New Arrivals
Well this was unexpected. I thought I was done buying sheep! Today I brought home 25 bred (pregnant) three year old ewes from one of my cousins who also raises sheep. These ewes originally came from Matchett Farm, which is where I got half of my original seed stock, and my cousin was just getting a little overwhelmed with his operation so he decided he needed to offload some of the upcoming responsibility. He had over 130 ewes of different ages bred to start lambing in November and I couldn’t handle that many to add to my flock (that would over double my numbers) so I had to put some qualifiers in place.
I was picky on age. There were primarily two age groups that were bred: ewe lambs (2 years old but never had a lamb before) and mature ewes (in this case three year olds who had all lambed once before). I didn’t want to buy more ewe lambs (since they are notoriously more difficult to lamb, so I was able to narrow my pickings down to just 60 ewes who were all experienced in lambing.
Bred or not bred. This is quite a privilege to be able to be picky about, but I have a relationship with a local ultrasound tech and she is more than willing to come out and help me take a peek inside to guarantee my purchase a little better. Even though all of these ewes were exposed to rams, there will definitely be some that did not get pregnant. So we took out of centention all of the ewes who were “open” and that left us with about 40 left.
Number of lambs. This is even more rediculous to be picky about, but my ultrasounder was able to tell approximately how many lambs each ewe had. I decided I definitely did not want singles, but I was also going to cut out any triplets or more. It may sound like a bad investment to leave back the ones you know will have more lambs (3x the sale money instead of 2x at Easter), but I don’t want to be bottle feeding lambs and most mamas can’t raise healthy triplets on their own. So weeding out singles and triplets (as far as we could tell) got me down to 28 ewes to choose from.
I could have definitely taken all 28 of these ewes, my goal number had been 25 and what is a few extra? But I decided to stick with my number and I picked out three more to leave with my cousin. Two seemed to be limping and I have gotten a lot of advice to avoid “buying diseases” or buying sheep you know already need to be treated for some sort of issue. And the last sheep I took out of the bunch to get my magic number just looked a little worse than the rest.
So we loaded up the trailer with the 25 “winners” of the bunch and trucked them around the corner and down the road to my farm. I offloaded these ladies right into the barn for a couple days to acclimate to their new living situation and so that I could easier keep an eye on them. My cousin manages his sheep a little differently than me, so these ladies have never seen grass. It is a really bad idea to just chuck grain fed sheep straight on to tall, lush grass, so I let them have access to a small pasture (shared with my landlord’s alpacas) with very short grass to start getting used to it.
If you have read my other blog posts you may have noticed that these sheep were bred a little earlier than mine were. I started breeding mid July and these girls were thrown with the rams in early June. So this means lambs in November!! A whole month earlier than I was planning, so I have a LOT of work to do.