The Early Bird Gets The Worm
As a kid, my father always used to tell me "the early bird gets the worm", to which I would reply "Yes, but the night owl gets the rabbit". I have never been a morning person and never will be. My mother used to like to tell the tale of me as a baby waking up every night at 2:00 am to be fed, and even today I rarely if ever make it into bed before 1:00 am.
There is a myth that all farmers rise with the sun and go to bed with the sun. I say it is a myth because it is widely believed that to be a successful farmer you must get up before sunrise, but it isn't true. Back before the advent of electricity and tractors with headlights, then it made a lot of sense for farmers to work with the sun because most of your work is done outdoors and you need light to be able to see what you are doing. In the modern age, with electricity in barns, and flashlight apps for your phone, there isn't any reason that a night owl cannot be a successful farmer.
When we first started farming we bought into the myth as well, especially since when we started reading books on how to care for the animals a lot of the books seemed to indicate that the sheep and goats prefer to eat during daylight hours, and that they don't like to move from well-lit areas into dark areas, etc. We took all this information to heart and decided that we needed to make sure we fed our animals early in the morning and before sunset each day. My husband's job was a little more flexible than mine, so we would get up early and he would head out to feed while I headed into work. In the evening, if he wasn't working, he would feed while I was on my way home, or if it was summer and light later then I would help feed when I got home. Well, when you have a full-time job in addition to your farm, the best laid plans often go awry. The winter was especially hard since it was dark by 5:30 pm and we didn't want to feed too early and have the animals go without food for a really long stretch overnight in the cold, so we would find ourselves out feeding in the dark and using headlamps to see by. When we did, a funny thing happened - the sheep and goats didn't care! They didn't turn up their noses at the food because it was after dark. They came running as soon as they heard the feed buckets and saw our headlamps. We gradually started noticing other anomalies as well, like the sheep appeared to hate the sun and would go into the dark barn and run-in sheds during the day to escape the sun, and they would come out at dusk and start eating. We had "Vampire" sheep! Someone had forgotten to tell the sheep that they weren't supposed to like dark places and weren't supposed to like eating after dark. We gradually started thinking, well if these other "truths" aren't true then maybe we don't have to feed at the first light of dawn either, and we can go back to being "night" people.
I left the corporate world to start farming full-time. For the first few months after I left, I slept in each morning trying to catch up on 19 years of sleep depredation. I then started feeling guilty because I felt that as a farmer I should be getting up really early, so I started getting up at the same time I used to get up when I was working in the corporate world (and yes, I realize that 7:00 am isn't really early, but it is to a night owl). It didn't take me long to realize that it wasn't going to work because I still couldn't make myself go to bed before 1:00 - 1:30 am every night, and only getting 5 1/2 - 6 hours of sleep when you are physically working hard every day isn't the way to live a long and healthy life. What to do? The animals didn't seem any happier when they were getting fed at 7:00 am then they did when they were getting fed at 9:00 am, so I decided to stop fighting my night owl nature.
We now sleep in until 8:00 am, get up and have breakfast and then go feed everyone. The animals don't care as long as they are fed around the same time every day. They like their routine and don't appreciate us deviating from it too much. If we must get up earlier than normal for some reason, the animals are happy enough to be fed early but then they are out looking for us to feed them again at their "normal" time. We try to explain that they have already been fed, but they don't believe us. It is their normal feeding time and they want their food! If we try to feed and milk the goats earlier than normal, they don't want to go into the milking parlor; it isn't their time yet and they aren't ready. If for some reason we get behind schedule, then everyone is outside waiting for us and as soon as they see us coming, they start hollering for their food. The moral to this tale? There isn't one size fits all farming. You need to figure out what works for you and your farm and then make it happen. That is farming from the middle....