Bill Fosher

Bucks County has a washable process. You put the hide in the washer on the gentle cycle with a certain kind of detergent (Woolite, maybe?).

Maja, For me? Not really. I managed to sell a few for $120, out of which came a consignment commission. I gave most of them to family and friends as gifts. I have 20 or so, plus a deer hide, ready to go now. I am not in a big rush to spend the money, but I also don't want to see them just rot.

Last time I used Bucks County (about three years ago) it was $60 per hide plus shipping. They do not accept credit cards -- they will either ship COD or send you a bill and ship your hides out after they get your check. My all-in costs, not counting the time I spent prepping the hides and salting them, were about $85 per hide.

It doesn't get very cold here, Julie. We only have a few days where it stays below zero, and it seldom dips below -20, even at night. I love those days when the snow squeaks under your boots. Makes me feel alive and vibrant.

I wouldn't be raising sheep in your environment. I would be dead. We've had six days over 90 F this year so far, and I thought I was going to die during each of them. We have even hit triple digits once.

That may be true in your circumstances, Julie, but it is not a good rule of thumb. In systems like mine, where the majority of the cost of production of a lamb is in the cost of keeping the ewe over the winter, nearly all of the margin (if indeed there is a margin) comes from post-weaning growth. Selling a 65-lb weaned lamb at $1.25/lb nets me $81.25 (less if I have to pay trucking, yardage, and commission), and I probably spent about that much just keeping the ewe last winter. Selling a finished, 125 lb lamb at 90 cents a pound nets me $112.50. Assuming that the lamb gains a half a pound a day, that means he's earning me about 25 cents a day while he's growing out, and really the only cost is my labor. Economies of scale are very important here -- it takes virtually the same amount of labor to raise 10 lambs as it does raise 400 post weaning. Ten lambs earning 25 cents a day means $2.50 a day; 400 means $100 a day. When I have to start feeding supplemental concentrates and hay, the math changes pretty quickly, but I can justify them by selling to more upscale markets that pay a significant premium over market price for quality.

Oh, but the drama for those few minutes!

If you're there every day anyway, switch to hand feeding. It's better for the dogs, it'll make them more effective guardians (they'll be guarding the sheep and not the self-feeder), and you'll be better able to get your hands on them when need be. Five months is a little young to go to once a day feeding, but it would probably be okay. I've kept sheep that far from home, and I know what a pain it is to go there when the weather is rotten or when the only thing you need to do is feed the guard dogs, but I think it's part of the deal.

Hi Julie, Just as you predicted, I did notice this thread and I do have an opinion. Big surprise on the second part, eh? ;>) If you can get the shipping done right quick, you're probably good as far as their welfare during the trip. But you need to be aware of the amount o stress that travel, change of diet, and change of surroundings can have on sheep. If the ewes are used to rides on trailers, the trip itself will probably not be a big stress on them. If not, it could be huge. A five hour trip also probably means a change of climate as well, which would be a stress even if the climate is "better." The main things you want to watch for are signs of pneumonia and metabolic disorders. Find out what they've been getting for feed and change it as little as possible as gradually as possible. We bought a group of 150 ewe exposed lambs and shipped them 12 hours including an international border crossing vet check in the third month of their pregnancy without difficulty. 90 of them lambed, which is about what the source flock predicted. I have trucked ewes within a couple of weeks of lambing without ill effects. In my opinion, the most risky time to the pregnancy is in the first month or so.

Candy, I think it's mostly a matter of patience. Anything that is tangled can be untangled if you are Zen enough about it. However, after 15 years, the plastic stays will no longer be straight, so the effort at untangling probably won't be rewarded by a functional net. Is there a substantial section that is not tangled that you could cut out and use as a short piece?

Could be less, too. You'll last just fine.

With just four left, it might not take as long as I predicted. If those four are showing bags now, you'll probably be done in three or four weeks.

Right on schedule! How many ewes left?

Could be due to one of the abortion diseases. I'd isolate the ewe ASAP and watch the others carefully.

Meghan, When I am contemplating producing ram lambs for breeding, I know which ones I intend to keep before the father and mother are introduced. The only question is whether a ram lamb will be produced from the mating. As a practical matter, this means that if I want to keep a ram lamb out of ewe 4001 and ram 7008, I make sure that 4001 is in 7008's breeding group. When 4001 lambs, if she has a ram lamb that meets my criteria for birthing ease, litter size, and has no obvious structural defects, then he is left entire. In the end, he still may or may not make the team, but at least he has the gear needed if he grows well, etc. I recently purchased a ram lamb from a very advanced breeder who uses a genetic program called Lambplan to estimate the breeding value of her sheep based on the traits they express and their genetic background. Based on this, we can predict that lambs sired by this ram will gain about 4 more pounds post weaning than the average of the rest of her flock and have an additional 2.5 mm of eye muscle depth. That's pretty impressive, and I'm hoping that I will see it in my next lamb crop!

Hi Claudia, Since your ewes were running with rams until as they began to cycle, I think you're going to find that you have a long, spread-out lambing season, and towards the end you'll start to have some more synchronized activity. What happens in most breeds of sheep is that they don't start to cycle until the rate of chance in the length of day is speeding up -- that is to say, when you're losing daylight at a fairly rapid rate. Ewes respond differently to this cue, based on nutrition, age, weather, presence or absence of rams, and of course there are individual differences in how the hormones that cause ovulation are generated and how the ovaries respond to them. Usually there is some triggering event when conditions are right that will bring a small percentage of ewes into season. This might be a cool night in mid-August, or a ram starting to chase them around and court them. (Rams are also seasonal, and sometimes start to engage in breeding behavior before the ewes are cycling.) So a few ewes will cycle over a relatively short period of time. If they are bred and fertilized during that cycle and the embryo implants, then, obviously, they stop cycling. If they are not bred, they will continue to cycle, roughly every 17 days, until they are bred, or until the spring equinox approaches. When ewes are around other cycling ewes, it tends to bring them into season, and after a few cycles, they will all be on more or less the same schedule, a phenomenon known as the dormitory effect because the same phenomenon can be observed in womens' dorms. In groups of ewes where breeding is planned for a specific date, the rams are not introduced until the ewes are all cycling together, so the ewes are fertile at more or less the same time, the rams get the job done, and are removed from the flock, producing an intense, but brief, lambing period. In your situation, the ram was probably breeding each ewe as she came into season, so there was no ongoing estrous to get the dormitory effect going. Other events triggered other ewes here and there, the ram bred them, and they stopped cycling. My guess would be that you will probably be lambing until March or April, because by October or November the days would have been short enough to start estrous in all the ewes even if they didn't respond to other triggers. Even in planned breedings, there's a bit of a pattern to breeding. Unless you happen to hit it right when all the ewes are cycling together, what usually happens when you introduce the ram is that a few ewes get bred within a day or two, and then nothing happens for about a week. Then they all cycle together, and 17 days later they cycle again if they weren't bred on the first cycle. As a result, you get a few lambs on the leading edge of lambing, followed by a big wave about a week later, followed by a second, smaller wave two and a half weeks after that. Because of variation in gestation and estrous. these waves are usually six to seven days long. Using a teaser ram eliminates those first few lambs, and puts a larger percentage of the lambs on the crest of that first wave. If you start selecting breeding sheep born in the first 21 days of lambing, you will have a shorter and shorter lambing time, assuming that there was adequate ram power available to the mothers at breeding time. Early fertility is highly heritable -- something on the order of 50 percent.

Laura, I also prefer dry lambs, and I have farmville blocked on facebook.

Claudia -- You ewes and lambs shouldn't need to be jugged more than a day or two -- three at the most. Kristen -- The mark of a true shepherd is that she or he will pick up a new lamb and sniff it deeply. About this time of year I develop an urge to visit a lambing barn. Not to run one, mind you, but visit one for a few hours. Watch some races. Sniff some lambs. Go home.

Hi Julie and Cynthia, I hope it's useful. I was going to post it here, but at 1300 words in length it seemed a little cumbersome for this format.

I posted an updated version of a newsletter article I wrote about winter lambing and hypothermia on my blog this morning. http://edgefieldsheep.blogspot.com/2010/01...rmic-lambs.html

Sorghum-Sudan can become toxic if it is frosted, and when it is less than 18 inches tall. It concentrates prussic acid (hydrogen cyanide) when under stress. I grazed the regrowth on the field shown in the picture when the crop was about 24 inches tall. The lambs loved it, but they did not eat the stems. Our grazing was cut short by a killing frost in October. You need to strip graze it to keep them from trampling too much and wasting it. It is a very heavy feeder, and I understand that it can become toxic if stressed by lack of nitrogen or rainfall. So it's not a crop to be taken lightly. Around here it is usually used as an emergency forage. I planted it when a spring pasture seeding failed. We took 39 round bales off 7 acres, and grazed 100 lambs for 35 days on it. Could have probably gone another 15 days but for the frost.

Hi Claudia, I'd agree with most of the advice so far. The only thing that I would do differently is that I would do checks through the night. I'd try to do it without turning on any lights at all if you can, and do it quietly. Let the ewes know you're there so you don't startle them, but try not to make them get up if they're sleeping or cudding. The reason I think night checks are important is that because you weren't expecting lambing, your ewes probably have not had adequate nutrition, so you will probably have low birth weight lambs, which can chill very quickly. You may need to dry some of them off, and I think you will also need to be checking neonatal lambs pretty frequently to make sure that they're full and warm. Dry bedding is incredibly important in cold-weather lambing. Lots of straw or waste hay for the ewes and lambs to bed down in will be like adding 30 degrees to the air temperature. Teens at night shouldn't be a big challenge to a strong lamb with a milky mother, but it is cold enough to tip the scales if things are less than ducky. I think I'd err on the side of vigilance.

Alfalfa can be a very good feedstuff, but it's probably best reserved for ewes in late gestation, heavy milkers, and fast-growing lambs. But of course, you can't generalize about any forage. You really need to take forage samples and have it tested. I think it costs about $17 per test; some land-grant universities will do it for free, or at least they used to. At the dairy farm where I work, we made some alfalfa that's about 24 percent protein this summer, and some that is as low as 18 percent. You'd be hard pressed to tell which is which by looking. Here in New England, I can't imagine trying to get sorghum-Sudangrass dry enough to bale for dry hay. If you look closely, you can see a little mist behind the mower conditioner. It took two hot, windy days and two passes with a tedder just to get this stuff dry enough to make decent silage, and as I feed it out these days it is still like unwrapping an ice cube. But the lambs love it and are growing like gangbusters.

I'd question the assertion that alfalfa is best, as it can be too high in protein and too low in energy. I don't know about straight Sudan grass, but I have had very good luck with brown midrib sorghum-Sudan Grass hybrids. I am currently fattening lambs on it, and it is just about an ideal stand-alone lamb finishing ration: 13 percent protein and 65 percent TDN. Here's a photo of the crop being mowed. To give a sense of scale, the rear wheels of the tractor are a little more than six feet tall.

Sally, Good point. I was wondering how one would ever get a conviction since the defendant would have to be incompetent in order to meet the elements of the crime, and would therefore either be not guilty by reason of insanity or incompetent to stand trial, or both. The definition would, essentially, criminalize mental illness. Not the first time in human history such has been done.