lamb productivity – Page 2 – Stewart Creek Somethings

Lambing continues slowly

August 18, 2024Steve HardinLeave a comment

Moonlight barn picture, phone picks up a lot of light!

The sheep are kind of having babies at a glacial pace. We have had one more single born since the twins last week. We have moved the sheep to the upper fields now and it makes it a lot easier to check on them. We can just hop on the tractor and drive up the fields all the way to the end. This is not even a slight possibility on the lower property due to the creek and fences separating the fields. I spotted the new mom when I was bringing in the sheep one night. The baby had just been born and was still warm and wet and messy. I grabbed the baby and used it like a lure to get the mother to follow me into the barn lot where we are keeping the mommas and babies.

Lamb productivity is easy currently. one set of twins, one single born to two mothers = 150%.

The child and her now official Beau are bringing us apples that have fallen off their fruit trees and we are feeding them to the sheep at night. Every evening I toss out a bunch so when the sheep come in at night they are rewarded. It is starting to pay off, the sheep are coming in 2-3 times a day to check for apples. This makes it much easier to put them in at night if they are voluntarily coming in. There a bunch of ewes that look like they are going to pop any time and several that have full udders already. We are hoping they get with the program and pop them out soon.

I needed to match a cow/calf pair as we are selling one this fall. I spotted two cows and two calves off by themselves so figured I would get some tag numbers so it would make it easier to sell them. I was headed down to clean up field one of the old hay bales that had not gotten removed. I drove up to the cows and the calves jumped up and ignored the cows that were right there. They started to run down the fence line and all of a sudden the cows that were 75 yards away started hollering and running at the fence line. Turns out the adult cows were just baby sitters and not the actual mothers. I was able to get a picture of the mother cow with calve #24. This same person wants a pregnant cow also. So Mr Rainman and I sorted cows today.

Sorting cows never goes smoothly. I know this and yet I seem surprised when we are running the cows for a solid hour on the back hillside because the cows refuse to go down through the gate that is in the middle of the hillside. It took us two hours to push the cows into the corral and sort off two, a female cow and an eater for this year. The same person that wants a cow/calf pair wants an eater so we are hoping that by putting the eater in with the family pairs it will learn to be calm. Running with the teenagers all summer has not made any of the cows calm. We had two of them leap the fence. The fence on the hillside that we had just tightened and reinforced! They jumped it without even hitting a strand of wire. We are just going to leave them for now. They will stay outside the fence with the mommas/babies and knock down some of that tall grass. They won’t run away with the cows on the other side of the fence.

Week 12 lambing update

February 7, 2024February 7, 2024Steve HardinLeave a comment

Yes, we are in week 12, or in human terms three months and we have still not had the sheep give birth to all of the lambs. We have some lambs that are already three months old. Annmarie and I have discussed this, in the next two weeks we are going to sort off the culled sheep from the main herd with their babies. Those sheep will go in with the ewes that have not had their babies. We are going to dump the rams in with the rest of the heard for two months only! Then the rams will come off and go back in Alcatraz with the bull. We cannot continue to lamb for months on end. It is crazy and very inconvenient.

Date of update- Feb 6 2024
# of Lambs born – 46
# of ewes who have delivered babies – 31
# of ewes still pregnant – 6
# of single lamb births – 17
# of twin lamb births – 13
# of triplet lamb births – 1
# tagged male (weathers-neutered) lambs-33
# tagged female lambs-9
# unknown lambs – 3
# of bummer lambs – 4
# of lambs who died in first two weeks – 5
Total # of lambs on farm -37
% birthing rate- 148%
% production rate -119%
% survival rate at birth – 100%
% survival rate at 2 weeks (bummers count as death as they need help and leave the farm) – 80%

Ouch, these are not the best statistics. We may have to consider bringing in a different breed of ram in the next two years. We had a lot better survival rate when we switched up the ram breed every so often. We have been doing Katahdin for quite a while now. One more thing to think about.

Our young border collie, Chance is one her second cone of shame. I have used 2/3 of a full roll of duct tape in an attempt to keep them in one piece. The vet tech felt sorry for the dog on Friday, by Saturday she had it cracked and by Sunday it had already torn in half. It has been six days and she already has two full length tears in it. I am just going to keep using duct tape on it. I have a second full roll ready to go so I think it can survive until we get the paw wound healed up. It looks so much better now than it did when we started. She hates it but has really learned to use it as a scoop, weapon and digging tool.

Week 7 lambing update

January 6, 2024January 10, 2024Steve HardinLeave a comment

Well lambing is going to be better than last years five months long endeavor but we are definitely not getting it done quickly. We are going to have to go through three cycles to get everyone delivered. What happened to the good old days where one had to worry about the ram losing too much weight because he did not even bother to take time out of his busy day to eat! Our new ram is so GenZ. He does a little business, eats, rests, wanders then remembers occasionally he has a job to do. The baby boys all lay around for 20-30 minutes after getting banded looking like they wanna die. You can see that in the picture below!

Date of update- Jan 10 2024
# of Lambs born – 40
# of ewes who have delivered babies – 26
# of ewes still pregnant – 8 in area, I don’t think they are all pregnant
# of single lamb births – 13
# of twin lamb births – 12
# of triplet lamb births – 1
# male (weathers-neutered) lambs-32
# tagged female lambs-5
# unknown lambs- 3
# of bummer lambs – 3
# of lambs who died in first two weeks – 5
Total # of lambs on farm -32
% birthing rate- 154%
% production rate -123%
% survival rate at birth – 100%
% survival rate at 2 weeks (bummers count as death as they need help and leave the farm) – 80%

We had a ewe up and die on us. She was one of our older ewes. She had twins and they are both very healthy. I brought them into the house and spent 1.5 hours getting them to take a bottle. I am not very good at bottle feeding lambs. I usually let Annmarie do that and I take care of the barn animals but she had to go to work and it was my day off. I was going to go into work late to catch up so I had the time to give them both a boost. Once they had a couple of ounces of formula into their tummies they became quite insistent on getting more. I had to keep switching between lambs so no one had to do without for very long.

We are pretty surprised by the 32 boys out of 40 lambs. That is some definite leaning to one side. We have never had a lambing where the numbers are so skewed.

Lambing update week 6, 12/2023

December 27, 2023December 27, 2023Steve HardinLeave a comment

This has been a weird lambing season. We have only had 7% of our born lambs be female. The wife keeps telling me that “grain is for girls and grass is for guys” when it comes to helping your gender outcome by feeding a certain diet. All of these ewes were on grass only when they conceived but we have never had such a disparate difference before.

I had to spend some time this weekend expanding the momma/baby area in the barn to accommodate the babies. As the ewes continue to give birth we will shrink their area one more time before we are done. But it has to be right at the end of the birthing cycle as we will need to use about half the jug walls to make the last wall in the barn. Once we do that we can only have three jugs for newly born lambs/mommas.

The chores are now taking about three hours a day when split between the morning baby check and the evening feeding. I had to feed the boys in Alcatraz tonight and the bull, “big red” is getting way too comfortable with me. I open up the old lamb shed and he just walks in and starts eating off the hay pile. I try to push past him with a bale and he head butts it. So we have a shoving match at the doorway as I try and get it out the door. Tonight I pushed on his head to get him out and he just shook me off. I got behind him and lightly smacked him on hind quarters like a horse and told him to get out of the shed, he did. As long as he thinks it’s his idea he is okay with moving out of the way.

It is 44F tonight so moving the large bales with the Kubota is painful. We have to plow through six inches of mud to get to where we need to drop off the bales. I am hopeful that Winter will actually get here in January. It is a lot easier feeding the cows on frozen ground.

Date of update- Dec 27 2023
# of Lambs born – 28
# of ewes who have delivered babies – 18
# of ewes still pregnant – 16 in area, I don’t think they are all pregnant
# of single lamb births – 9
# of twin lamb births – 8
# of triplet lamb births – 1
# tagged male (weathers-neutered) lambs-18
# tagged female lambs-a
# of bummer lambs – 1
# of lambs who died in first two weeks – 4
Total # of lambs on farm -23
% birthing rate- 156%
% production rate -128%
% survival rate at birth – 100%
% survival rate at 2 weeks (bummers count as death as they need help and leave the farm) – 82%

Annmarie spotted this rooster in a wild rose bush, we think he was eating the berries. We have been spotting more owls on the place but at night they are hard to distinguish. Our daughter finally just googled what they sound like, duh. They are very noisy at first dark and the last two hours of the night. We do have a pair of great horned owls again. We also have a pair of barn owls. We are certain of those but I have seen Pygmy owls in the past and I am hopeful they will pass through again. The bunnies are definitely multiplying, we are now spotting three on the drive down the driveway. The owls and hawks can concentrate on knocking down the vole population, they don’t need to eat the rabbits.

Lambing week 4 update 2023

December 17, 2023December 17, 2023Steve HardinLeave a comment

Date of update Dec 17, 2023
# of lambs born — 15
# of ewes who have delivered babies – 8
# of ewes still pregnant – 23-29, I don’t think they are all pregnant
# single lamb births – 2
# twin lamb births – 5
# triplet lamb births – 1
# tagged weathers (neutered boys) – 9
# tagged female lambs – 1
# of bummer lambs – 1
# of lambs who died in first two weeks – 4
Total # of lambs on farm – 10
% birthing rate – 188%
% of production rate – 125%
% survival rate at birth – 100%
% survival rate at 2 weeks (bummers count as death as they need help and leave the farm) – 67%
# ewes with clipped ears for culling – 3

Well it has been a long week, we had all of our triplets die. We are still not sure of the exact cause. We switched the supplement we were feeding the newborns as we cannot get any more locally. We have ordered more and will be switching back to giving the supplement the first day of a lamb’s life. We are hoping that the supplement change is the correction we need. The latest twin mother forgot one of the lambs and after being in the jug with them she rejected one lamb so we had to bummer it out. All of this and no more births has totally tanked the 2 week survival rate and our production rate. The sheep are deciding to take another break in birthing. I am hopeful that we will not go another three weeks before lambs start to appear again. The sheep come into a fertility cycle every 3 weeks.

We have installed our creep feeder into a section of the momma/baby area. It has been two days and no lambs are going in to eat yet. I am hopeful that the lambs will discover it soon, as it takes quite a load off of the momma sheep.

To correct our lamb survival rate we are clipping the ear of any ewe that loses a lamb this round. We will cull every single one of them this spring. We have more ewes than we currently want and this should help stabilize our survival rate. We will know next year.

Since we are both going to work early now, I have been getting up at 0345 to go out to the barn and take care of all the sheep and any new lambs. Annmarie is now doing the evening chores as it fits in better with her new work schedule. I feed the cows and the boys in Alcatraz every other day.