Breeding Out of Season and Farm Tours

This year we are doing something different for the first time in regards to breeding. Or at least it is my first time. Farm Girl has done this procedure many times at work. We are attempting to breed our ewes out of season with the use of CIDR's and PMSG. We've bred ewes out of season before with our Katahdin flock but they are year round breeders so didn't require any help. This flock however, are a commercial flock and though several are crossed with Dorset or are pure Dorset, which are also known for their prolific lambing and out of season breeding, we decided it was best to CIDR them all.

What is CIDRing you ask? Good question. Before Farm Girl started working at her job, I had never heard of it before myself. It stands for Controlled Intravaginal Drug Release. Basically, it is the process of withholding a ewe's heat cycle in order to synchronize estrus cycles in the entire flock. Hence, we will have lambing over a day or two as opposed to weeks or months.

First step is to corral the flock and send them through a chute where they get inserted with a T-shaped plug that kind of reminds me of a tampon.

As we don't have any proper handling equipment, we had to fashion something out of materials we did have.

It worked decent enough but I was left to herd them forward from the behind, which most of them didn't appreciate. Farm Girl was up front and in charge of inserting the CIDR's while Farm Boy handled the release gate.

After inserting a select group of 8 ewes we waited 12 days and then pulled the CIDR's out before injecting them with PMSG which is an injection to help stimulate the ovaries and fertilization and (hopefully) produce more multiple births. We introduced the ram 24 hours later and then repeated the procedure again the next day with another 8 ewes per ram, and then once again the day after that until all ewes were impregnated. By doing this, we are giving the ram less ewes to have to work with and a chance to rest in between each breeding. We fastened a breeding harness on the rams and then left him in with the ewes for a week.

Marked butts indicate he had serviced them.

Now it is just a waiting game. They say that the best you can hope for in an off-season breeding schedule is a 75% success rate. That was news to me. Disappointing news. I have the year all planned out and budgeted for, and a 75% lamb crop at the end of the year was not in the plans.

Sometimes I get overwhelmed or discouraged and think about throwing in the towel. Thankfully, Farm Girl prevents me from following through with that. I know it takes time and perseverance but I allow the stress of it all to take over. Then I hear someone's farm story and their personal struggles to make their farms afloat, and I feel ashamed of myself. Such as this weekend. Me and the kids toured three sheep farms over the weekend and one of the farmers told how he had started out with 200 ewes which after a couple years, he lost them all to scrapie. That is the kind of thing that would make me throw in the towel and call it quit. But not this farmer, he persevered and started over with 75 healthy ewe lambs. It's stories like that which make me hang in and keep on going.

As it turned out, his farm was my favorite farm on the tour. He didn't have top notch equipment or
the state-of-the-art facility but he was so well-organized. I loved it. Probably because I feel so swamped and unorganized that his place looked so appealing.

The sheep were kept in the bottom of the old bank barn with an extension built on to the back.

Where most farms use the upstairs of a bank barn to house hay and straw, this farmer utilized the space and put the nursery and replacement lambs up there.

Replacement ewes

The nursery

Charts and clipboards make recording handy and easy

Everything is labeled and packaged. Even the extension cords!

The next farm we toured reminded us of our own farm setup and the potential it could have. Their new barn was directly behind the old bank barn such as our arena is located from our bank barn.

Theirs...

...Ours

The thing I got most excited about on this farm was this...

Do you have any idea how much hauling this elevator could save? Brilliant!

Farm Girl thought it was embarrassing when I took photos of everyone's manure piles.

But it made me feel better about my own big pile of shit. However, I am happy to update on that topic that a nearby farmer has gladly been helping himself to my manure and the pile is coming down considerably.

Just comparing these photos after uploading, I feel a ton of satisfaction.

Manure

I hear ya Dr. Malcolm. I've been saying the same thing the last couple days.

This is a side to farming I don't often talk about. It must be the city girl in me but I find it disgusting and vulgar and if I could, I'd find a way to bury it underground and out of sight. But alas, animal feces is a major part of farming. The unglamorous part. Not to mention the very difficult, strenuous part. Unlike wealthy established farmers, I don't own the machinery to discard manure properly so am doing it the old fashion way...mucking and hauling it entirely by hand. With a little help from Farm Boy.

We try to clean some of the stalls over winter but it is not easy trying to maneuver a wheelbarrow through deep snow so we have to wait until the first thaw to begin cleaning out the pens entirely. We began with the biggest pen, the sheep run. Why? Because it badly needed it. The image below shows just how deep it had gotten over winter.

It is backbreaking, hand-blistering work. But the real problem is the actual hauling and piling part. We started a pile just on the other side of the barn wall so that we didn't have to haul it far but we still have the problem of piling it. I don't want to have my entire yard covered in a hundred piles of manure so try to stack the manure on top of each other but that' isn't as easy as it sounds. The manure is wet and heavy and rolling a wheelbarrow over it doesn't work. So I laid down an old board to use as a ramp to help dump the load and that seems to be working for now.

Next year I plan on mucking stalls more frequently. Or buy a tractor, a far smarter decision. Now, some farmers would see this huge mass of dung and see a beautiful bounty of fertilizer. But alas, as I don't own a field to make use out of all that rich fertilizer...it remains a big pile of shit.

Lambing Season

It is lambing season here on our farm. Half our ewes have lambed out already and we are waiting on the other half. One of the things I enjoy most about sheep farming is going down to the barn first thing in the morning and directly after work to check for new lambs on the ground. So far, our sheep have thrown us lambs nearly once a day for the past two weeks. Some days we'll even have more than the one mom lambing. Unfortunately, however, our lambing rate has only been 1.26. Very disappointing. We're hoping that improves with the remaining half of the ewes waiting to lamb.

That does not diminish how dang cute they are though. A couple photos from the barn.

Remember our bottle lambs from last spring?

This is them now.

Or at least two of them. The ram lamb which we had wanted to use as a future breeding ram, turned out to have an overbite. Not a flaw you want to potentially pass down to your lambs. It also caused him to take longer to gain weight. When he was big enough, we sent him to market. But the girls have turned out very well and we put them in with one of our breeding rams last month so fingers crossed they took.

This is our market lamb pen.

Not much, I know. And only one of them is being sold for meat. The other two (the two standing in the forefront) are both ewes and we really liked the way they developed so keeping them as future breeding ewes. The pen is pretty empty now but it will be nice and full for the Easter market.