First Animals

    In the past two weeks we have put our first animals into our grazed orchard.
    Two weekends ago we purchased two heifers from my friend Brad Lau in Waimea.  They have somewhat unknown origins and Brad says the lady who he got them from were calling them Beefalos with some Angus in them.  I bought them because whatever they are they are certainly miniature by cattle standards.  They are both under 36" at the shoulder at 1+ year old and weigh less than 400 pounds each.  They look like miniature Angus cows and I have a feeling they have some Lowline in them which would be great.  Lowline cows are miniature cattle derived from the Angus breed and were developed in Australia.  They produce the most meat per acre of any breed, can finish with great marbling off pasture alone, and are only about 60% the size of regular Angus cows but produce more rib area of meat(prime cuts) in proportion to their body size.  Their smaller size will do less damage to our fences and our fruit tree roots.
    My dad and I were also able to put up a 20x16 hale/catchment for our animals.  A gutter feeds into our 80 gal trough that will overflow into a small pond(once we make it).  I also went around and "buttoned" up our fence putting extra post or skirt in about 40 spots to make our orchard pig/dog proof.
    This past weekend we put our first sheep in our orchard.  We are very lucky to have 5 sheep(4 female 1 male) from Jake's flock in Pepeekeo.  They are bred from a 7/8 Dorper ram and mixed hair ewes(Katahdin, St. croix, Barbados).  Hopefully the sheep do alright in the orchard, as it will be hard to monitor them.  In Pepeekeo Jake has had a hard time with flystrike and lost 2 ewes to it.  We hope we can breed resistance to it.  Muscovy ducks may also help to clean flies off our sheep, and we plan to get some as soon as we have a pond.  Our Dorper ram has a nice shedding coat and seems to have good feet and resistance to internal parasites.  He has not had any flystrike issues yet.  He is not as big as Dorpers that I have seen in pictures, but I hope that he will breed some good hardy animals and get our ewe line established.  The ram lamb we chose to put in the orchard has exceptionally short hair and looks like he will have a nice muscular frame.  In the future we will look to find a big Dorper ram to beef up our herd.  We will also replace ewes prone to health problems.
    I hope that our animals start to take down the Guinea grass so that we can start planting many more trees this year.  We will need to cull animals aggressively these first few years to breed out weaknesses, but with a little luck our herd will grow large enough to keep our orchard in a state that is favorable for our growing trees.