“The end is none of your business”. A silly quote from a silly Netflix movie. But in the world of agriculture, the end is too much of our business.
In the last few days on our farm we lost a kid to coccidia and a lamb to pneumonia. It is so much our business. There is the logical bottom line-lost animals equals lost revenue. Lost revenue hurts the bottom line.
There is reality. Lost animals are lost. A sacred trust we enter with their mothers. With them. We will protect you. Save you. But today reminds me that so much is out of our hands. We have given antibiotics. We have crushed pills and sprinkled powder down tiny goat throats; added meds to water. Watched. Worried. And they are gone.
The dreaded L word: Loss. Or the D word: Death. I know it seems contradictory to struggle with these losses, yet in the same week take two rams to butcher. They too are lost. However, they come back to us, purpose fulfilled. We control that loss. The insatiable human need to be in control of forces we have no business trying to control. Life and Death.
With the losses comes another L word. Learning. What have we learned from a week of constant worry, calls to the vet, trip after trip to the pens? One, we are learning. Our farm is terribly young. While we are not terribly young, our experiences in life are not all that relevant to raising sheep and goats. We read, ask questions, research. My Google history is filled with questions on dosages, measurement conversion (why do directions on bottles mix American and Metric?), symptoms; as well as recipes, dyeing ideas, wool prices. We read, we learn. Perhaps the most relevant experience we bring is the passion for learning from two teachers.
The second lesson learned is perseverance. It would be easy to sell the animals, retreat inside our house and give up. It would be easy to not breed again, no babies, no breech births, no stillborns. Life would be simpler, easier, and oh so much cheaper. But obviously, we won’t do that. It would be challenging to run a wool company without sheep. The goats provide milk, and they provide entertainment and weed eating services. We care about them too much to sell them, almost too much to keep them.
As of today, we (animals and people) seem on the mend. The kids afflicted with coccidia are up and playing. The sheep show no signs of further infection, leading the vet to include the pneumonia was bacterial. A side lesson this year has been the effects of weather fluctuations on animals' health.
The two L words-loss and learning will not end. The “better” losses-animals heading to new homes or the freezer, will hopefully far outweigh the “bad” losses. Regardless, we will learn and grow from each.