by Gene Logsdon
Sheep, the Second Best Choice for the Cottager
Just as chickens provide three products, meat, eggs, and compost, so do sheep: wool, meat, and an excellent manure for fertilizer. Because diversity is such an important key to cottager efficiency, this triple market potential is something to value. The wool payment can sometimes pay for the ewe's purchased feed, and the manure will replace most or all of the purchased fertilizer that would otherwise be needed, so the money brought in from lambs fed out on pasture and mothers' milk, is almost all net profit minus the labor involved. Last but not least (by far), even older people can handle sheep for hoof trimming or shearing or lifting into the truck if necessary. Try that with a steer or market hog.
Because of their triple value, sheep are a good choice for a vegetarian farmer. They can be kept profitably for wool only, especially where one can find a specialty market with a higher price than the common commercial market or where the cottager is a spinner or weaver and sells the wool as yarn, fabric, or finished wool products.
Sheep have a fourth function on the farm as scavengers. They will clean up weeds in fencerows, and eat grain from the fields missed by the combine.
Except during shearing and lambing season, sheep do not require much attention and so are ideal for a cottager with limited time. Shearing and lambing take place here in late March/early April when there is no other pressing work on the farm. From May until winter, the flock mostly takes care of itself on pasture. I say that with my fingers crossed, because, as with everything else, the more attention you pay to sheep, the better they will do. For example I believe the reason I have thus far escaped coyote damage is that I make it a point to walk through the pasture almost every evening, and when the lambs are small, every night, shining a flashlight up and down the valley (coyotes don't like bright lights) and even shooting off my rifle if I hear howling in the distance. I also lure the flock up close to the barn at night with some choice morsel of hay, grain, or fruit.
The general practice among shepherds in humid regions like Ohio is to cut the tails off the lambs about a week after birth. (In the dry western range country, this practice is rarely followed.) Most often this is done by slipping a very tight rubber band (elastorator) around the tail with a special tool. The elastorator cuts off the blood circulation and the tail drops off in a few days, presumably causing the poor lamb only minor discomfort. I do not like to "dock" lambs at all, and this way least of all. On lambs I intend to keep for ewes, I cut the tails off cleanly with a hot nipper tool, cauterizing the wound in the process, after applying a tourniquet (which everyone tells me is unnecessary) and then applying pine tar or a medicated wound powder. I leave an inch or so of tail, which heals faster than the show ring practice of amputating clear hack to the rump.
Most shepherds feel obliged to dock lambs because the stockyards will generally knock a few dollars off the value of every lamb with a tail, no matter how clean and healthy the lamb. I have argued at the stockyards, to no avail. The stated reason for docking is that manure will catch and build up on the tail. The gob of manure may become infested with maggots which then eat into the lamb's flesh, certainly a fate worse than docking. But I fatten my lambs on pasture--no grain-and only one year did a few lambs have a manure build-up on their tails, during an autumn of excessive rains that made the pastures too lush. Even then the problem did not result in maggots.
Last year I found an auction market where I can sell direct to buyers, with the stockyards taking a commission. The buyers last fall paid just as much for tailed lambs as for tail-less ones, everything else being equal, so I will no longer cut off tails on market lambs.
Ram lambs to be sold as market lambs are generally castrated, although it is arguable whether meat quality is improved by the practice, so long as the lamb is sold within about half a year of age. Iowa farmer and magazine publisher Maury Telleen has kept sheep all his life and he tells me that he does not castrate market lambs anymore. But a $5 per head penalty may be levied against uncastrated fat lambs when they are sold, so most shepherds feel obliged to do it. Generally castration is done by putting an elastorator around the scrotum, which, like the tail submitted to this method, eventually sloughs off. I would worry about infection, not to mention unnecessary cruelty. Instead I have the vet neuter the animals with a special instrument, called an emasculator castrator or burdizzo, that severs the seminal ducts just above the scrotum, a bloodless, safer, and more humane method similar to human male vasectomy. At the same time, the vet gives the lambs a shot to protect them from overeating disease. (The medicine is Clostridium perfringens Type D Toxoid. Sometimes the digestive tracts of lambs can't handle a big intake of fresh grass, and the normal activity of microorganisms in the gut breaks down, resulting in a sudden buildup of one kind, Clostridium perfringens, which can lead to death.) Then the flock goes out on pasture and except for a possible mid-summer worming, it requires no more work from me other than shifting the sheep from one pasture to another. I don't wean the lambs. They nurse until the ewes dry up which means the lambs are still getting milk when they are quite large. I think this is one reason that I can get hundred-pound lambs without grain. If you handle a flock this way, not weaning and separating lambs from their mothers as most people do, then you must castrate or the grown lambs will breed the ewes.
There is yet another way around almost all the gruesome work of tail docking and castration: Easter lambs. There is an ethnic market at Easter time for lambs of about six weeks of age weighing under about thirty pounds-the equivalent of veal in bovines. These lambs require no surgical alterations, and because the price is usually about twice that of conventional fat lambs, and since they require little or no feed or labor, raising them can be profitable.
Some sheep breeds are raised only for wool, like the fine-wooled Rambouillets, and some mostly for meat, like Suffolks. Most breeds raised primarily for meat produce wool that may be low in quality but still salable for some purposes. Many breeds, like Corriedale and Columbia, produce both meat and fairly high quality wool. Our sheep are mixed breed, but mainly Corriedale. I chose this breed for the very practical reason that we live near the Kin family which raises nationally renowned Corriedales. I can rent a buck from them handily every fall for breeding.
The tendency among sheep breeders in this part of the country is to breed for larger and larger sheep, be they Corriedale, Columbia, or Suffolk, and try for a 120-pound market lamb. As I grow older, I prefer smaller breeds like Dorset, Cheviot, and Southdown simply because they are easier to handle and I'm not convinced that two 120-pound lambs are more profitable than three 80-pounders. Arguing the merits of one breed over another is an endless sport and leads to one conclusion: raise the breed that you like best.
Proponents of newer breeds which routinely birth three, four, or five lambs at a time, including Finnsheep, Polypays and others, would have us believe these sheep are more lucrative. This is arguable too. In most cottage situations, I think you will find sheep a more enjoyable and even more profitable enterprise if you can improve your flock by selecting out only ewes of whatever breed that generally birth twins, with now and then a set of triplets to make up for the singles. Some super-shepherds, who concentrate all their time and effort into sheep and nothing else, can disprove that contention by averaging three lambs or more per ewe with certain breeds, but many shepherds I talk to agree with me--aver- aging two lambs per ewe is enough. Why do we farmers constantly fall for the mistake that we will get ahead if we out-produce each other? All that does is drive the price down. If we had ewes that could raise a dozen lambs each, we would be no better off as a rural society than having ewes that will raise two lambs each.
By the same token, specialists in the sheep business are going to twice-a-year lambing. That practice doesn't fit the cottage farm regimen as I see it, either, since the fall lambs will require expensive hay and grain. The principle I follow here flows from the same economic philosophy I have mentioned before: When you get to be super-duper, you
also have to put in super-duper time and expenses and if nature doesn't cooperate, maybe endure super-duper losses. If you need more money, instead of gunning for two lambing seasons a year, do one lambing well, and raise something else in the fall instead of a second batch of lambs.
Lambing time requires almost constant attention. The shepherd must be there if midwifery is necessary. That means checking the barn every few hours. Lambing on cottage farms ought always to take place after cold weather has passed, as nothing will kill a feeble lamb at birth faster than losing body temperature. On the other hand., a healthy lamb with a normal birth can tolerate surprisingly cold temperatures. Lambing on spring pasture is the best alternative, I think, if the threat of predation from dogs or coyotes is minimal.
Only experience can teach you how to manage lambing. First of all, subscribe to The Shepherd and Sheep magazines and study them for a year. Beginners are usually too solicitous and try to get the newly born lamb to suckle right after it is born. Instead, after you get mother and lamb isolated in a lambing pen, leave them alone for a while. Often a ewe will back away from a lamb the first few times it wobbles up, searching for her udder, and I have become convinced that she does so simply because I am watching and making her nervous. So I go away. If the lamb is crying loudly an hour later, I come back and see what's the matter. Tip mother up on her butt, and check her teats to make sure they are not blocked. Although I have never yet been able to force a lamb to suck, sometimes if you squirt some milk on its nose, it will get the idea. Almost always if it will not drink, the ewe is butting it away when you are not present or there is something internally wrong with the lamb. When a ewe will not accept a lamb, the reason usually is that she has twins or triplets, and the first lamb born wanders off while she is in labor with the others. An hour later, when she is busy nursing the second lamb, she does not recognize the smell of the first one and refuses to accept it. Smearing some afterbirth on the unclaimed lamb's rump sometimes works (ewes recognize lambs by smell, and always smell the lambs at the anus). Just keeping both lambs together for a while sometimes works. Milking some colostrum from the ewe and feeding it by bottle and rubber nipple is the last resort. If the lamb gets weak and cold, take it to the house to warm it, and feed it mother's colostrum then. We have saved an almost dead lamb by submersing it in warm water for a while, then wiping it dry and putting the lamb in a box next to the stove. Every shepherd should have a woodburning stove (but a hair dryer will do). Sometimes recovery is remarkable. The lamb will wake up a half hour later, baa-ing for milk and trying to jump out of the box. If a lamb is obviously sick or disabled at birth and early attempts to help it draw no response, I do not persist in trying to save it. Rarely do extraordinary measures pay off. Let the poor thing die.
Sometimes you may end up with a lamb no ewe will claim, as we do occasionally. We put Pampers on ours, feed them by bottle, and let them have the run of the house. Fortunately, we've never had more than one at a time. Our "house" lambs snuggle in our laps and seem as much lulled to sleep by television as I am.
In about a week, a house lamb should go back to the flock. If it bonds too closely with humans, it will be extremely unhappy in the barn. Pet lambs have been known to pine away and starve from being separated from their human "parents." "Bounce," whom we rocked like a baby, did finally get used to being a sheep again and today she is very handy when I want to lead the sheep across the creek or into a new field. She will go anywhere I go except up a tree, and then the rest will follow.
Sheep are prone to internal parasites mostly because humans insist on trying to raise too many of them per acre available. As my neighbor, Al Kin, a nationally known Corriedale breeder, often says: "Shepherds begin with a small flock and have good luck. So they keep increasing flock size until they get in trouble."
How many sheep are too many? An acre here is supposed to carry five sheep through a grazing year. But if parasites are a problem and are becoming immune to wormers in your area, two sheep and their lambs are better, I think. If you are aiming at more profit, add one small-breed steer or cow along with the two sheep and their lambs per acre. Cattle parasites don't infest sheep and vice versa. If your pastures improve enough to carry more than that, increase only cautiously. We used to think that rotating sheep on pasture so that a given field or paddock was left ungrazed for thirty days broke the worm cycle, but animal scientists have proven that to be an error. A good cold winter will kill most worm eggs in the soil, and thus break the worm cycle temporarily. But even after a hard winter, some worms remain and there may be a rapid buildup in summer on crowded pastures.
Temporary pastures, rotated to other crops, pose less danger from parasites not only because the plowing and cultivating tends to clean infested soil, but because at least one year in four, when the field is in corn, it is almost entirely free of sheep until fall. That will break the worm cycle. The disadvantage of temporary pastures is that they can't withstand much animal traffic in wet weather and they do not contain a wide variety of grazing plants as a permanent pasture does.
We will carry sixteen ewes and their lambs and a couple beef cattle on about ten acres of permanent pasture and six acres of temporary pasture this coming summer. I hope to get thirty lambs from the ewes, to have forty-six sheep altogether and feed them exclusively on pasture from April through November when we sell the lambs. Only experience will tell for sure, but I believe that forty something will be our limit in sheep, not in terms of carrying capacity but because of internal parasite pressure. Additional grazing animals will be bovines, along with maybe a llama or donkey to guard the flock from dogs if that becomes necessary.
When lamb prices are good, a situation we are fortunate enough to be enjoying at the moment (late 1992 and early 1993), sheep can pro vide a very respectable income per acre without overcrowding. At a price of about 70¢ a pound, thirty lambs will fetch about $2000. (It is riskier to count lambs before lambing than chickens before hatching.) If the wool payment covers any extra hay I might have to buy for the ewes in winter, that $2000 means a net of about $120 per acre (16 acres involved). That meets my long-term goal even before adding in income from chickens, beef, and pigs, which are also fed mostly from these acres. That would seem to demonstrate that a smaller commercial farm of 160 to 200 acres, managed in this traditional cottage way, would make an adequate living for an economically conservative family. And remember that I am usually taking the easy market. If I market lambs directly through sales of meat to consumers and wool to spinners, as I sometimes do, a better return per acre could be achieved. A friend in Iowa tells me that he can made about $120 per lamb through private locker sales verses $85 through regular market channels.
A New Kind of Family Cow for the Cottager
The term "family cow" refers traditionally to a cow kept for a family's own milk supply. Such a cow will return more money to the cottager than any other animal on the farm, but also requires the greatest amount of labor including every-day milking. Realistically, not many families are going to want to, or be able to, milk a cow twice a day, nine to ten months out of the year.
I propose rather a cow kept primarily for baby beef-for the meat her half-grown calf will provide-and milk only if the cottager so desires. This alternative allows two options: Either let the calf take all the milk, or milk enough for the table and let the calf have the rest. The latter choice, which I have made, allows you the freedom to milk once a day, or once every other day, or maybe only once every third day. If the calf is born in spring, it can be ready to butcher as baby beef by winter having been fed only milk and grass and none of the precious supply of winter hay.
These options require a cow that gives only a medium amount of milk when fresh. A heavy producer will give more milk than a calf can handle and you will have to milk every day whether you want to or not. (As an alternative, you can buy an extra calf and persuade mother to adopt it along with her own calf.) The disadvantage of a moderate producer is that by half way through her lactation, she ma
y be giving enough milk only for the calf. However, since the main goal in this enterprise is the meat and not the milk, this is hardly a disadvantage for the cottager who is not keen on milking anyway.
A spring-born calf, raised entirely on plenty of milk and good pasture, reaches about 600 to 700 pounds by fall. Having never been weaned, its meat is luscious and tender: more tasty than veal but not as fat-marbled as beef finished to over a thousand pounds on a heavy corn diet. To our palates, baby beef is the best beef of all, and according to tests that my Kansas rancher friend Oren Long ran on his baby beef, as low in cholesterol as chicken.
In my opinion, the best cows for raising baby beef are jerseys bred to Angus bulls. Mother cows that are crosses between Jersey and Angus, or Guernsey and Hereford are also ideal. These breeds usually give more milk than beef cows, but throw calves that are chunkier than dairy types. When taking some of the milk for table use, I have found that I had to milk at the same time the calf nursed--I work the two teats on one side of the cow while the calf is sucking the two on the other side. If I try to milk without the calf nursing, the cow will not let her milk down, as we say, saving it instead for the calf. Animals aren't stupid. That also means that I have to pen the calf for at least five hours before I intend to milk out my share. The rest of the time, the calf runs with the cow. It is much better for mother and offspring to be together as much as possible. I am convinced that calves are so prone to scours (diarrhea) these days because of the stress of being separated from their mothers right after birth.
It hardly pays to keep a bull for only one or two cows, so the cottager must generally turn to artificial insemination if a neighbor doesn't have a suitable bull. Artificial insemination is a great alternative but it does have drawbacks. Cows don't always "settle" on the first service and sometimes not on the second, third, or fourth either. This can throw your schedule way out of whack especially when you want calves birthing in spring to take advantage of a full season of pasture. Also some areas may not have an A-I service person at your beck and call. As dairy farms get larger, dairymen have learned to do their own breeding and keep their own supply of bull semen, which means that the number of career inseminators is dwindling. Some farmers have gone back to using bulls. Even if I had just four cows, I would buy a bull to service them in September or October and then sell the bull, repeating that practice every year and thus avoid keeping a bull on the farm yearround. It costs money to feed a bull all year, and often bulls become cross and dangerous.