Creep Feeding: Is it the Right Choice for your Operation?

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Creep feeding is a means of providing supplemental nutrition to lambs before weaning. Not all producers creep feed their lambs since most can easily thrive on mother’s milk and good quality hay or forage. For those that lamb in winter, under drought conditions, or have poor quality hay/forage, creep feeding allows producers to market their lambs sooner by meeting the nutritional needs of their lambs while improving body condition and growth. Advantages: Accelerates growth and helps smaller triplets or struggling lambs to thrive. Helps lambs reach ideal weight earlier for specific markets Acts as a nutritional supplement for lambs on…

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Getting Started with Sheep: Part I – Things to Consider

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So, you’ve decided that sheep might be a nice addition to your existing farm, or a good place to start your farming adventures. You may have decided that Katahdins would be the best breed for your situation. After all, they’re hardy, easy care with their shedding hair coat and parasite resistance, and they’re wonderful mothers. Everything sounds great so far, but what now? Where do you go from here? And how do you actually get started? Part 1 of this two-part series will offer questions for you to consider on lots of important topics with links to other EAPK blogs…

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Ruminations on Lambing Season – Updated 2025

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There are a lot of preventable problems that can arise during lambing season, derailing the health and productivity of your ewes and lamb crop. Below is a compilation of management tips to help keep your pregnant ewes healthy, get your lambs off to a good start and decrease the stress and workload for tired shepherds. These tips are compiled from EAPK blogs and newsletters published during 2021-2025. Preparation for lambing Nutrition and exercise Make sure that you are providing adequate nutrition and exercise for your ewe flock to ensure healthy ewes and lambs. Nutritional requirements Ewes have much higher nutritional…

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Understanding How the Heat Beats Your Sheep

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Have you felt pretty beat up by the heat when you work outside for long hours in the summertime? Well, let me tell you that the summer heat does not only affect us, but also our flock. Imagine that you are training for a marathon at 100 degrees Fahrenheit with a quilted puffer jacket on. That is exactly how our animals feel when experiencing heat stress conditions. Heat stress is defined as when the ambient temperature and relative humidity increase to a point where it affects the animal’s capacity to dissipate their internal heat to the exterior, causing an increase…

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Preparing for the Storm

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As many are aware, and many experienced, extreme weather devastated the southeast region last fall. These storms caused significant loss of life and billions of dollars in damages. As we reflect on these losses and look ahead to future extreme weather events, we need to consider the resiliency of our operations. Some questions that I have pondered over the last few months include; how reliant is a flock on outside resources? How adapted are livestock to their environment? If you were shut off from the world for a week, would you and your flock survive? What about for two weeks?…

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Management Intensive Grazing

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I realized the benefits of grazing early on in my livestock career. Most everybody that I knew had animals on grass; it was the confinement operations that seemed so farfetched to me. It wasn’t until I heard someone talking about a form of rotational grazing called “Management Intensive Grazing” or “MIG” that I started to think about grazing in a whole new way. Instead of just turning animals into a pasture and letting them eat all that was there, even though most of the time that wasn’t much, you would just give the animals a small portion of the pasture…

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Considerations for Winter Feeding Hay and Water

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We all know that we need to calculate how much hay to put out for our sheep to make sure that they have adequate nutrition over the winter. But, remember that sheep like to do things at the same time, so make sure you put out hay in a manner that allows everyone to eat at the same time. Our flock of 160 ewes requires two 4x5 round bales of hay per day to meet their nutritional needs, We put out eight bales at a time though, and only feed every four days. This way everyone has access to feed…

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Farm Emergency Planning

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A farm emergency can take many forms.  It could be a barn fire on a large dairy farm, or it can be something less extreme such as a simple power outage.  Emergencies aren’t foreseen and no two are exactly alike.  No matter what size farm you have, it is important for you to develop a plan on how you, and your facility, would respond to potential disasters. Developing an emergency management plan will require careful thought but doesn’t have to be overly complicated.  I equate them to Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point plans (HACCP) that are utilized by our food…

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The “Ram”bunctious Ram: A Discussion on Ram Behaviors

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As sheep producers, we all need two important things to get lambs on the ground: ewes and at least one ram, depending on the size of the ewe flock. The purchase of a quality ram can be quite an investment. Understanding proper management and handling of your ram is vital to keeping the producer and everyone on the farm safe, while ensuring the health and longevity of the ram. Here are some points to think about in your operation: Proper handling and raising of rams/ram lambs impacts ram aggression. Rams have a natural level of aggression which increases as they…

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Producer Profiles: Lambing Flow in Different Operations

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As producers we organize our barns for lambing according to what works best in our own situation. Here, three producers, from Iowa, Kentucky and Maine, share how they manage their sheep during lambing, with a focus on barn lambing. Producers were asked to describe how their lambing barn is organized and how they manage the flow of ewes and lambs. They also describe the barn's physical structure, lambing and mixing areas, jugs, feeding, recordkeeping and any special considerations, like the use of barn cameras, creep feeding, etc.  John Bare, DVM, Thistlegrove Farm Location: central Iowa Approximate number of ewes/acreage: 70…

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