GRannie Rambouillets & Johnstone Farm Border Cheviots

08/31/2026

08/26/2026

08/11/2026

🐄 VACCINES: WHAT “EFFECTIVE” ACTUALLY MEANS

Let's clear up one of the biggest misunderstandings about livestock vaccines.

A vaccine does not put an invisible force field around your cow.

Vaccinated animals can still become infected.
They can still become sick.
And depending on the pathogen and vaccine, they may still shed an organism.

So what does vaccine efficacy mean?

It means the vaccine reduces the risk of a particular outcome in vaccinated animals compared with unvaccinated animals under the conditions studied.

And here's the important part:

That outcome isn't always simply “infection.”

Depending on the vaccine and the research behind it, vaccination may reduce:

• The chance of becoming clinically sick
• The severity of disease
• The duration of illness
• Complications or death
• Reproductive losses
• The amount or duration of pathogen shedding
• And, with some vaccines, the chance of infection itself

Think of vaccination as stacking the odds in your cow's favor.

If a pathogen enters my herd, I don't want her immune system meeting it for the first time while she's also fresh, stressed, heat-stressed, off feed or dealing with another illness.

I want her immune system to say:

“I've seen something like you before.”

That's the point.

And vaccine efficacy is NOT necessarily 100%.

If a vaccine reduces the risk of a particular disease outcome by 80%, that does NOT mean “20% of vaccinated cows will get sick.”

It means the vaccinated group had an 80% lower risk of that measured outcome compared with the unvaccinated group in that study.

BIG difference.

Vaccination is also only one part of disease prevention.

Biosecurity matters.
Colostrum management matters.
Nutrition matters.
Ventilation matters.
Cleanliness matters.
Stocking density matters.
Stress matters.
And the amount of pathogen exposure matters.

Vaccines are another layer of protection.

We don't vaccinate because we believe disease becomes impossible.

We vaccinate because reducing the odds matters.

On a dairy, I'll take every reasonable advantage I can give my cattle.

— Beyond the Bulk Tank 🐄

07/23/2026

This was the Grasslands Sheep Show and Sale at Humboldt last weekend. Melissa Goulet of MellyKnits recorded this.

07/21/2026

When we picture Viking-age Iceland, we tend to picture longships, iron, and men.

The actual unit of account in Iceland for roughly five centuries was a bolt of woven wool.

It was called vadmal. And the Gragas, Iceland's medieval law-book, fixed its standard precisely: one ounce of value equaled six ells of cloth by two ells wide. That was not informal custom. It was written law.

Debts were settled in it. Rents were paid in it. Fines, tithes, and fees for imported goods were all converted into measured lengths of cloth and exchanged like banknotes.

There were no mints in Iceland during this period. The island had almost no silver coinage in circulation. Vadmal was the medium of exchange because it was the one thing Icelanders could produce reliably and trust universally.

Who produced it?

Women did. Almost entirely.

The upright warp-weighted loom was a fixture in Icelandic households, and it was operated by women. They produced the cloth, regulated the quality, and in doing so they controlled the material the entire economy ran on.

Archaeologist Michele Hayeur Smith, who has studied textile production in the Viking North Atlantic for decades, found that the evidence for vadmal production points overwhelmingly to female craft networks. The women working those looms were not peripheral to the Icelandic economy. In a very direct sense, they were the economy.

The Gragas specified what a valid cloth unit had to look like. Which means the women weaving to that standard were, functionally, minting currency. Their labor was the labor that made exchange possible.

For centuries, Iceland had no king, no coin, and no central mint. It had law, assembly, and women at looms producing the medium that made everything else run.

The swords get the sagas. The cloth kept the lights on.

What gets left out of the stories we tell about the past, and why?

07/19/2026

Experience a unique grazing dinner in Saskatoon at Beaver Creek. Enjoy a guided prairie hike, a locally sourced three-course meal, and a live sheep demonstration under the open sky.

06/01/2026

These puppies are looking for new homes in mid June. 7/8 Great Pyrenees 1/8 Kangle. Working parents.

05/28/2026

This is the system we have used for lambing our Rambouillets since 1995. Often the first move leaving the ewes with lambs behind happens around day 3 or 4. After that it is daily moves. When the youngest lambs in a group are 5 days old we combine them with an older group. This has worked well for us

During 2026 lambing (on pasture), moving the flock at least once daily allowed us to continually leave behind ewes with new lambs. We had not done this previously, did not anticipate doing this this year, and only became intentional about it some days into lambing.

The opportunities created should have been obvious, and are no surprise to many. But we had not realized how convenient it was to have ewes with lambs (greater than 1-day old) separated from the lambing heavy-breds.

While moving the heavy-breds on ahead daily, we left behind ewes with their lambs that had been born that day, and drifted those sets toward central areas that the heavy-breds never touched (as a group).

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Three benefits:

1) It was immensely easier both to monitor and to move the heavy-breds. We had far greater flexibility to move them through pasture connections made tricky by topography or gates, without lambs getting left behind en masse.

2) After 20 days of lambing, we could move the group of ewes with lambs off-farm to adjacent leased ground that is lacking permanent infrastructure, while keeping ewes who had not lambed closer to home. While grass on the homeplace had not recovered adequately for a second pass by the *full* flock, holding the very small number of remaining heavy-breds would not meaningfully set back the fast-recovering spring flush.

3) Because the heavy-breds were consuming so little grass after day 12 (as a shrinking group, and by acreage), we were able to keep them much closer to the central facilities from days 9 through 21, instead of blowing through & past. This meant that if a brand new set needed help bonding, we did not have to move it so far. And when the crew spotted a problem, help was closer. (Meanwhile, the ewes with older lambs were drifted further off to larger pastures during that interval.)
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An aerial view of our actual grazing pattern would look nothing like this chart. But we used the concept of maintaining an interface between the heavy breds, who were consuming less acreage daily, and the ewes with lambs, who were consuming increasing acreage daily.

Integrating two distinct grazing paths presented opportunities and convenience that we had not previously enjoyed.