Long Way Homestead Calendars featuring our flock of Shetland Sheep and guardian llamas. With beautiful photos, this calendar gives you a small sense of what raising sheep throughout the year looks like.

The calendar is 6" x 9" (vertical) and fastened with a jute cord.

Calendars are mailed via Canada Post and will be mailed out by October 25th, 2024.

About our Calendar Sales

The sales from our yearly calendars goes directly to purchasing hay for our flock. Your support allows us to keep our flock fed all winter!

Before I actually raised sheep I knew very little about how much they eat. I had this naive idea that if you have green grass, you're fine. I had no idea about how much forage they actually need and what is involved in getting that nutrition.

I won't go into relative feed value and proteins etc in this post, but this is a broad overview of what is involved in keeping sheep fed and healthy.

We feed our sheep on pasture from June 1 to hopefully October 1st. But if it's a dry year, or a wet year, or if we accidentally over-graze our pasture, then we run out of enough grass by early September and we move to hay. We do not have hay land (meaning we have to purchase hay from a different farm).

Here is what we plan for:

Each sheep needs around 4lbs of hay a day (this is a rough estimate and not looking at the feed value).

We feed small square bales for the most part. Each small square weighs roughly 50lbs

We have 38 sheep to feed all winter long. This is 152lbs per day or 3 square bales.

We have had a great grazing year and we anticipate we will need to start feeding hay by September 15th

September 15th – June 1st is 275 (ish) days of feeding hay. Which brings our total up to 825 bales for the next year.

We plan now so that we can work with variables that we have no control over in the future. Climate change, drought, flood, even pandemics are some of those variables that affect our livelihood.

Our 2023 Sheep Calendar is being released today and all the sales of the calendar will be going directly to the cost of our feed for the sheep this year.

Two calendar sales will feed our sheep for one full day! It may be a small item for you, but it has a huge impact for us!!