Getting Started with Sheep: Part II – Now That You’re a Shepherd

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Congratulations if you’ve recently purchased sheep or are making plans to acquire your own flock. Now that you are officially a shepherd, the following information can be used as a guide to keeping your sheep healthy and productive. Links to earlier EAPK blogs provide resources for further information on particular topics. Information resources One of the most important “tools” you can have as a shepherd is a strong support system. It’s not a question of “if” but “when” things will go wrong. It happens to all of us – a sick animal, forage or equipment challenges, parasite pressure, genetics that…

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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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Preventing Lamb Losses: 30 Days Through Weaning

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For the purposes of this article, we assume that lambs will be weaned around 60-90 days of age. At 30 days old, lambs’ rumens are still developing, and they are not able to survive on just forage. They still need milk and/or adequate amounts of creep feed to thrive. Lambs that are fed only milk and forage should ideally not be weaned until 90-100 days of age, when their rumens are fully functional. Creep fed lambs can be weaned earlier, as long as you continue grain supplementation after weaning.  Making sure that your lambs receive adequate nutrition during this time…

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Fall Lambing Considerations

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Experienced Polypay producer, John Anderson of Lambshire Polypays in Ohio, shares some sage advice and techniques on how he successfully lambs in the fall without the use of CIDRs or other artificial methods. John lambs exclusively in the fall now after nearly 40 years of accelerated lambing using both the STAR system and three times per year. Why lamb in the fall? There are many benefits to lambing in the fall. Fall born lambs often bring better prices at market than those born in the spring. Pasture lambing in the fall can match fall forage growth. In many parts of…

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Colostrum

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The best diet that you can offer your lambs is good quality colostrum, followed by milk that they consume straight from their healthy, well-fed dam. Unfortunately, things do not always go as planned and all shepherds should be ready to, at least temporarily, supplement or replace a lamb's colostrum needs in case their dam is unable to do so. What is colostrum? The "milk" that ewes produce in the days leading up to lambing and is available to her lambs on the first day after lambing is called colostrum. It is "liquid gold" that contains antibodies to all the diseases…

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Winter Grazing for Livestock: Enhancing Animal Performance, Health, and Farm Profitability

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Winter grazing for livestock offers numerous benefits that extend beyond traditional feeding practices. This article explores the advantages of winter grazing, including improved animal performance, enhanced animal health, reduced labor for farmers, and ultimately, improved profitability. Improved Animal Performance: Winter grazing allows animals to continue their natural behaviors which limits exposure to mud and pathogens that often occur at hay feeding stations. Research by Johnson et al. (2018, "Effects of Winter Grazing System on Cow Performance and Pasture Productivity") demonstrates that properly managed winter grazing can maintain or even enhance body condition in livestock leading to improved reproductive performance and…

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Evaluating your mineral program

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We all know that our sheep need minerals, but how do we know that we are not over- or under-supplying their needs? Mineral deficiencies can lead to disease, but too much can lead to toxicity and even death. Minerals interact with each other; high levels of molybdenum can suppress copper levels and cause copper deficiency but it is also used to protect against copper toxicity in instances where high copper levels are present. The whole diet needs to be evaluated, not just the minerals you are offering. Minerals in the soil determine what minerals are available in the forages grown…

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Grazing Native Warm-Season Grasses: SARE Grant Update

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In my career with USDA-NRCS I've been fortunate to see a lot of different production methods involving a variety of livestock operations across North Carolina. Beginning in 2016, I began working with more producers that had established or wanted to establish native warm-season grasses (NWSGs) in their pasture operations. Those producers mainly worked with beef cattle. These work experiences led me to want to do the same thing on our small 20-acre farm in North Carolina. However, I wanted to do something different by using sheep. Study Design My proposed theory was that I could use NWSGs to lower feed…

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Scours: Causes, Treatment, and Prevention

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Scours or diarrhea is something that most of us probably see in our flocks over the course of a year. Animals scour whenever there is a disturbance in the normal processes that regulate how much fluid is excreted in their manure. Scours is a symptom, sometimes due to a serious disease that requires prompt treatment, but often diet induced and transient, requiring only tincture of time to resolve. Diet plays a large role in manure consistency; expect looser manure for a few days whenever there is an increase in protein and/or energy or a decrease in fiber in their diets.…

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It All Starts in the Rumen

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As prey animals, sheep evolved with the ability to harvest their food quickly with very little chewing, then retire to a safe place to further process their meal. Sheep are unable to directly digest the cellulose in forages and must rely on billions of microorganisms in the rumen (bacteria, protozoa and fungi) for fermentation and digestion. The byproducts of these microbes provide the sheep with needed nutrients (protein, energy, B vitamins and vitamin K). The health of the entire animal is reliant on the health of the rumen microbes. The rumen is often referred to as a large fermentation vat…

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