Ten Commandments for Raising Healthy Sheep

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TMOTHER'S own veterinarian—Randy Kidd—is back again... with:

Sheep are just about the ideal homestead livestock. After all, the wool-covered meatbearers are easy to handle... adapt to almost all climates... require only minimal shelter. . . need much less caretaking than do such attention-demanding species as goats, chickens, and dairy cows... and—on top of all that—are extremely "space efficient" grazers that can thrive on a simple diet of fresh grass and hay!

A SICK SHEEP...

Although sheep are fairly hardy critters, the muttonmakers can become ill and—unfortunately—sick "woollies" often don't respond well to treatment. In fact, old-time shepherds claimed that "a sick sheep is a dead sheep". That gloomy saying is no longer completely true, but it still serves to point out that anyone who wants to produce a supply of wool and mutton should most certainly invest the time and effort necessary to keep his or her animals bursting with vitality. And this article (which is modeled after my earlier piece, "Ten Commandments for Healthy Livestock", which ran in MOTHER NO. 58, page 72) will give you the specific information you'll need to raise the healthiest collection of lambs, ewes, and rams in the whole dang county!

I. RECOGNIZE YOUR MARKET

Whether you're planning to raise meat and wool for your own use or hope to eventually go into the commercial sheep business, you'd be smart to begin your enterprise with a small flock of two or three ewes.

And, whichever sheep-raising goal you have in mind, you first need to know a few ovine (a word which refers to sheep, as "bovine" relates to cows) facts:

[1] It takes about 1/4 to 1/2 acre of good grass, 500-900 pounds of hay, and 100 pounds of grain to support one sheep for a year. (A ewe's annual wool yield—around eight or nine pounds—will probably bring in enough cash to pay her grain "bills".)

[2] Each breeding mother should yield 1-1/2 lambs a year (that is, half of your ewes will produce one offspring, while the other half will bear two youngsters each).

[3] A lamb should take approximately 120 days to reach its selling weight of 100 pounds, if it's fed a daily ration of two and a half to three pounds of grain along with two to three pounds of hay or pasture (a lamb raised on pasture alone will take five or six months to reach the same size)... and 65 pounds of the carcass will be made up of tasty meat.

Now, I don't want to fill this article with a complete cost analysis of the economics of sheep raising, so let me just tell you right out what my own "profit with sheep" conclusions are: First, I don't think most homesteader shepherds can compete with the "Big Business" sheep-raising operations. Face it, all the fellow with 30,000 to 50,000 head of sheep has to do is clear $1.00 per head to make a very nice annual profit... but if "Shepherd Sam" gets the same income rate on his own farmstead-sized herd, he may only make 50 bucks!

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