of sheep. So this year, the shearer is only going to have to shear six sheep, which are the half and halves, but they still need that wool taken off. 05:55 how to be comfortable in the summertime. Okay, that's what I ...