Nate Pontius

Considering the entire time I've lived here, the last five years, we've been in just a prolific drought, year over year getting less and less rainfall.

A day like today is a very, very good day.

And it's also kind of like forced rest.

When it's raining like this, you're not out there aggressively getting after it on the farm.

You are physically resting and allowing the animals and the land to rest and just take in this rain.

So it's a really good day.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, this prolific drought has guided me into making the decisions of raising a drought tolerant sheep on my farm.

Did I really start out wanting to be raising sheep?

No, I would prefer to be raising predominantly cattle, but due to the land that we had in this drought, it forced me to kind of shift my focus and use an animal that would

perform better in this drought, which is a South African breed of meat sheep called Dorbers.

And so that's what I mainly focus on at the farm.

It's interesting.

What makes the sheep different than a cow?

cattle have specific grazing preferences where they like to eat a lot of the longer sweeter grasses they don't really graze on brush and forbs and like thickets as much whereas sheep they they get down on that they eat all the really really crummy crummy forage and they can perform and gain weight a lot better and they're smaller they have a lot less impact on the land as what a cow does

You know, they're eight, nine times the size of a sheep.

So I can stock more sheep on my land and benefit it more than overstocking it with cattle, if that makes sense.

Well, I'm not really sure, really.

But what I think is the most interesting about this is how you're drawing the parallel to the importance of what your food ate.

And that's kind of what gets me going is...