Expanding The Flock! Bringing Home New Ewe Lambs

#farming #agriculture #livestock
We have a great problem. We just don’t have enough lambs on hand to meet the needs that we have. So we bring in a new set of ewe lambs to finish out. Also with expansion I went to northern Ohio to pick up 5 new ewe lambs to add to our flock.

[@craigpacker7171]

Those are some really nice ewe lambs. They remind me a lot of that really nifty late ewe lamb you have out of one of the wether dams. Do you plan to breed them this fall? Or will you wait a year?

[@BankBarnMeats]

Currently we are planning on breeding them this year so they lamb right at 1 year of age. So that should have them lambing February. But that also depends on how they grow. And a couple of the ewe lambs are heavy on the “blue” wool color. So it I’m excited to see how the grow bc I have always found black sheep really cool looking.

[@craigpacker7171]

@@BankBarnMeats Hmmm... I don't know. Lambing at 12 months is pushing it. I've never tried it. When I breed ewe lambs, I shoot for having them lamb at 13 or 14 months--but I guess I did it that way because that was the advice I was giving. The extra 1 or 2 months can make a big difference, but then that has you lambing in March or April, which is a good bit later than most of your ewes.
Meanwhile, I have some Natural Colored Lincolns, and I can tell you the white Lincoln lambs can't compete with the Black lambs on the cute factor. :)

[@BankBarnMeats]

@@craigpacker7171 we used to not breed them until they were 15-19 months of age. The ewes that didn’t take we shipped after we had been feeding for 2 years. I read some things and talked to a local farmer about it and now I have merged all this into my new process that we are trying this year for the first time. If a ewe lamb is marked and has lambs at one year of age great. If they don’t also no big deal if they don’t and are in good health. I read a article that a university put out that says ewes having lambs 12-15 months of age will have a higher percentage of twins/ lambing percentage over their life span. So we thought we would try it out this year fully aware that these ewes may need more attention in the lambing jug. So this year is a test. I will post the article once I get to a computer bc it makes a case for really what ever way works for a operation

[@BankBarnMeats]

This is the article I was referencing. extension.sdstate.edu/breeding-ewe-lambs . This is why we are going to give it a shot this year and in article they talk about the extra work that it will take. So I don’t know if I’d want to try it with 100 ewe lambs or not but this year will be an experiment