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There I was, sitting at the kitchen table after supper, mentally running through everything that still needed doing before the day was done. You know the feeling—you’ve been at it all day, but the evening still has a way of sneaking in with more work. And on a Wednesday night, that means one thing: sorting lambs for shipping in the morning.
Like clockwork, seven lambs need to be sorted, weighed, and prepped every other week. Simple, right? Not quite. I could already picture it: me out there, weighing lambs and sorting them off, trying to pick out the heaviest ones while hoping I didn’t end up with too many or too few in the shipping pen. And of course, the inevitable last-minute scramble that leads to a bit of lamb-wrestling when the numbers aren’t quite right. It’s practically a farm tradition at this point.
Sitting there, finishing up my coffee, I thought to myself, Why do I always do this to myself?
Now, here’s something I don’t talk about much, but I love technology. Our whole flock wears electronic ID tags, and the app I use tracks everything from their weights to their health, like having a digital flock assistant. It’s a great system, really. The app collects all the data I could want, and with a quick search, I can pull up info on any lamb. The problem? When I’m out there in the pen, trying to sort, the app doesn’t exactly help me find the right ones. I’m left guessing which lambs are heavy enough, and that’s where things start to get chaotic.
But tonight? Tonight, I wasn’t feeling up to the wrestling match. So I decided, “You know what? I’m not doing it tonight.”
Instead, I opened up the app, scrolled through the data from the last weigh-in, and found the seven heaviest lambs. Then, I did something I haven’t done in what feels like forever—I grabbed a pen. Yeah, you heard me. An old-fashioned pen. I jotted down the tag numbers on a piece of paper, feeling like I was going back in time, but also wondering why I hadn’t thought of this before.
Paper in hand, I headed out to the barn. And you know what? It was almost... relaxing. No guessing, no chasing lambs—just weighing them, checking their tags, and cross-referencing with my list. If the tag matched, into the pen they went. Easy. No drama. Honestly, it was kind of a revelation.
By the time I was done, I looked at the lambs in the pen, and there they were: exactly seven. No extras to take out and no more to find to add in. For the first time in ages, the sorting process felt smooth.
Now, I know what you’re thinking—Rod, why didn’t you just always do that? And trust me, I’m asking myself the same thing. But sometimes, you get caught up in making things more complicated than they need to be. I’m a big believer in tech, but there’s something to be said for the simplicity of a pen and paper. Turns out, they did the job perfectly.
So, next time you’re overcomplicating things, maybe just step back and grab a pen. You might find, like I did, that it’s baa-sically the perfect tool for the job.
Famer Rod
