Angela Percival

Hi Daron--I am in Olympia and have an acre of pasture probably a lot like this. Are you new to this property? Mine hasn't been grazed in a couple years now and I haven't cut it since I moved here over 10 years ago. However, even though you can barely walk through it in the summer, and mine is being colonized by Canadian thistle, it will die back down over the winter. At least that is what happens on my pasture--it stops growing, the fruiting stalks fall over and the mild wet winter causes all to biodegrade. Planting for me is near impossible in the summer or fall in the pasture, but not in the early spring when the grass has not begun growing again. I have lots of deer too and most of my trees and raised bed areas, berry hedges, etc. are caged due to deer--I like the deer so put up with the occasional loss--sometimes it takes a sense of humor more than anything. I had some Soay sheep and, like goats, they love Himalayan blackberry, and Scotch broom, trailing buttercup, etc. but they are worse than deer when it comes to fruit trees. They are more primitive sheep. The animals I am hoping to sometime have for grazing are small-to-medium size geese (Shetlands) and Kune Kune pigs. Neither are hard on fruit trees or fences. As far as I can tell, I have to scythe/mow two times a summer to exhaust the Canadian thistle and I was going to buy a scythe for next spring. I'd love to hear your fencing idea as I'm always up for new ones! I'm currently in Arcata, CA right now and coming back to Olympia in a few weeks. I'm going to be pretty busy for a while getting the well pump replaced and such, but it sounds like we have similar challenges and could share ideas and experiments. I tried laying some old carpet on a portion and the result was wonderful shelter for a lot of voles I haven't had any problem with them though. My pasture is the worst grass and I'd like to improve it too but it seems almost a necessity to have critters helping to eat it! I've been planting fruit and nut trees, vines, shrubs--wildlife habitat and food for me.  I am also hoping to have ducks soon--Ancona ducks can produce more eggs than chickens, eat slugs, love this weather, and I think are even hardier than chickens. You can't beat something that eats slugs and produces such tasty protein. I'll be doing a lot of planting this coming winter/spring too. Would be happy to meet up sometime and check out our pasture situations.

What about building a simple night shelter with stacked straw bales and maybe a metal roof and some plywood for a door? Then after a winter or two you can use the straw and litter as mulch? Rats would be able to dig through if you have them around. Weasels can get through very tiny spaces. Hardware cloth could be used to block both.

With 300 ft to plant, unless you are wealthy, you probably would do well to choose plants that you can propagate easily from cuttings. Evergreen is tough unless you choose something like clumping bamboos. Not sure how hardy guavas would do unless you get a lot of heat in the summer. Elderberries grow about that tall, send up shoots and spread, produce great fruit for people (choose good cultivars) and birds, easily propagated. Highbush cranberry would probably do well and is also about 8-10'. Wild plums will sprout from twigs stuck right in the ground. Serviceberries are native and get about 10'. Filberts. Might also consider coppicing willows (outstanding for bees)--if you grow the right kinds you can sell the rods produced each year to basket weavers. willows Some gooseberry varieties. I'm no help on evergreens though.

"Plums do not produce trees true to the mother tree from which they came. Generally, seedling plums are inferior in quality. Plum seed are generally planted only to produce seedling trees to be used as under stock with quality varieties grafted upon them. My best advise is to save yourself many years of waiting and then disappointment. Go out and purchase a grafted plum tree of a known quality variety."

So, seeds from a Mirabelle plum--a cultivar--will not produce the same fruit. Not sure about the "Sandhill" plums. Still, grafting much faster and less prone to disappointment. However, you could grow the seed and use those as rootstock for grafting onto.
another thread on the subject: Growing plums
I'm not an expert, so correct me if this information is wrong.

Might work for deer if you had a straight vertical wall 7 ft tall. Cheaper method might be an electric fence, depending on what you are trying to keep the deer from.

Your county extension might have a website that could tell you more about soils, forage, possible pasture grasses, etc. The Soay will definitely graze as well as browse. Where is the land located?

Chris, I might have agreed with you at one time, but statistics show it is safer to carry bear spray--50% of those who defend themselves with a gun get injured. I'd rather have two cans of bear spray and an air horn. Better yet, a Karelian bear dog.
USGS bear safety

As a woman who lives alone, I am more than happy to have a gun on hand, but only for human problems. I suppose it would come in handy to put down a suffering animal. No bears at my current place, but I've worked in bear country. Where black bears are hunted, they usually flee from humans, like most animals. Where I was working in roadless areas of Alaska, accessible pretty much only by helicopter, the black bears were unfamiliar with people and more likely to follow them or tree them.

Fencing can be a real drag, but I recently read about making fencing with free pallets and I thought it was the best idea ever! I'm going to try it in order to section off a part of the pasture for fruit trees. Geese would be great partners with the Soay since the grass grazed by the Soay is very lush and shorter, but by no means nibbled to the ground like I've seen some pastures. I don't know if that's unique to Soay or just because I have a pretty good crop of grass. I am pretty surprised they have been fine on a quarter acre this year.

I'm not sure about cedar, but I don't think it would be their favorite. They will browse on evergreens, but I don't think I have seen them chew the bark of evergreens at all. I haven't had any problem with larger trees--I have some huge old bigleaf maples and some cottonwoods that they don't bother. But an old Italian plum tree leaned a bit and they will climb that thing and stand on their hind legs to try to get the leaves and plums! The only trees they killed in my pasture were two young plum trees about 4" diameter. There is a youngish fir out in the back pasture that they like to rest under and they haven't killed that. To protect a tree, I wrap chicken wire over the trunk to about 4'. So far that seems to work.

About 20-40 pounds butchered. Some lines are definitely larger than others. Babies can weigh as little as 1-2 pounds, about the size of my pet rats!

Here are a couple posts from the Soay forum on their meat. People on the forum are happy to answer any questions and lots advertise their sheep for sale there too. You can also search on topics. Not sure about Texas breeders but there are livestock transport services. With the size of your property, I think small sheep and goats would be a good way to go.

"when I brought in a few ewes last summer [to the butcher], they were just over a year, and I ended up with 15-20 lbs of meat. I did barbeque a whole one at our pig roast, but it looked like a dog on the cooker and it really creeped me out! None of my sheep are real big, and I will keep this years til fall to butcher, making them 1 1/2 yrs old. I just explain to people that I need to to get the bigger size, and that Soay "mutton" tastes just like "lamb". I also served it up to all my friends at a party, so they could all get a taste of it. I made three sales off that one party. No one cared that it was technically "mutton" and they all called it lamb all evening, even though they knew it was not.
My ram is probably only 70 lbs, and 23% (I think) British. The ram I used this year instead, was more like 100 I think?, and I'll be interested to see how big the babies are. Even my ewe from 2009 is not as big as her mother yet. My bottle babies from last year weigh maybe 25-30 lbs, and they are now a year old! I'll let you all know if there is a visible difference in size. My babies run about 3-4 lbs, with an occasional 1-2 pounder (new mom fiasco last year).

As for the hay issues, I just purchased a few Tunis and Finn sheep, and the Tunis are actually the picky ones. What they wouldn't eat, I threw in for the Soay and they gobbled it right up! I've never had an issue with them not eating it, except a few square bales that got wet.

As for slaughterhouses, I don't use a USDA butcher, and sell on the hoof. Much easier that way, and no red tape. I pick my hides up the day they butcher, as we had maggot problems one time. I also send my hides to Bucks, but where mine were small, it only cost like $25, I think.

Some people like the smaller sheep though for meat, because if they have to buy the whole thing, not everyone has room in their freezer for a lot of it. 15-20 lbs doesn't take up much room. Last year I did a flat price of $150. If they weighed 30 lbs hanging, at $4.10/lb (which is what a local Katahdin raiser charges), plus $55 butcher, that is $178. Guess I wasn't too far off, and I have no marketing costs, no travel to butcher costs (they are 20 min. from me), no labeling costs, so it seems to work well. I'd rather lose a few dollars than deal with the government!"

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We get a lot of positive feedback on our lamb. Many customers saying it is the
best lamb they've ever eaten. We've been selling it mostly through the Winter
Farmer's in Burlington, VT. Soay meat is naturally lean and we do grass-fed, no
grain, which makes it even leaner. The flavor is mild, but definitely not
bland. Without wishing to step on toes, I don't agree with Priscilla of Salt
Marsh about not butchering in the fall. We have butchered lambs in every month
except July and August and noticed no difference in taste or smell. We butcher
only intact ram lambs. There maybe an increase in odor of the live animal
during the rut, but none that we can discern in the meat.

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We haven't been selling on the hoof. We try to butcher at around a 70-75 lbs
live weight and that generally gives about a 30-35 lbs hanging weight. That in
turn yields about 20-25 lbs of meat, depending on how boned out it is. I don't
know why you're not getting more meat unless your animals are smaller than ours.
We butcher nearly all ours at less than a year old so that we can sell them
legally as lamb and not mutton. No one outside of shepherds knows "hogget" as a
term in this country and it doesn't sound much more attractive than mutton. Our
older rams are between 90 to 110 lbs, and when we have culled them, they net
about a 40-50 lbs hanging weight and give a 30-40 lbs of meat. We haven't found
it worth keeping the sheep longer than a year for a few extra pounds of meat.
Maybe if we didn't have to feed 5 to 6 months of hay it would be worth it. We
pay about $75 per head to have them butchered in an organically certified
slaughterhouse under inspection and cryovac packaged. This makes our product
legal to sell retail and we have both retail and wholesale licenses. We sell
the meat primarily by the cut. We are currently getting $10/lb for ground lamb,
stew and shanks. $12/lb for legs and kabob meat. $16 for loin chops and racks.
We gross about $280 per head. Our price is competitive with other producers at
the farmers market and we may actually be under-priced compared to a couple of
certified organic lamb producers here in Vermont who are raising Icelandics. We
may increase our price in the fall. We have no trouble selling our lamb.

Forum is at Soay forum
The picture on the home page is of a very unusually colored ram of a man here in Washington who loves to breed black selfs, light selfs (like this ram), and spotted Soay. Most Soay have colors and markings like a wild sheep, as you will see from photos. His flock is really colorful and gorgeous woodland creek farm

Here's a little article about them that includes the main links to breed information. I should also mention that I have never wormed or vaccinated them since they arrived as lambs still on the bottle. Or trimmed their hoofs, which are worn down just from a patch of concrete in the paddock. Because there were no livestock on my pasture before they came, there were no worms and they didn't bring any with them. You can also avoid worms by rotating pasture with some type of movable fence or electric wire.
Soay article