Sheep?

[Dylan Biggs]

From what I understand Canada isn't even self sufficient in lamb production-if your careful about the ewe turns you'll be fine!!

Canada raises only half of it's domestic consumption. And consumption is growing steadily.

 

[Grassfarmer]

only animal born with a will to die. They are not for the inexperienced.

If they are sneezing that morning they will be dead that night.

That's a strange misconception about sheep that i've never understood. Anybody with a reasonable amount of sheep experience will tell you that they suffer a lot less illness than cattle, hogs or fowl. Look at the whole calf weaning in the fall debacle - all the precautions you take, all the vaccinations and babying calves so that they don't get "shipping fever"or pneumonia and it's still a huge problem for the industry. I've weaned thousands of lambs in the fall and never treated one or taken any kind of precaution against these type of problems. You can ship them straight to auction, to feedlots or keep them at home and they just get on with life. One thing about a sheep being really sick is that it might well die - but the instances of it are way less than in the other species and they are tough critters so they don't usually show much sign until they are really sick.

One of the biggest problems I see in Canada, and I don't know if it's general across North America, is the wrong selection of breeds.
There seems to be two kinds of sheep kept here - the terminals Suffolk, Texel, Charollais etc and the almost dairy types that have the multiple lambs. Nobody seems to work with the maternal breeds and cross them to terminal sire breeds. If we practiced the same breed selection in cattle and your herd was exotic bred exotic how good would you expect them to be at rearing calves? - how developed would their maternal traits be? The dairy types that have 4 or 5 lambs would equate to a holstein having 8 calves - how practical or manageable would that be? Sheep have 2 teats so anything more than 2 lambs is a pain in the @#$.

 

[Angus Cattle Shower]

Grassfarmer what breeds would you suggest for someome inexperienced?

 

[Grassfarmer]

Well I guess you'll be limited by the breeds and genetics that are available here. I had a quick look at a Canadian Sheep Association website and it was kind of :shock: :shock:
In the UK the maternal breeds were traditionally the Cheviots (white faced sheep) and the Blackfaces (dark faced horned). They would be bred pure on the hills but crossed with the Border or Bluefaced Leicester breeds to produce F1s for production on better land. These F1s would be bred to suffolk, texel etc terminal sires.
Here are a few pictures to illustrate.

Scottish Blackface ewes (a beautiful picture taken by a friend of mine.)

Scotch Mule ewe lambs - the F1 progeny of a Blue Leicester and a Blackface ewe. The best commercial sheep I know of.

North Country Cheviot ewe

North Country Cheviot ram - notice the masculine characteristics.

A Canadian style North Country Cheviot - it looks like the cattle craze of the 80s
:shock:

a Canadian Border Leicester ewe

A Canadian Border Leicester ram - spot the difference from the last picture :shock: :shock: The ram is supposed to look masculine :roll:
Maybe the breeders in Canada are trying to produce one with higher ground clearance to get over the snow problem :???:

In conclusion the easiest care breed would probably be the Lleyn (Welsh) but I haven't seen any sign of them in Canada. I would suggest going for the NC Cheviot but it will depend on the type you can find. They would be good to breed straight as you get a replacement female and a good male by-product. Blackfaces likely wouldn't do any good here as the land would be too strong - take them off the poor soils and they get fat and idle pretty quick. Suffolks are a good terminal sire on almost all breeds but they make dumb mothers.
Even more than cattle you need the female sheep to look feminine and the males masculine.

 

[PureCountry]

Hey GF, since you and I chatted about sheep in January I've met several breeders and anyone who's had Cheviots has said that they are flighty, even fence-jumpers. I've been told by more than one that they also don't flock real well. What's your experience with that?

Great work on the pictorial explanation of the sheep breeds. Illustrated your points quite well. :wink:

 

[Grassfarmer]

Hey GF, since you and I chatted about sheep in January I've met several breeders and anyone who's had Cheviots has said that they are flighty, even fence-jumpers. I've been told by more than one that they also don't flock real well. What's your experience with that?

Great work on the pictorial explanation of the sheep breeds. Illustrated your points quite well. :wink:

Not my experience with North country cheviots - beware they are not the smaller, finer boned south country cheviots they are talking about - they are more apt to be high speed and also less prolific. Generally sheep are very much a product of their environment, if they grew up on wild terrain like extensive mountains where they hardly see a person they can be wild and fence or wall climbers. But I really don't think wildness can be easily attributed to breeds as such - unlike cattle.

 

[gcreekrch]

Hey GF, since you and I chatted about sheep in January I've met several breeders and anyone who's had Cheviots has said that they are flighty, even fence-jumpers. I've been told by more than one that they also don't flock real well. What's your experience with that?

Great work on the pictorial explanation of the sheep breeds. Illustrated your points quite well. :wink:

Cheviots herd kind of like quail. I like my Suffolks, they are big enough to stand the winters and they produce lambs that will dress 60 to 80 lbs in 180 days on swamp grass and willow brush. We have stayed with the old style thicker sheep and have avoided the show ring types of the last years.
We do feed them well in the winter. As Grassfarmer stated they don't get sick often but it is far more difficult to starve a living out of a sheep than a cow.

 

[Northern Rancher]

Any cheviots we had were hard to handle-I like Targhee or Ramboiullet ewes with a Cheviot ram on them. My grandma ran 300 ewes up here in 1917 I imagine that was more fun than she could stand.

 

[Kato]

Good thread! I've toyed with the sheep idea myself. What the heck, I've already got the donkeys, and the sheep guys who've bought donkeys from me have had terrific success with them.

You asked if there's something they can't eat. One thing I know of, at least in our area, is that they cannot tolerate copper. Maybe we have more natural copper here, or maybe it's a general thing. So don't let them into the cattle minerals.

As a knitter, I have to ask...how are those Cheviots for wool quality?

 

[PureCountry]

Any cheviots we had were hard to handle-I like Targhee or Ramboiullet ewes with a Cheviot ram on them. My grandma ran 300 ewes up here in 1917 I imagine that was more fun than she could stand.

Can't imagine anyone in your pedigree having more than they could stand. She was probably tough enough to calve out 300 EXT heifers bred Brahma.... by herself. :lol:

 

[Northern Rancher]

I guess a widow who homesteaded 8 quarters of bush with two little kids was about half tough. She lived by herself till she was 90 before she moved in with us. I was pretty sharp on the robbie burns when gramma was alive. I think she ran scotch black face ewes back then.

 

[Northern Rancher]

http://www.sheep101.info/breedsS.html Some interesting critters!

 

[Grassfarmer]

Good thread! I've toyed with the sheep idea myself. What the heck, I've already got the donkeys, and the sheep guys who've bought donkeys from me have had terrific success with them.

You asked if there's something they can't eat. One thing I know of, at least in our area, is that they cannot tolerate copper. Maybe we have more natural copper here, or maybe it's a general thing. So don't let them into the cattle minerals.

As a knitter, I have to ask...how are those Cheviots for wool quality?

The cheviots have the highest quality of any of the british breeds - that was what all the "tweed" was woven from and a whole Scottish woolen industry was built on. Only the specialist wool breeds like merino have higher quality wool.

The copper issue is funny - yes it can be toxic but they sometimes can't do without it either. The terminal sire breeds have a lower tolerance to copper, especially the "continental" ones like texel, beltex, rouge. At the same time most of the UK sheep population gets routinely injected with copper because the soil is really deficient - way, way more so than most of the prairies. We would inject pregnant ewes with 2mls copper sulphate in January and again in March with an April lambing flock. If you didn't do that you would get a condition called sway-back in the lambs - they are born with spinal defects that literally makes them sway and stagger about. If they are born with this condition you may as well hit them on the head as they'll never amount to anything. I saw a jacob lamb on an acreage near me recently that had swayback - the owner wanted my opinion on why it kept staggering about so don't believe all you read about sheep not needing copper.

 

[gcreekrch]

Good thread! I've toyed with the sheep idea myself. What the heck, I've already got the donkeys, and the sheep guys who've bought donkeys from me have had terrific success with them.

You asked if there's something they can't eat. One thing I know of, at least in our area, is that they cannot tolerate copper. Maybe we have more natural copper here, or maybe it's a general thing. So don't let them into the cattle minerals.

As a knitter, I have to ask...how are those Cheviots for wool quality?

The cheviots have the highest quality of any of the british breeds - that was what all the "tweed" was woven from and a whole Scottish woolen industry was built on. Only the specialist wool breeds like merino have higher quality wool.

The copper issue is funny - yes it can be toxic but they sometimes can't do without it either. The terminal sire breeds have a lower tolerance to copper, especially the "continental" ones like texel, beltex, rouge. At the same time most of the UK sheep population gets routinely injected with copper because the soil is really deficient - way, way more so than most of the prairies. We would inject pregnant ewes with 2mls copper sulphate in January and again in March with an April lambing flock. If you didn't do that you would get a condition called sway-back in the lambs - they are born with spinal defects that literally makes them sway and stagger about. If they are born with this condition you may as well hit them on the head as they'll never amount to anything. I saw a jacob lamb on an acreage near me recently that had swayback - the owner wanted my opinion on why it kept staggering about so don't believe all you read about sheep not needing copper.

Most areas have a sheep mineral that is balanced for that particular locale.

I know from watching a neighbor that feeding sheep the cow mineral mix of copper was somewhat akin to putting salt on slugs.


Edit.....


BTW Grassfarmer, I like the look of those Scotch Mules. By their lineage I would guess they are fairly coarse wooled?

 

[Grassfarmer]

http://www.sheep101.info/breedsS.html Some interesting critters!

Some strange creatures for sure - a lot of the pictures are really dated - most of the UK breed ones belong in the 1960s or 70s. The picture of the American suffolk is stunning - definitely a "high rise model"

 

[Dylan Biggs]

Good thread! I've toyed with the sheep idea myself. What the heck, I've already got the donkeys, and the sheep guys who've bought donkeys from me have had terrific success with them.

You asked if there's something they can't eat. One thing I know of, at least in our area, is that they cannot tolerate copper. Maybe we have more natural copper here, or maybe it's a general thing. So don't let them into the cattle minerals.

As a knitter, I have to ask...how are those Cheviots for wool quality?

If you are after the very best in quality wool Merino are the best.

 

[Grassfarmer]

Good thread! I've toyed with the sheep idea myself. What the heck, I've already got the donkeys, and the sheep guys who've bought donkeys from me have had terrific success with them.

You asked if there's something they can't eat. One thing I know of, at least in our area, is that they cannot tolerate copper. Maybe we have more natural copper here, or maybe it's a general thing. So don't let them into the cattle minerals.

As a knitter, I have to ask...how are those Cheviots for wool quality?

The cheviots have the highest quality of any of the british breeds - that was what all the "tweed" was woven from and a whole Scottish woolen industry was built on. Only the specialist wool breeds like merino have higher quality wool.

The copper issue is funny - yes it can be toxic but they sometimes can't do without it either. The terminal sire breeds have a lower tolerance to copper, especially the "continental" ones like texel, beltex, rouge. At the same time most of the UK sheep population gets routinely injected with copper because the soil is really deficient - way, way more so than most of the prairies. We would inject pregnant ewes with 2mls copper sulphate in January and again in March with an April lambing flock. If you didn't do that you would get a condition called sway-back in the lambs - they are born with spinal defects that literally makes them sway and stagger about. If they are born with this condition you may as well hit them on the head as they'll never amount to anything. I saw a jacob lamb on an acreage near me recently that had swayback - the owner wanted my opinion on why it kept staggering about so don't believe all you read about sheep not needing copper.

Most areas have a sheep mineral that is balanced for that particular locale.

I know from watching a neighbor that feeding sheep the cow mineral mix of copper was somewhat akin to putting salt on slugs.

I guess it depends on your background levels of copper. We once had a ewe with a completely crippled lamb - a pathetic thing that hadn't a great future but my Dad was more inclined to let things linger in the hope they would recover than I was. It was a single lamb, about 5 weeks old and only kept alive because the mother would come back and stand over it so it could suckle. We moved cows into the field and at that time we were feeding a very high level of copper in the mineral - if I remember right it was about 6500 - 7500 units of CU - I know we needed a special vets license to get it that high. Within a few days that ewe started to steal mineral from the cow feeder which was no mean feat as they were designed to keep them out. Within a week the lamb was cured - up and walking and never looked back. It looked like a miracle to us, that sheep seemed to know what her lamb needed and went after it because none of the others bothered with the minerals. The apparently toxic level of copper the ewe ingested never did her any harm either.

Edit gcreekrch - the mules are relatively coarse wooled off the blackface side but don't be fooled these ewe lambs are dressed for sale - they have been treated with purl dip to curl and color the wool. Also had their necks clipped out to make them look more feminine and all the same...tricks of the trade :wink:

 

[Denny]

We've been toying with the idea of running a 100 ewe's .We feed corn silage on the ground in the winter. I was thinking ewes could pick up alot that the cows miss.We also have access to some fenced areas capable of holding sheep that would be free.Between that and the yardsites at both farms I figure we could run them as a by-product to the cows. The copper in the beef mineral has been a stumbleing block.My neighbor who's made a decent liveing say's it's a no no.

I would'nt mess with a dog though a pail of grain they will follow you most any place.I've had sheep off and on since I was a kid. My 10 year old son has some now and thats got me thinking about it again.

 

[Grassfarmer]

When we wanted to keep sheep out of cattle minerals we got a 40 gall barrel, cut the top off then cut a v down the side just far enough that a cow could get it's neck in and reach the bottom but a sheep couldn't access it. Fix wooden bars around the edges of the v to cover the sharp edges and fix the whole thing to a gate/wall/tree or whatever.

 

[Dylan Biggs]

We've been toying with the idea of running a 100 ewe's .We feed corn silage on the ground in the winter. I was thinking ewes could pick up alot that the cows miss.We also have access to some fenced areas capable of holding sheep that would be free.Between that and the yardsites at both farms I figure we could run them as a by-product to the cows. The copper in the beef mineral has been a stumbleing block.My neighbor who's made a decent liveing say's it's a no no.

I would'nt mess with a dog though a pail of grain they will follow you most any place.I've had sheep off and on since I was a kid. My 10 year old son has some now and thats got me thinking about it again.

The grain pail is great when it works but it's the "most" any place where I have really appreciated my dogs.