DSANA Farm Tour

Well we did it...yes a year worth of work and pure exhaustion. We were fortunate enough to have the 17th annual north american dairy sheep symposium hosted in Petaluma with people attending from Canada, Mexico, many different states and even a speaker from Germany.  Cindy Callahan of Bellwether Farms in Petaluma did a wonderful job hosting and we were lucky enough to be listed as one of the farm tours and be the place to have lunch.  So we finished up all old projects, started and completed new ones, scrubbed, painted and planted to spruce up the place and put a rush on the completion. I have to admit I am a bit of a perfectionist about parties and had to fine tune the barn, and yes....get water bottle labels and burlap!!  We did also have beautiful mums for the party....but those were eaten by a loose sheep the night before.  So they were just greenery (part of living on the farm, flowers get eaten quickly)  The work paid off and the place looked amazing, hard to believe just a year ago I walked onto a manure filled run down dairy.  Well when people asked how did you do it all, I laughed and said little sleep and lots of concealer, and lots of help. They would laugh but I was serious. We had a group of around 115 so Tony held down and spoke about the milking parlor and equipment, and Joe did the outside tour, which included showing our sheep and each barn and its use.  We ending with running our super cooperative milk sheep through the parlor to show how it worked.  They were great, everyone expected them to be shy with 115 people all shoved in our milking parlor.  I guess we forgot to mention they are pretty tame and used to kids running and riding bikes in the milk barn alley behind them when they are milking.  So a great week of speakers, lots of learning, and a great farm tour!! Lots to be thankful for and tons more to work for....so time to catch up on sleep and refresh, back to the normal routine and normal nap times!!  More to come!!