Saturday, February 26, 2011

A Good Farm Story

This is the bad part, the rest is more uplifting:
By now it was obvious this wasn't going to be easy. Apparently the lamb was coming backwards. I tied on some baler twine and pulled. Nothing-zip-nada! Finally I made some progress. I got two legs out, still couldn't feel a head.
I needed help. It was pretty obvious by now this was becoming a retrieval operation for the lamb, but I wanted to save the ewe. I was sure it wasn't good when skin started peeling off the lamb's leg.
I looked at my cell phone—2 a.m. Who do you call at 2 a.m? My vet is an hour away, my pig partner is 7 miles away, but his idea of a good sheep is a dead sheep, and I was too close to that already.
Ah! Two miles from me is one of the premier Hampshire breeders in the country—no fooling! Stan Poe and his son Stan Jr. I had called Stan for advice before but not at 2 a.m. So I dialed the phone. No one answered. No surprise there it was 2 a.m. Then my phone rang—he dialed back!
"Stan are you awake?" I asked
"I am now" he said. I'm not too smart at 2 a.m.
Then I told him I had an emergency. Within 15 minutes, he pulled up to my barn door. The two of us worked side by side, and finally got a lamb out. It was huge and dead. "Man, that's a big single for a Southdown," he said.
Somehow I didn't think this was over. He felt inside and found another lamb, with its head twisted back. Apparently it was the one I tried to pull first. Next thing I knew, I had 40 pounds of dead lambs in a sack!

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