SET YOUR GOALS AND WORK TOWARD THEM!

This past weekend we ran in to some new shepherds who had attended the MSBA Small Flock event we held at the farm this past spring.  I love to “talk sheep” and I really enjoy sharing my farm knowledge with others.  During our chat, these new shepherds asked a few pointed questions I have heard before.   I thought I might tell you about them this morning.

1) How long should we keep our ewes before it is time to replace them?

2) We have a wether which we keep for fiber and someone told us that we should never keep a wether.  Should we get rid of him?

Each one of us has different reasons for keeping sheep and we have different goals and objectives for our flocks.  A spinner who has a few pet sheep that they want to harvest wool from may answer these questions very differently from a commercial producer who has 600 head producing quality lamb year round or a purebred producer who is raising purebred breeding stock.

In the case of the first question posed above, a small pet flock owner may answer that you should keep your ewes until their quality of life dictates that the ewe should be put down humanely…  The commercial producer may answer that at 7 years of age, ewes should be sent to market while they are just passing the peak of their productivity yet still have value as a meat animal themselves… and the purebred producer may tell you that you should keep a ewe as long as she remains healthy, productive, and is able to feed and care for her lambs.

None of these answers are wrong, they are just different because each shepherd makes decisions based on their own flock goals.  New shepherds need to learn to think in this same way… they will undoubtedly change their goals along the way, but having a general sense of direction will help them with all of the many questions and decisions they will need to answer for themselves.

In the case of the question about keeping a wether… my personal farm goals tell me that the resources (food, wormer, space) that could be going into that wether could instead feed a ewe who would be able to give me lambs in addition to fiber.  I would also argue that a wether left with a group of ewes who you hope to have bred by a ram lamb could definitely complicate things.

However, whether YOU should keep a wether would depend entirely on YOUR goals.

SO - What’s the point? 

The point I am trying to make is that I think that when we are talking to new sheep enthusiasts, we need to teach them HOW we make decisions rather than to just tell them what we decided.  That will not only help answer their question at hand, but hopefully many more in the future.