Personally, for sheep books I like Storey's Guide to Raising Sheep, SID: Sheep Production Handbook, and also Lambing Problems and Managing Your Ewe. While I do love those books and learned a lot from them, I learned even more from my neighbor. He grew up on a commercial sheep ranch out in South Dakota running thousands of ewes, and he moved to MD and had a smaller flock of crossbred Montadale/Babydoll Southdown ewes. He crossed the Babydolls onto the Montadales to make them smaller since he was getting old (he was almost 80 when he finally got out of sheep lol) and he wanted them easier to handle.cugrad said:
My sheep lived at his farm for about six years, then he moved to a retirement community in Texas, so my sheep moved to my house. I'm using a lot of the same management practices at my house that we used at his. Like continuous grazing unimproved/native pasture. We never rotated nor did we ever plant seed. Only thing we did was mow the pasture in late spring/early summer to make it a more manageable height for the sheep to graze on (the grass would be taller than the sheep
). My neighbor always thought that rotating pastures was a waste of labor for the 'benefits' that are associated with it (the 'cost' of labor would be more than the profit made from running more ewes).As for feeding hay, at my neighbor's he had enough pasture that the ewes could graze it all winter long and only get hay when there was snow on the ground (not that they'd eat it then). At my house, we only have two acres and my sheep really grazed it down by late December/early January (I think). So up went a fence around 'The Sheep Shack' and they are being fed hay and grain. They are getting 2% of their body weight in hay daily plus grain. So I have a 145 lb ewe, a 200 lb ewe, and two 90+ lb 10 month old ewe lambs. I'm feeding 525 lbs of sheep, so I give them 11-12 lbs of hay a day split into two feedings, to count for waste also. Plus my two mature ewes are getting grain since they are lactating & would otherwise lose to much weight, esp with the quality of the hay I'm feeding. And my two 10 month old lambs are getting grain since they are still growing a little (and one is bred). Once the grass starts growing again, they will be moved back onto pasture, stop getting hay, but continue getting grain until their lambs are weaned.
Toxic plants--you can do a search on google for toxic plants to sheep in your area. I don't worry about toxic plants in my pasture (nor did we worry about them in the neighbor's). Don't quote me on this, but I think most toxic plants to sheep are more woody/shruby type plants than plants that grow in a field of grass & legumes. But you do need to worry about decorative/landscaping plants--when I take my sheep out to weedwhack around the house for my mom, I make sure they don't eat any of the poisonous plants around the house (bleeding heart, yew, etc).
As for planting a pasture--we've never done it. We just let the sheep eat what grows naturally in our area.
Here's a picture of part of my neighbor's pasture after 10-15 yrs of running sheep on it with only mowing it once a year and grazing sheep on it year round. This was taken mid-March last year. Unfortunately right now the grass is getting green, but it is not that long
