Sheep for milk

[patandchickens]

jump on you constantly (ruining your work clothes! ), find ways to escape fences that you thought there would be *NO* possible way they could escape, and jump on everything in their pen including the hay bag and hay feeder (ruining the wire on the hay feeder) and refuse to stand on 4 legs and eat like normal animals including the lambs right next to them.

Yeah well, that's what my HUMAN kids do too, and worse. Goats at least don't poo in their pants

Pat

 

[rockdoveranch]

I found this article on "Sheep and Goat Vacuum Milking" using a converted syringe.

After reading it I may just try milking for colostrum and milk for future rejected or orphaned lambs. Colostrum and milk replacer gets expensive.

http://www.tvsp.org/sheep_milker.html

 

[damummis]

DH keeps trying to get me to milk our sheep and get rid of the goats. The goats are a handful and I am contemplating trying to milk the sheep. I am still up in the air about it, but thanks for the thread.

 

[aggieterpkatie]

I milked one of my ewes a few times this year. It worked out pretty well, because she actually has fairly good size teats for a ewe. It still was harder to milk than my full-sized goat, and I'm not sure I'd want to do it full time. The milk was really good though, and the yogurt I made for it was very creamy and delicious!

 

[patandchickens]

With the admittedly-very-limited am't of milking I've done on mine, I haven't found it to be particularly a problem, even on the wee little Shetland ewe. Dunno if I could have done the Shetland if I had *large* hands (mine are sort of average I guess) but the dairybred ones were easier. Not as easy as a goat or cow of course but still not really a big issue.

Pat

 

[miss_thenorth]

Yeah, my one ewe had fairly nice sized teats, and they were easy enough to handle, and the other ewe had rather small ones, but still not a problem to hold onto. Milking was not difficult. but compared to my goats teats, they are small. i wouldn't let the size of the teats be a deterrent.
The difference I have found between goats and sheeps teats is, with a goat, you give on squeeze and it goes along way. Sheep, you need to squeeze more often, they don't fill up like a goats teats do.