Etta James and the Peaches' record Roll with Me, Henry was banned because it was so dirty. Well, there are a bunch of sheep on top of Cass Hill in Westmoreland singing that nasty song these days.
My new Ile de France ram, Henry, had four of them bred before he was even back to their pasture with them, and five more this morning. Henry has yellow raddle paint on his brisket so he leaves a mark on every ewe he serves.
Come April 23, we should start to see the results of Henry's efforts. I can't wait -- there's nothing like wobbly new lambs on green grass. Sure it was cold and slushy this morning, but Henry's planting the seeds of spring.
I shouldn't focus only on Henry. I have three new rams working with three different groups of ewes, but for some reason I am most excited about Henry's progeny.
Showing posts with label Sheep and lambs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sheep and lambs. Show all posts
Monday, December 1, 2008
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Honor thy meat
At this time of the year, we’re approaching harvest of the lamb crop. I don’t like to use that euphemism for slaughter, but it is becoming more and more common as civilians try to reconnect with their food supplies – an effort that I try to support with all my energy. If a little bit of euphemism is needed to blur the line of sight between the conscience and the appetite, so be it. (That clever turn of phrase is from Maxine Kumin’s poem, Taking the Lambs to Market, published in her 1992 book, Looking for Luck.)
When I started this business, most of my lamb customers were older than me. They were remembering what lamb was like when their parents or grandparents kept sheep when they were kids. While many of those folks are still with me, more and more, I’m finding that my new customers younger than me. Not just because I’m getting older, but because young families are starting to feel that they need a better connection to their food supply than an array of Styrofoam trays in the meat department at their local supermarket.
But they’re still not 100 percent comfortable with the fact that they’re eating an animal that was once alive, and buying it from someone that had a personal relationship with it. Here are some common questions from people who are negotiating this road:
Q: “How do you eat meat from animals you knew?”
A: “I don’t like to eat meat from an animal I didn’t know!”
Q: “How can you slaughter those sweet lambs?”
A: “Precisely because they are so sweet. And juicy, and nutty, and …”
Q: “Don’t you feel bad when you take them to the butcher?”
A: “No. I feel pride in a job well done. I feel thankful for the lambs, the ewes and rams that produced them, the sun and the wind and rain and minerals in the soil and all the other millions of things that have come together – yet again – to put high quality protein from happy, healthy animals in your freezer.”
What always strikes me as odd is the fact that most of these people have fewer questions about the meat displayed so tidily in the back of the supermarket than they do about my lamb. They are faced with the choice of mindlessly picking up a package of steaks at Price Chopper or thinking with me about how they want a whole lamb carcass cut up. Sure, the Price Chopper thing is easier on lots of levels – less planning, it’s ready to cook tonight – but even the ones who know the production system that produced that steak seem to be able to turn off that part of their brains long enough to get the stuff cooked and eaten.
My lambs live a very good life that ends very quickly. The feedlot steer that produced those steaks at Price Chopper probably lived a life where slaughter would be a relief of suffering rather than the quick end to a good life.
But still, in a time when people have lost touch with their food, I suppose that if it helps to talk about harvest rather than slaughter, processing rather than butchering, and schedules rather than kill dates, it’s a small price for me to pay. It’s interesting how many people who start out worried about being responsible for the death of a cute and happy lamb end up being lamb customers. You can almost see the change in their body language when they make the decision to overcome their squeamishness and place the order.
I don’t ever want to give the impression that I take slaughter lightly. When I hand over my lambs to the care and custody of the place that will end their lives, I do everything I can to ensure that the end will be quick and painless as possible and involve as little fear and stress as possible. There are good food science reasons for doing this: meat from frightened animals can be tough and taste off. But that’s not why I take the care I do. It’s because these are my lambs. They’re good sheep. They’ve done all that I’ve asked of them. There’s no way I’m going to let the last day of their lives be any worse than it has to be.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Fiddlehead, the bottle lamb
Today I've read a couple of AKDD's posts about her experiences raising bottle lambs on her excellent blog, Vet on the Edge, and it put me in mind of some of my bottle lamb experiences. I should state from the outset, I hate bottle lambs. Hate them for many reasons. First and foremost, because they represent the failure of a ewe to mother her own lamb, which usually means either that I have failed in management or she has failed in mothering. The implication of this is that one or the other of us has broken our contract. Either I have been remiss in my shepherding, or she has let me down.
The economics of bottle lambs are horrifying. Lambing is, in many ways, the end of a cycle as well as the beginning. When a newborn lamb hits the ground, I have put all the time, effort, and expense of a winter's feeding into its mother with the expectation that she will produce a lamb or two (or occasionally three) to pay for all that keep, and perhaps, return a little profit to my enterprise. In my flock, the cost of production of a newborn lamb is about $70. Over the next six to 10 months, I will continue to spend money on it -- even if the mother is raising it -- in the form of labor, supplemental feed, veterinary supplies, wear and tear on my truck, etc., etc. By the time it is ready to go to market, I will have a total cost of production of about $100 to $105, and if I'm lucky I'll get paid $125 for him.
Add two bags of milk replacer -- about $90 -- to the normal cost of producing a market lamb, and I've gone from making $25 to losing $70. In other words, I have lost my margin on three other lambs just to pay for the rearing of that one. And that is to say nothing of the fact that caring for one orphan takes more time than tending to 50 lambs being reared by their dams. During lambing, my time is a precious resource. Bottle lambs take my attention and focus away from the lambing flock, which can precipitate more problems, or let little problems turn into larger ones.
So when I came across Fiddlehead for the first time an hour or so after her birth, I was only slightly upset that she was dead. Fiddlehead was a tiny lamb, one of two born to a 12-month-old ewe lamb. Most ewes that young only have a single lamb; few will have enough milk to raise two lambs even if they are both vigorous. At that age, the dam herself is still growing, so less of her energy can be directed to reproduction and lactation than when she is fully grown. Fiddlehead's twin was full-sized and vigorous, full of colostrum and raring to go. The dam was attentive to both lambs. She was pawing and nickering at the small, lifeless heap in front of her nose. I picked her up and held her up to my ear, and, lo and behold, there was the hint of a breath sound and, yes, a heartbeat. Damn.
Now when I say tiny, I mean it. This was a lamb that could fit in the palm of one of my hands and not drape over the edges. She tipped the scale at 2 pounds, one ounce. Thirty-three ounces. She had no chance of survival. A normal newborn lamb weighs four to five times that much. She was unable to stand. I told myself the humane thing to do was put her down. I was carrying her to my truck for just that purpose, when two ladies out for a walk and enjoying the pastoral scene spotted me and my dire cargo.
"Do you think it'll survive?" one of them asked hopefully.
"Not very likely," I replied.
Fiddlehead begged to differ. She lifted her limp head, summoned what little strength she had in her under-developed lungs and bleated loudly.
"Oh! How sweet!" came the chorus from the roadside.
"Damn." I thought to myself. "So much for the quick and painless death option." Sure, I could have just taken her off and done the grim deed out of their sight. But I am a shepherd. If a lamb -- however wretched -- wants to live that bad, I try to find a way to give it every chance.
It was 48 hours before Fiddlehead could stand. Three more days before she could suck on her own. I carried her around in my jacket or shirt pocket. But once she got her feet under her, she was as full of life and obnoxious as a only bottle lamb can be, following people around and butting dogs and cats that dared get in her way.
I lost a packet on her. She never grew well. Never amounted to much. I should be angry at myself for letting those ladies guilt-trip me into making a bad economic decision. Instead, I'm glad that they helped me stay a shepherd.
But I still hate bottle lambs.
The economics of bottle lambs are horrifying. Lambing is, in many ways, the end of a cycle as well as the beginning. When a newborn lamb hits the ground, I have put all the time, effort, and expense of a winter's feeding into its mother with the expectation that she will produce a lamb or two (or occasionally three) to pay for all that keep, and perhaps, return a little profit to my enterprise. In my flock, the cost of production of a newborn lamb is about $70. Over the next six to 10 months, I will continue to spend money on it -- even if the mother is raising it -- in the form of labor, supplemental feed, veterinary supplies, wear and tear on my truck, etc., etc. By the time it is ready to go to market, I will have a total cost of production of about $100 to $105, and if I'm lucky I'll get paid $125 for him.
Add two bags of milk replacer -- about $90 -- to the normal cost of producing a market lamb, and I've gone from making $25 to losing $70. In other words, I have lost my margin on three other lambs just to pay for the rearing of that one. And that is to say nothing of the fact that caring for one orphan takes more time than tending to 50 lambs being reared by their dams. During lambing, my time is a precious resource. Bottle lambs take my attention and focus away from the lambing flock, which can precipitate more problems, or let little problems turn into larger ones.
So when I came across Fiddlehead for the first time an hour or so after her birth, I was only slightly upset that she was dead. Fiddlehead was a tiny lamb, one of two born to a 12-month-old ewe lamb. Most ewes that young only have a single lamb; few will have enough milk to raise two lambs even if they are both vigorous. At that age, the dam herself is still growing, so less of her energy can be directed to reproduction and lactation than when she is fully grown. Fiddlehead's twin was full-sized and vigorous, full of colostrum and raring to go. The dam was attentive to both lambs. She was pawing and nickering at the small, lifeless heap in front of her nose. I picked her up and held her up to my ear, and, lo and behold, there was the hint of a breath sound and, yes, a heartbeat. Damn.
Now when I say tiny, I mean it. This was a lamb that could fit in the palm of one of my hands and not drape over the edges. She tipped the scale at 2 pounds, one ounce. Thirty-three ounces. She had no chance of survival. A normal newborn lamb weighs four to five times that much. She was unable to stand. I told myself the humane thing to do was put her down. I was carrying her to my truck for just that purpose, when two ladies out for a walk and enjoying the pastoral scene spotted me and my dire cargo.
"Do you think it'll survive?" one of them asked hopefully.
"Not very likely," I replied.
Fiddlehead begged to differ. She lifted her limp head, summoned what little strength she had in her under-developed lungs and bleated loudly.
"Oh! How sweet!" came the chorus from the roadside.
"Damn." I thought to myself. "So much for the quick and painless death option." Sure, I could have just taken her off and done the grim deed out of their sight. But I am a shepherd. If a lamb -- however wretched -- wants to live that bad, I try to find a way to give it every chance.
It was 48 hours before Fiddlehead could stand. Three more days before she could suck on her own. I carried her around in my jacket or shirt pocket. But once she got her feet under her, she was as full of life and obnoxious as a only bottle lamb can be, following people around and butting dogs and cats that dared get in her way.
I lost a packet on her. She never grew well. Never amounted to much. I should be angry at myself for letting those ladies guilt-trip me into making a bad economic decision. Instead, I'm glad that they helped me stay a shepherd.
But I still hate bottle lambs.
Monday, January 21, 2008
A useful beast
When I arrived to do my chores today, I discovered that my lambs had grown impatient for balage, gotten out, and mixed themselves in with the ewes, whose bales were recently refreshed.
This left me with the task of separating the two groups. Initially I figured that I would go back to the barn, get out the handling gear, drag it out to the field, set it up, shed out the lambs, put them back where they belong, pack it back up, and haul it back to the barn. This is about a two-hour process -- mostly setting up and packing up and hauling back and forth.
I decided instead to have a go at shedding the lambs out of the ewes with my good dog, Tweed. Tweed's a little hot to trot, so I spent about 10 minutes getting his mind right -- just getting him to calm down, listen to me, and work with me, rather than assuming that he knew what the job was.
Shedding using a dog is very exacting, precise work. You start with all the sheep between the handler and the dog. When you get a good sized group of sheep that should be in one group at the front of the group, you call the dog in, cut them out from the rest of the group. The handler then drives the small group away while the dog holds the remaining sheep back so they don't follow. Repeat this process over and over again until all the ewes are in one group and all the lambs are in the other.
Sheep want to stay together. The attraction is like a magnet or gravity: the smaller group is drawn to the larger one, and the effect is weakened by distance. Once that first small group has been driven off far enough that it won't want to re-join the main group, you can use it to draw other small groups so you don't have to drive them as far from the main group on subsequent cuts.
The strategy is key: You want end up with the smaller of the two final groups held by the dog. If you try to drive off the smaller group, it will constantly be trying to get back to the bigger group, requiring the handler to stop manipulating the mixed group to drive them back again. In this case, there were 21 lambs and 79 ewes, so Tweed's job was to hold the lambs and let the ewes go. My job was to shift the sheep around until there were some ewes ready to leave the main group, but no lambs.
Tweed had to listen to me. There's no way that either one of us could do this job alone. His job is to hold what I tell him to hold, and let sheep run away when I tell him to. For a Border collie, letting sheep run away is one of the hardest things imaginable. For Tweed, listening to me is hard at first, but after a while it starts to make sense.
But half an hour later, we had 21 lambs in one corner of the field and 79 ewes in the other. There was one mother-daughter pair that held together until the end, and we probably spent more time getting that last lamb out of the ewe flock than the other 20 combined. We had to regather the whole flock once, when two lambs slipped past Tweed. At that point, we had made two cuts, taking about five or six ewes each time. The two lambs squeaked in with the third cut, which had 10 ewes in it. I probably just got greedy and should have taken two cuts with fewer sheep rather than one big one.
Anyway, a job that would have been a fairly odious and time consuming chore became a way to spend a bright winter's morning with my dog, in close enough contact with the sheep to really get a good eye on each and every one of them, and get a job done in a quarter of the time it would have taken otherwise.
I really must learn to trust my dogs more often.
This left me with the task of separating the two groups. Initially I figured that I would go back to the barn, get out the handling gear, drag it out to the field, set it up, shed out the lambs, put them back where they belong, pack it back up, and haul it back to the barn. This is about a two-hour process -- mostly setting up and packing up and hauling back and forth.
I decided instead to have a go at shedding the lambs out of the ewes with my good dog, Tweed. Tweed's a little hot to trot, so I spent about 10 minutes getting his mind right -- just getting him to calm down, listen to me, and work with me, rather than assuming that he knew what the job was.
Shedding using a dog is very exacting, precise work. You start with all the sheep between the handler and the dog. When you get a good sized group of sheep that should be in one group at the front of the group, you call the dog in, cut them out from the rest of the group. The handler then drives the small group away while the dog holds the remaining sheep back so they don't follow. Repeat this process over and over again until all the ewes are in one group and all the lambs are in the other.
Sheep want to stay together. The attraction is like a magnet or gravity: the smaller group is drawn to the larger one, and the effect is weakened by distance. Once that first small group has been driven off far enough that it won't want to re-join the main group, you can use it to draw other small groups so you don't have to drive them as far from the main group on subsequent cuts.
The strategy is key: You want end up with the smaller of the two final groups held by the dog. If you try to drive off the smaller group, it will constantly be trying to get back to the bigger group, requiring the handler to stop manipulating the mixed group to drive them back again. In this case, there were 21 lambs and 79 ewes, so Tweed's job was to hold the lambs and let the ewes go. My job was to shift the sheep around until there were some ewes ready to leave the main group, but no lambs.
Tweed had to listen to me. There's no way that either one of us could do this job alone. His job is to hold what I tell him to hold, and let sheep run away when I tell him to. For a Border collie, letting sheep run away is one of the hardest things imaginable. For Tweed, listening to me is hard at first, but after a while it starts to make sense.
But half an hour later, we had 21 lambs in one corner of the field and 79 ewes in the other. There was one mother-daughter pair that held together until the end, and we probably spent more time getting that last lamb out of the ewe flock than the other 20 combined. We had to regather the whole flock once, when two lambs slipped past Tweed. At that point, we had made two cuts, taking about five or six ewes each time. The two lambs squeaked in with the third cut, which had 10 ewes in it. I probably just got greedy and should have taken two cuts with fewer sheep rather than one big one.
Anyway, a job that would have been a fairly odious and time consuming chore became a way to spend a bright winter's morning with my dog, in close enough contact with the sheep to really get a good eye on each and every one of them, and get a job done in a quarter of the time it would have taken otherwise.
I really must learn to trust my dogs more often.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
34 Days
It's almost time to start breeding the ewes for next spring's lamb crop. The rams have spent the last 321 days keeping each other company, finding things to do and eat. They're fat and spunky and aware of the short days and cool nights. They're ready for their annual month of procreation.
Most breeds of sheep are seasonal breeders. That means they will breed in the late summer, through the fall, and into the early winter. As days start to lengthen, the ewes stop ovulating and the rams lose some of their libido. The farther you are from the equator, the more pronounced this effect is and the shorter the breeding season is. What triggers the hormonal changes in seasonal sheep is a little bit confusing. It's not exactly day length, although day length plays a part. It's the rate of change in day length that does it. So as you go farther north in the Northern Hemisphere, the difference between the length of daylight on June 21 and Dec. 21 gets greater and greater, the rate of change gets faster and faster and hence the breeding season gets more and more compressed.
"So what? Who cares?" you might be tempted to ask. Shepherds do. This is one of the coolest things about sheep production -- it could almost make you believe in intelligent design if it weren't so perfectly explained by evolution. There comes a point in the breeding season where everything just lines up perfectly. Here in the mid-latitudes, seasonal ewes start to ovulate in late August. It'll just be a few to start with, say 15 percent of the flock. Seventeen days later, most of these ewes will ovulate again, and a few more will join them. As we move into October, nearly all the flock will be ovulating, but their cycles will be scattered. By the end of October, however, "the dormitory effect" will start to kick in.
The dormitory effect gets its name from the fact that, generally speaking, groups of female mammals living together will tend to synchronize their ovulation cycles. By late November, all the ewes are cycling, and they are all fertile within a day or two of one another on each cycle. If they are not bred, this will continue for several weeks, probably until early January when days start getting longer again. Then some of the ewes will stop cycling, and gradually the synchronization will start to end and by sometime in late Feburary or early March, the ewes would no longer be ovulating at all.
But in those weeks at the end of November and early December, it's possible to have so many ewes fertile at the same time that rams can breed dozens of ewes every day. I had one North Country Cheviot ram that had bred 30 ewes within his first 45 minutes of his introduction to them. This leads, 145 days later, to a lot of ewes lambing at the same time. And lo and behold, 145 days after the beginning of this peak of fertility is the onset of grass growth and the beginning of warm weather.
Shepherding a group of lambing ewes, and later, their lambs, is much much easier if all the ewes are lambing at the same time. We introduce the rams at the time of year when the most ewes are fertile at the same time, and they can breed the whole flock in two cycles, or 34 days. There's enough variation in gestation length that all the ewes don't lamb exactly 145 days later, but there's a definite peak about 10 days after lambing starts, and a valley a few days later, followed by another, smaller peak about 27 days after lambing starts, representing ewes that were not bred on the first cycle.
When lambing is brief, the nutritional needs of the flock through the winter are consistent and manageable. The lamb crop is ready to be weaned at the same time in late July or early August, and all the lambs are close enough to the same age that they can be managed in a single group from then until market.
When lambing is long and drawn out, some ewes are very close to lambing and have much higher nutritional needs than their fellow ewes bred later, who may still be months from delivery. The shepherd faces a choice of segregating sheep into different groups based on estimated lambing dates, or splitting the difference in their nutritional needs and hoping for the best. And hoping for the best is never very successful in shepherding, let me tell you.
The only way to control lambing time is to keep rams separated from the ewes for all but a carefully selected period of time. Put the rams in with the ewes in very good condition, let them breed for 34 days, and take the rams out. If you have ewes that haven't gotten bred in that time, don't keep them around. Within a few years, you'll have a flock of ewes that lambs in short order in the spring. My flock took just 18 days from the first lamb to the last in 2007.
I have four rams right now. Technically speaking, that's two and half more than I really need to breed my flock of 75 ewes. But having more rams allows me to produce distinct lines of ewes and market lambs, and ensures a little bit of genetic diversity in my flock. For 331 days of the year, these guys rest and relax, fight and feed, but for the other 34, they ensure the continuation of my flock and my sanity at lambing time.
Shepherds use a five-point scale to describe the condition of sheep. A 1 is emaciated, 5 is obese. I aim to have my rams at about 4 or even 4.5 at the beginning of breeding season. It's not uncommon for rams to lose two condition score points during breeding season, as they are too distracted to eat very much, and they're burning lots of calories herding their ewes. So eat up guys. November 30 is fast approaching, and I want you well rested and ready to party.
Most breeds of sheep are seasonal breeders. That means they will breed in the late summer, through the fall, and into the early winter. As days start to lengthen, the ewes stop ovulating and the rams lose some of their libido. The farther you are from the equator, the more pronounced this effect is and the shorter the breeding season is. What triggers the hormonal changes in seasonal sheep is a little bit confusing. It's not exactly day length, although day length plays a part. It's the rate of change in day length that does it. So as you go farther north in the Northern Hemisphere, the difference between the length of daylight on June 21 and Dec. 21 gets greater and greater, the rate of change gets faster and faster and hence the breeding season gets more and more compressed.
"So what? Who cares?" you might be tempted to ask. Shepherds do. This is one of the coolest things about sheep production -- it could almost make you believe in intelligent design if it weren't so perfectly explained by evolution. There comes a point in the breeding season where everything just lines up perfectly. Here in the mid-latitudes, seasonal ewes start to ovulate in late August. It'll just be a few to start with, say 15 percent of the flock. Seventeen days later, most of these ewes will ovulate again, and a few more will join them. As we move into October, nearly all the flock will be ovulating, but their cycles will be scattered. By the end of October, however, "the dormitory effect" will start to kick in.
The dormitory effect gets its name from the fact that, generally speaking, groups of female mammals living together will tend to synchronize their ovulation cycles. By late November, all the ewes are cycling, and they are all fertile within a day or two of one another on each cycle. If they are not bred, this will continue for several weeks, probably until early January when days start getting longer again. Then some of the ewes will stop cycling, and gradually the synchronization will start to end and by sometime in late Feburary or early March, the ewes would no longer be ovulating at all.
But in those weeks at the end of November and early December, it's possible to have so many ewes fertile at the same time that rams can breed dozens of ewes every day. I had one North Country Cheviot ram that had bred 30 ewes within his first 45 minutes of his introduction to them. This leads, 145 days later, to a lot of ewes lambing at the same time. And lo and behold, 145 days after the beginning of this peak of fertility is the onset of grass growth and the beginning of warm weather.
Shepherding a group of lambing ewes, and later, their lambs, is much much easier if all the ewes are lambing at the same time. We introduce the rams at the time of year when the most ewes are fertile at the same time, and they can breed the whole flock in two cycles, or 34 days. There's enough variation in gestation length that all the ewes don't lamb exactly 145 days later, but there's a definite peak about 10 days after lambing starts, and a valley a few days later, followed by another, smaller peak about 27 days after lambing starts, representing ewes that were not bred on the first cycle.
When lambing is brief, the nutritional needs of the flock through the winter are consistent and manageable. The lamb crop is ready to be weaned at the same time in late July or early August, and all the lambs are close enough to the same age that they can be managed in a single group from then until market.
When lambing is long and drawn out, some ewes are very close to lambing and have much higher nutritional needs than their fellow ewes bred later, who may still be months from delivery. The shepherd faces a choice of segregating sheep into different groups based on estimated lambing dates, or splitting the difference in their nutritional needs and hoping for the best. And hoping for the best is never very successful in shepherding, let me tell you.
The only way to control lambing time is to keep rams separated from the ewes for all but a carefully selected period of time. Put the rams in with the ewes in very good condition, let them breed for 34 days, and take the rams out. If you have ewes that haven't gotten bred in that time, don't keep them around. Within a few years, you'll have a flock of ewes that lambs in short order in the spring. My flock took just 18 days from the first lamb to the last in 2007.
I have four rams right now. Technically speaking, that's two and half more than I really need to breed my flock of 75 ewes. But having more rams allows me to produce distinct lines of ewes and market lambs, and ensures a little bit of genetic diversity in my flock. For 331 days of the year, these guys rest and relax, fight and feed, but for the other 34, they ensure the continuation of my flock and my sanity at lambing time.
Shepherds use a five-point scale to describe the condition of sheep. A 1 is emaciated, 5 is obese. I aim to have my rams at about 4 or even 4.5 at the beginning of breeding season. It's not uncommon for rams to lose two condition score points during breeding season, as they are too distracted to eat very much, and they're burning lots of calories herding their ewes. So eat up guys. November 30 is fast approaching, and I want you well rested and ready to party.
Sunday, September 9, 2007
Where wool comes from
An amusing ad for the Los Angeles County Fair ad. I wonder how many folks in the target audience will get the joke.
Duh, Ashley, all wool comes from cows
Duh, Ashley, all wool comes from cows
Sunday, July 1, 2007
Meet the lambs
Lambing at Edgefield Farm started on April 24 and ended on May 20. With the exception of a few hoggets that were intentionally bred late, the entire flock had lambed within 18 days. This was our first year with some purebred Coopworth ewes, and they've produced some decent lambs for us. This is a Coopworth ewe paying very close attention to her twins.
In addition to the Coopworths, we also bred a group of crossbred ewes to a Texel ram. We also keep a few purebred Texel ewes. Here's a Texel ewe and her lamb. Texel sheep are prized for their meaty carcasses. They're not the prettiest sheep in the field, but they're gorgeous on the grill!
Here's the whole flock heading out to graze. All these photos were taken June 30, 2007.
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