There Were Happy Times and Sad times.... Mesta Meadows Summer Newsletter

I'm tempted to name this newsletter the "Good, the Bad, and the Ugly", but that seemed a little to 'heavy' so I went with there were happy times and sad times. First, on the Happy Times.... we are super excited to introduce our new full time intern - Caleb Albeston. A native of New Zealand, Caleb is working at Mesta Meadows before he starts college in Colorado next year. Caleb is already have a huge impact on the farm and we are super happy to have him. Here is Caleb's introduction in his own words:

Hi, my name is Caleb, I’m 17 years old, and I am Mesta Meadows’ new intern. I grew up in New Zealand doing small scale farming here and there, eventually moving to the US with my family two years ago. I graduated high school and was looking for farm internships, leading me to come upon Mesta Meadows. The variety, authenticity, and direct food-to-table approach caught my attention. I enjoy the farming lifestyle, the challenges, highs and lows, as well as the refreshing feeling you get after a hard days work. I’m here to learn, work, and soak up the new experiences.

Caleb joins our crew of Breckan Davies and Tessah Dowd in working on the farm. We really couldn't do it without these great kids! We will introduce each of these great members of the Mesta Meadows team in future newsletters.

On another good note, we have made some big investments in the farm during the last year including pulling over 48,000 feet of high tensile wire to turn the 4 pastures on our home farm into 14 pastures so we can improve rotational grazing, reduce parasite loads for our sheep by moving them more frequently, and generally making our pasture management more efficient. We have also built a new sheep dairy barn to Grade A standards to enhance the quality of our milk to the highest level possible.

The other good note is our farm expansion. We have been blessed to pick up another farm lease on an adjoining farm (the East Farm), in addition to the lease we secured last year on the farm neighboring us to the South (the South Farm). This has let us quadruple our pasture land. This is really important since the more pasture we have, the less hay we need to feed and as a primarily grass fed operation, this is a game changer for us!

We also had a fantastic lambing season with a lot of triplets, a large amount of twins, and few singles with an end lambing rate of 2.1 lambs per ewe. This was the best lambing season we had ever had.

So a lot of really positive things have happened since last fall. Unfortunately, we also had some sad news. We are one of the few fine wool sheep ranches in the Southeast, and in fact, a lot of folks argue that you cannot raise fine wool sheep this far southeast due to parasites. This year, we had a terrible year for parasites (the barber pole worm being the primary culprit). We have had a lot of rain (roughly 40 inches this spring), hot weather (many 90+ days), and high humidity which is prime weather for barber pole worms. Despite our best efforts, we had major losses in our lamb crop due to barber pole worms. There is nothing worse than seeing the lambs you have worked so hard to raise die from worms. As a result we have completely revamped our lambing season, we are using a cross bred ram with Scottish Black Face genetics (one of the toughest breeds of sheep) to improve the survivability of our lambs. So it has been a heart breaking spring on the lamb front.

We also lost our oldest guard dog, Samson this spring. Sam was the most amazing guard dog, and an amazing friend. Sam died on his post in the field guarding our wool flock. He will be sorely missed. He joined Izzy who was unfortunately hit by a car earlier in the year. Sam's son, Samson Jr. is currently in training in the petting zoo and will soon move to one of the fields to begin guarding our flocks.

Part of farming is taking the good with the bad. You learn, you adjust, you try different management techniques, and always try to improve. And sometimes, you just have to persevere, get through the tough times and keep pushing ahead.

So after a challenging spring, we are now entering another happy time - calving season! We have 4 calves (2 Angus and 2 Scottish Highlands) already on the ground and another 8 calves expected in the next few months. The best time of the year for me is always watching new life appear on the farm whether is is lambing or calving season!

On a final note, we are excited to announce that we have expanded our sales outlets in order to make it easier for our customers to get our fantastic farm to table products. In addition to our on-farm, farm to table store - The Mason Jar Store at Mesta Meadows, we have added a drop off point in St. Louis (West Center Mall), the Riverfront Farmers Market in Cape Girardeau, and three retail stores in St. Louis (St. Louis Greens, Local Harvest Grocery, and The Kerry Cottage). We hope you will stop by these venues to obtain our products.

And of course, we also hope you will come visit us and meet some of the new calves! We love giving farm tours!