sheep and goat market

[willow bottom]

Like others have said they are a lot harder work with them than cattle. I use to have 250 ewes. During lambing time it was 24/7. With a full time job and other things going on I just couldn't keep up. I did make more with sheep than cattle but if you count your labor then maybe I didn't. The thing is around here there is no source for a large number of quality ewes to buy. When I decided to sell out I had my whole flock sold with in two days. I think about getting back into hair sheep but really wanted have any idea where to buy good ewes everyone around here has about stopped raising them.

I hear alot of folks say it's 24/7 during lambing time. Why is that? Do they need assistance or what?

 

[RanchMan90]

Like others have said they are a lot harder work with them than cattle. I use to have 250 ewes. During lambing time it was 24/7. With a full time job and other things going on I just couldn't keep up. I did make more with sheep than cattle but if you count your labor then maybe I didn't. The thing is around here there is no source for a large number of quality ewes to buy. When I decided to sell out I had my whole flock sold with in two days. I think about getting back into hair sheep but really wanted have any idea where to buy good ewes everyone around here has about stopped raising them.

I hear alot of folks say it's 24/7 during lambing time. Why is that? Do they need assistance or what?

Shouldn't be if you're not lambing in winter. A windbreak is adequate most of the time.

 

[ChrisB]

If you pasture lamb, I think it would cut back a lot on labor at lambing time. We lambed in the lot though and with mostly twins and triplets we would have to pen them in a small lambing jug for 24 hours. It's easy for lambs to wander off looking for milk from another ewe and the ewes had a hard time keeping track of their lambs. We also dipped navels right away and would make sure each lamb would nurse when brought into the jugs. Not sure if we really had to do all that, but that is what we were told to do and we had very few problems.

I liked having sheep overall. We quite just because we couldn't really expand beyond 50-75 ewes without investing some money and we were already all set up for cattle so we sold them and grew the cow herd. The downsides to sheep for me were shearing and trimming hooves.

I still kick around the idea of getting some hair sheep and running a drylot facility, but that would probably require even more hoof trimming.

 

[pricefarm]

Like others have said they are a lot harder work with them than cattle. I use to have 250 ewes. During lambing time it was 24/7. With a full time job and other things going on I just couldn't keep up. I did make more with sheep than cattle but if you count your labor then maybe I didn't. The thing is around here there is no source for a large number of quality ewes to buy. When I decided to sell out I had my whole flock sold with in two days. I think about getting back into hair sheep but really wanted have any idea where to buy good ewes everyone around here has about stopped raising them.

I hear alot of folks say it's 24/7 during lambing time. Why is that? Do they need assistance or what?

We lamb in the fall so our lambs would be ready for Christmas and Easter markets. We sent all our lambs to New Holland Penn. We would lamb 250 ewes in about 30 days or less. So when you have 10 ewes lamb a day there is around 18 or so new lambs running around. Not counting the ones that lamb the day before. Also during the fall you would get cool nights with rain and that was the worst thing for new lambs. After a ewe lamb we would pen them up for about a day then turn them out. So it was busy for about 30 days but after that it wasn't so bad. But then when it come to worming and vac. You would have 250 ewes plus about 375 lambs to work. That made for a very long day