I was having a little trouble.
I had too many mouths to feed in the evening and what was happening with our little round table and a couple little rubber bowls is that everyone was pushing and shoving and being fairly unpleasant. And of course, the lambs were totally being shoved out of the picture and not having a chance to learn to eat with the mommas.
So I had a couple ideas in my head and a few pieces of stray lumber, so it was time to create a line feeder. A sort of feeding bar that would help to spread everyone out a bit so that dinner time would be much more civil. (In a livestock sort of way!)
After seeing them wreck that cute little play table, I knew it had to be fairly tough as well. Ten full grown animals can be very pushy and rough on things. I also knew that I wanted it to be fairly long so that I could pour their grain into it and walk away without being shoved and pushed myself!
It’s not super pretty, but it works great! I need to make another one for the lambs… a sort of card table in the kitchen for the grain party every night!
We have them trained to come into the paddock in the early evening with a couple scoops of sweet feed or just hay pellets. It doesn’t take much, in fact I suspect that everyone is really only getting a couple mouthfuls before it’s all gone. It’s kind of like their evening snack. It’s important to have your livestock trained to a routine that gathers them up easily and quickly, so that in an emergency, you can get them to a safe place. And I like having them penned up at night in our big paddock. With two buildings and a good sized space, everyone is pretty comfortable. And if we need to go to town for a few hours, I know they will be safe with a few flakes of hay. Worse comes to worse, if they were to escape from the paddock, they would just be in the middle yard and safe.
I just love when we can make something that works just fine without spending a small fortune on the fancy manufactured version. I sure do keep my eye out at barn sales and such in the area for the fancy things, or even items that might not be intended for my eventual use. But it’s always fun to put together something that works great just from a few scrounged and donated leftovers!! Yeah!
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