Year 1
What we've learned in year 1 of raising and breeding club lambs...
State Fair Insights
Leg wraps, leg wraps, leg wraps, funky fans, and shaving free lamb pens.
Leg wraps on everything was the first thing that stuck out in the state fair sheep barn. The stated goal is to help the lambs highlight their heavy bone structure by growing long “shag” between their knees and hooves. While this does nothing to improve their value in your freezer, it does make them look cool and helps differentiate exhibitors who put daily hours of care into their sheep from those that don’t.
Leg wraps physically prevent lambs from chewing the wool off their legs. Keeping the wool and skin under a leg wrap healthy requires the exhibitor to perform a daily routine of unwrapping, brushing, washing, drying, and re-wrapping each leg. It’s a real commitment on the part of the exhibitors but makes for some pretty lambs in the show ring.
This funky fan set up sure beats zip tying mom’s box fan to the front of the pen. Combining the ¼ HP air mover’s with the homemade plywood platforms results in consistent airflow over the lambs without interfering with walkways, adjacent pens, or fair goers’ ability to see the lambs. It also adds valuable storage space for feed and buckets and the ability to daisy chain multiple air movers together helps overcome the constant problem of not having enough outlets in a show barn.
Finally, shaving free lamb pens caught our eye. They might not be as visually pleasing as pens bedded with wood shavings, but at closer look they have some real advantages. First, exhibitors and fair goers don’t need to constantly battle keeping the shavings inside the pen and out of the walking paths. Exhibitors also don’t have to spend time tediously removing shavings from their lamb’s wool before entering the show ring. There’s also a claim that these pens are cooler for the lambs, since airflow isn’t blocked by deep bedded shavings.
Clearly, showmanship practices have evolved since dad last showed lambs 20 years ago .
Breeding season preparations
Shots, shots, shots, shots, shots, shots...everybody!
Part of producing healthy lambs is protecting the mothers from disease while they are carrying the lambs. The vaccines we give before the breeding season protect against Vibriosis and Chlamydia (both cause late-term abortions), and Caseous Lymphadenitis (CL), which is a contagious bacterial disease. All sheep in our flock are also vaccinated against Clostridium and Tetanus, but those are given at other times of the year.
We also use CIDRs (controlled internal drug release) to get the ewes ready for breeding season. By releasing controlled amounts of progesterone (similar to IUD’s), these help the ewes' bodies get ready to produce a lamb during a controlled time period. This makes lambing season easier on the shepherd by shortening the time period when lambs might be born and helps us produce lambs that are the right ages for county and state fairs in July.
The giant crayon game
Strapping a giant crayon to our ram, Renegade, helps us identify and record breeding dates. These breeding dates will come in handy in January because they tell us when it’s time to move each ewe into her maternity pen and watch for signs of labor. Most lambs will be born 146 days (+/- 3) from these breeding dates, so we’re expecting our first lambs around January 12th, making them ideal ages for market lamb shows (and freezers) in July and August 2025.
Fall fencing
The post-baseball, pre-football, and pre-volleyball season is a great window of time to get kids to "help" do some fencing. Cool days and dry weather made for ideal conditions. No one ever regretted having extra pasture available right?
Fall shearing
These pros can shear a lamb in 25 seconds, we aren't nearly that good yet, but we're getting better with each attempt.
Why do we shear in the fall?
We're trying to be Goldilocks. If wool is too long during winter lambing, things can be a mess and lambs won't find their milk source as easily. If wool is too short, the ewe's will burn too much energy trying to stay warm through the winter. Shearing in October should give us enough wool growth before the really cold months, but not so much to be a problem during lambing.
What went well?
Nobody died, nobody bled much, and everyone ended up with less wool than they started with.
What we'll do different next time
The pros must know something we don't about shearing machines (clippers). We had to clean ours between every ewe to keep them cutting smoothly. There's no way the pros are doing the same.
We also need to learn something about sheep handling to smoothly transition from one side of the sheep to the other and shear efficiently through the neck and shoulders. The pros on YouTube effortlessly move ewes from one position to the next. Kyle looks more like a toddler wrestling a St. Bernard.
Shed makeover
Making room for January lambing required throwing out some old "treasures" and left over materials we "might use one day". We also built out lambing pens we'll use to give individual care to ewes and lambs their first few days after birth.
