# Milking sheep



## trampledbygeese (Mar 2, 2015)

Is this the right place to post about milking sheep?

The lambs are about two and a half weeks old - ish, I think, I'll have to check the calender.  Anyway, they are hay munching and nibbling on stuff now, so I thought it must be time to milk the ewes in earnest.

Only...

...all I know about milking is about goats, and not a lot about that.

Can we have a long discussion about milking sheep?  Dos and don'ts of milking sheep.  Tips and tricks.  What's your method?  Time of day?  Making sure the lambs get their share?  Equipment? 

Do sheep keep in milk forever (several years between freshening) like goats do?  

I warn you now, all I have is a rope, a bucket, an eagerness to learn and a lot of patiences.  What I don't have is a functioning spellcheck.  Looking at how things go on our farm, I would like to milk each evening, maybe for a month or two.  Or, if it's yummy milk and the ewes don't mind, three or four months.  Ideally I'll have some milk for cheese making, but at the least, I would like some for freezing for emergencies (like bottle feeding lambs).  

I know basic milk handling procedures for once the milk is out of the animal - from helping and watching my friends milk goats - but it's the part before that I'm not confident with.  Anyone got some advice for getting the milk from udder to pail?


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## BrownSheep (Mar 2, 2015)

I don't milk ewes often. Generally just for lambs or if we are concerned about mastitus or as one of the old timer calls it "blue bag".

Some of our tamer ewes will let us milk them with just a halter and a flake of hay. The wildest ones require a halter and some one else to pin them to a wall. We just milk by hand. Of course, sometimes they hold it back from us.
There is a commercial sheep dairy a couple of miles from us who I believe keep the lambs with the ewes full time and freshen yearly.

A high sided bucket will help a lot. It helps keep them from stomping the milk. I would also keep them pretty well sheared around their belly.


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## norseofcourse (Mar 2, 2015)

This is good - there is also a "Milking" category in the "Our Herds as Providers" section.

If you do a search on milking sheep, there's quite a few threads.  I experimented with milking my sheep last year and posted about it here:
http://www.backyardherds.com/threads/sheep-milking-this-years-experiment-recap.29259/
If you know anything about milking goats, you're starting ahead of where I was!

I plan to milk again this year.  What ended up working best was separating the lambs overnight, milking the ewes in the morning, then letting them back together all day to browse/graze.  When I milked in the evenings I got very little milk, and I didn't want to separate them during the day.  Of course, if you wean the lambs or take them to bottlefeed, you could probably milk them twice a day and get more.

I hand milked from behind, into a plastic bucket (I'm looking for stainless steel for this year).  It was a learning process for both me and the sheep!  I used a neck rope instead of a goat-type headlock.  I have a low milk stand, and just knelt down behind them (this year I'm getting a stool to save my knees).

I have read that sheep won't give milk quite as long as goats do, maybe only 5 or 6 months, but that probably also depends on the sheep, breed, milking schedule, feed, etc...  I milked for two months starting in late June, my last milking was on August 24.  Rose had given birth on April 8, so that's... nearly five months into lactation for her.  I only stopped because there wasn't enough daylight to milk before work anymore.  I will be starting much earlier this year.

I really enjoyed milking my ewes and I'm looking forward to milking again this year.


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## trampledbygeese (Mar 2, 2015)

Thank you both very much, this is a great start to my milking adventure.

The sheep I hope to milk are katahdin.  They are suppose to be good milkers, and have decent sized udders for a sheep.  These are huge girls, but calm.  I can walk right up to them and put the halter on, all they do is look at me and ask when their next meal is.

The bad thing about these sheep is that they are the loudest creatures I've ever met.  Having their lambs in the next pasture overnight will mean many sleepless nights for the whole neighbourhood.  So, I'm not sure this will work, at least not at the start.

I think I'll start with a quick, evening milking for the girls, just to get them and me use to it.  Do this for about a week, then decide where to go from there - ie, upgrade my equipment, separate the lambs, &c.  

Off to read the sheep milking experiment thread.  Thanks for the link.


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## SheepGirl (Mar 3, 2015)

I don't have a stand for my sheep, and usually I'm by myself in the barn. A sheep that doesn't want to be milked is hard to restrain with just one arm! (Unless they have a lamb they really want to nurse.) So what I've resorted to doing is knocking them on their side, much like is done for shearing. And lay them flat out enough that they won't move and milk one side at a time. Then, stand the sheep up and knock them over again to get to the other side.


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## NEWCOMER (Mar 9, 2021)

SheepGirl said:


> I don't have a stand for my sheep, and usually I'm by myself in the barn. A sheep that doesn't want to be milked is hard to restrain with just one arm! (Unless they have a lamb they really want to nurse.) So what I've resorted to doing is knocking them on their side, much like is done for shearing. And lay them flat out enough that they won't move and milk one side at a time. Then, stand the sheep up and knock them over again to get to the other side.


Me too! my sheep is a new mom. So, after two weeks I started to milk her like you did...now she's more open to the idea


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## Baymule (Mar 10, 2021)

@NEWCOMER you will have to let us know how this goes!


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## NEWCOMER (Mar 10, 2021)

@Baymule Actually,  I made a short thread about what happened! I'll edit this as the days go by


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