More About Milk Sheep

(Page 2 of 3)

July/August 1975
By Roberta Kirberger  
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"It takes 20 minutes to milk a sheep," says the author of the feedback. Sure, at first before you develop "milker's hands" and get a bit of cooperation from the ewes. We eventually brought our time down to 10-14 minutes altogether for two milkings (which is still longer than the process takes for a goat).

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Oh, yes that business about ewes piddling while you milk is either Suffolk nervousness (our shearer raises the breed and says they're jumpy) or failure to make friends with the sheep.

One point that really ticked me off was the bit about the flavor of sheep's milk: "somewhere between cow's and goat's milk, with less aroma than the latter". If your cow's, goat's or sheep's milk has any "aroma", you'd better check your sanitation procedure! The 12 people who tested our ewes' product all thought the drink was delicious and couldn't believe us when we told them where it came from.

Well, all that is pretty minor but the feedback article did contain one serious mistake: YOU DON'T RAISE BABY LAMBS ON COWS MILK! Its composition is quite different from that of their natural food. Even feeding a ewe's milk replacer, you'll have a death rate of 50 percent or more if the young don't get any colostrum. (I snitched from the abovementioned fatso for our bottle baby's supply this year.)

Since lambs die very easily from overfeeding, you start them out on eight meals a day of only an ounce or so each. By the age of seven weeks the youngsters can be put on dry feed. Caution: You must give any such orphan a shot for "overeating disease" (enterotoxemia) and a round of antibiotic every 14 days or so or suffer the heartache of losing the sweetest little baby you ever had for a friend.

Think carefully before you undertake the orphan-raising bit: Milk replacer is very expensive, the hours are lousy, and the percentage of loss high. Lambs seem to be the least hardy farm infants (at least compared to our foals and the neighbors' kids, pigs, and calves).

By the way, the reader whose question about sheep appeared in Poppy George's column in MOTHER NO. 29 shouldn't have left his lambs to be docked at the ripe old age of four months. This operation should be done when the animals are only seven days old.

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