Heading into Fall

After a very warm day yesterday, we awoke this morning to temperatures in the low 50s here in the Sierra foothills. In March, this feels balmy; in September, this means wearing a sweatshirt when I leave the house to irrigate at the ranch. Finally, the weather has a hint of autumn in it! After a long, hot, and smoky summer, a cooler morning was incredibly welcome. Maybe fall is on its way!

We ranch in a Mediterranean climate, with wet, cool winters and warm, dry summers. Our rangelands are characterized as "annual" rather than "perennial," meaning they are dominated by annual grasses and forbs. We don't have green grass (unless we irrigate) from roughly June through October. Spring rains can mean longer green season in the spring; a dry fall can mean no green grass until Thanksgiving (or later, like last year). And so there's always a sense of uncertainty and expectation as we head into fall. We look forward to that first real storm!

In many ways, autumn is my favorite season. There's a sense of winding down - the days grow shorter, irrigation season ends, we pick the last of the summer vegetables, and I get to spend a few days deer hunting. But as a shepherd whose sheep lamb in the springtime, autumn also marks a beginning. In about 10 days, we'll put the rams with the ewes in anticipation of next year's lamb crop. For me, the new year doesn't begin on January 1 - it begins on the day we turn the rams in with the ewes (or on the day we get a germinating rain).

Even at our small scale, we do a lot of planning focused on breeding season. We started talking in April about how many ewes  and replacement ewe lambs we thought we could keep this fall. After the driest two years in our experience, we were a little nervous about what this season would hold. Dry soils this spring meant our irrigated pastures were less productive than typical - we weren't sure we'd ever catch up on our forage growth. Last year's dry fall spooked us, too - we barely scraped by last November on what remained of our irrigated forage. And so we made the decision to keep fewer replacement ewe lambs and to cull more heavily than normal. We made the calculation that we could breed 80 of our own ewes, plus 11 that belong to a friend, and keep 13 replacements - hopefully without having to buy any hay. We'll see if our decisions pan out - if we get early rain, we may wish we'd kept more ewes! Conversely, another dry fall might mean we need to sell more sheep (or buy some expensive hay).

In many ways, I think, small ruminants like sheep and goats offer more flexibility than cattle. Our sheep can utilize a wide variety of forages. We're equipped to graze rangelands that might be inaccessible or undesirable for cattle. I suppose it doesn't hurt that ours is a part-time business, either. But we do have to make decisions about the economics of our business. We can't afford to bring feed to the sheep for very long - we're far more profitable when we can take the sheep to the feed. That said, we're locked in now. We've invested half a year's worth of work and management to get our flock ready to breed this fall.

In the meantime, I'll enjoy these cool mornings and bright days. And I'll look forward to turning in the rams - and enjoying that first real storm of autumn, whenever it arrives!