2022 Waiting on Lambs Journal

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Waiting on the vet.
Color slightly improved, poop normal again.

 

[farmerjan]

Best of luck with her, hope the vet can get her set and it will heal.

 

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Cast on, waking up and waiting on shots.
3wk recheck, probably 5wks before cast removal.

 

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Straight to food.

 

[Alaskan]

Poor little teddy bear!

I am glad the vet could fix it!

 

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Lickety-Split


Forgot to coat Kibito & Seadra.

 

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She's obsessed with the rabbit in QT.
She has no sheep friends, even her mom has ignored her since birth, so, bun it is, I guess.

 

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Had to fence her away from the bun, she kept knocking the water off.

 

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While we wait for her leg to heal, I'll be planning what to do for paddocks.


Husband has lost it & we're having a house built on the big land. Because moving is impossible or something.

Anywho, my horses live on a track. Excellent for them.
But my sheep do not believe in hotwire. FFS. They routinely ground it out, snap wires & posts and I'm so sick of it.
I need to carefully measure out all my current paddocks and then map out placement for at least 10 more!
As a recap, I have 7 on 4 acres and then roughly 3 on the new land.
A driveway will cut through one, which will force me to redo some fencing by the road.

I want to do 60 days rest before the ewes & lambs return to the 1st paddock. And I'm thinking 3 days in each is as short as I can do, since I'll need too many paddocks otherwise.
3 days means that I need 20 paddocks to rotate through.

I want to still have horses on a track, but that gets tricky.
At this point, I wish I had hair sheep!!

10 paddock strips. About 5k in tposts, gates and fence rolls.
Rest could be winter grazing. Horse track is turned off then and horses are out in the big field. Though, with this setup, I'd probably end up rotating the horses through the paddocks instead of keeping them in the big field.


11 paddocks, roughly, to use up the good land. Good means mostly weed free and easy to mow!


I now have cattle, which I will use to rotate immediately after the ewes. They respect hotwire, so I won't worry about them and fences. I'll use them to break the worm cycle.

The other alternative is to confinement raise the lambs. Once all sale ones are weaned, start rotating ewes & keeper lambs. Sale lambs stay in confinement. Then rotate cattle after the ewes on the 10 paddocks and hope it's enough of a break to stop the parasites. This will save me the labor and upfront costs, but I will be feeding alfalfa pellets and hay for 60 days more than I already do. I don't know if the ewes will bounce back on just hay or if I'll have to pellet feed them as well. If so, it'll be costly!

 

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Ugh, made the mistake of asking FB and they're fixated on hotwire. So off topic, like always.

I think I'll try rotating the cattle after the sheep next year. But I want cows separated from bull/steer. Read I can graze together with the same effect. So, female cattle with the ewes & lambs. And male cattle with the rams one or two paddocks behind them.
And probably try to partly confinement raise moms' with lambs. Kind of already do, by waiting to have several moms n lambs older than a week-2wks before moving them out. Just need to hold onto them longer. That'll let grass grow in fuller n taller before being grazed, less stress on the land and less grazing to the dirt, which is also bad.