The Burkel Farm

The Burkel Farm is in a state of transition. We started out with a roughly 50-50 mix of Highland cattle and our sheep flock. We've begun the process of scaling down cattle and heading into a full time sheep operation. Because of this, we're at around 35 ewes and two rams. This is particularly understocked for our property, but we wanted to capitalize on high prices for our Highlands along with timing of sending steers in for processing. The wonderful thing about sheep is, we can scale back out to our stocking rate with sheep in one breeding year. That being said, our sheep flock is excellent. We invested in Greg Judy rams and put them into a set of registered Katahdin ewes from a great local breeder as the start of our flock.

2020, summer - The start of our flock and steer. We began by farming small acres outside of the city we lived in from a generous family member, primarily chickens, bees and a small set of sheep.

2020, fall - We moved to our small farm with our starter flock and steer.

Winter, 2020-21 - We added two Highland heifers and eventually a Highland bull. We fed them high quality hay during the snow-covered months.

Spring, 2021 - Some of our flock’s new lambs.

Summer, 2021 - the flock continued to grow with new lambs.

Summer, 2021 - most of the flock and herd.

Summer, 2022 - after an amazing year of lambing, we decided to scale down in cattle and scale up in our sheep flock.