It’s been a bountiful growing season here in Shaftsbury. Our flock has spent the last six months moving daily through our pastures and newly planted oak and chestnut orchards while strengthening the soil and forage with every lap.

A new batch of our regeneratively-raised and naturally-tanned sheepskins are available online. We’ve got the first dozen listed in the farm store and there are more to come.

We’ve started using our newly built bridge that makes a vital connection between both sides of the farm. Now we can move sheep, tractors and water wagons in a direct route between our eastern and western pastures.

Our flock began in 2015, with a rag-tag group of 43 sheep, and one intrepid miniature guard donkey. There were mostly Katahdin sheep in that original group, with several Dorpers in the mix as well.

As we’ve moved our flock between paddocks again and again over the last decade, we’ve learned that the sheep are at their absolute happiest when they’re in one of our transitional meadows.

We’ve seen the environmental impact of holistic managed grazing firsthand. All across the world, and on hillside farms here in Vermont, ruminant grazers have shown they can stabilize soils, increase drought resilience, and rehabilitate land as they munch, bunch, and move.

One of our overarching goals this season is to begin the work of rehabilitating the soils in our newly acquired fields.

This spring, the Breadtree Farms team began planting our red oak breeding orchard. This orchard will ultimately hold almost 1,200 trees, 640 of which were planted this spring.

Our lambing season started in early April with our Texel-cross lambs. Things were slow and steady while we got to know the first offspring from our new Katahdin-Texel experiment.

Last year, we acquired fields that had been managed in a conventional corn and hay rotation for many decades.

We are very lucky to have Nour El-Naboulsi, a talented soil scientist and farmer, on our team. With his help, we spent last year gathering baseline data for our soil health and detailed measures of the overall field conditions.

Our agroforestry projects are at the heart of our mission here on the farm.

The busiest part of our lambing season won’t kick into gear until the middle of May, but our first wave of lambs started appearing in early April.

It was a long winter here in Vermont, and watching life come back to the land this spring feels especially precious this time around.