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.