The Soay Sheep Chronicles

With lambing fast upon us, we are reminded of a lively conversation on one of the Soay “chatlists” some time ago about what kind of bedding to put in the jugs, the lambing stalls, or whatever enclosed shelter areas are designated for lambing.  Here’s one topic that is really easy to deal with, but worth a caution to beginners.

The best solution we have found after much trial and error is straw or waste hay that has fallen around the feeders but not gotten too wet or too soiled.  Even if you have to buy a bale of straw, it is worth it.  If the ewe and lamb are in the jug/stall long enough to foul their nest beyond your tolerance level, you simply shovel out the used straw or hay.  It is lightweight enough for even the smallest shepherd to deal with easily.

Of all the substances you could put down on the stall floor, the straw or waste hay is least likely to stick in great quantities to the newborn lamb and if the ewe ingests some of it, no problem.  And that’s really the deciding factor here.  Let me explain by talking about stuff we think does not work.

The worst is sawdust or wood shavings, the type of material you might be tempted to use because it is easily acquired in your farm or pet store as dog and horse bedding.  Dog or horse bedding seems like a great idea because it is so clean to start with, and just as light as straw.  The problem is that the minute the ewe delivers her lamb onto the ground, it will be covered with shavings and look like a giant Hostess Sno Ball.  Remember Sno Balls, the 62-year old marvel that most of us consumed in frightening quantities as kids?  It is hard to imagine now, but back then we paid real allowance money for that stale round hunk of chocolate cake covered with marshmallow and then rolled in coconut that had a shelf life measured in years, if not decades.

But I digress.  Don’t use sawdust or shavings in your lambing area.  The shavings will adhere to the birth fluids and membranes covering the lamb from nose to toe, a gelatinous mess the consistency of old fashioned library glue.  Remember the glue that came in a small bottle with a red slanted rubber tip that supposedly opened up when you pushed the tip into the paper to release the glue?  Yuk.  The ewe will try hard to lick off all that membrane and fluid in short order and a fluffy, dry little lamb will emerge from its mother’s ministrations as if by magic — but not if the ewe has to work her way through a layer of cellulose “coconut.”  We are not even sure that it would be safe for the ewe to ingest that much woody substance.

More importantly than the possible discomfort to the ewe’s rumen, you do not want the ewe to hang back and wait for the encrusted fluids and membranes to dry and fall off of their own accord.  It is essential that the ewe lick off her lamb and consume the mucous-like covering, which stimulates the ewe’s milking hormones and also stimulates and warms the lamb, getting it up and back to the udder for the all-important first meal of colostrum.

Another solution — sand — also has superficial appeal; the urine will flow right through it and the droppings will be easy to spot.  We haven’t tried sand so we do not know how badly it would stick to the lamb.  But the thought of shoveling out all that weight many times a week during lambing months gives this 60+ shepherd the vapors just thinking about it.

Bottom line?  Use straw or waste hay, and plenty of it.

Happy lambing!

When I started this blog, it was my intention to write only about subjects on which Steve and I felt we had a basic grasp of the research or professional writing about the problem confronting us.  This time, I am stumped and so is Steve, and we can rely only on our own observations of a number of our Soay sheep.  The topic:  lambs who do not reach sexual maturity in time for fall breeding, and who frankly evoke an image of “runts.”  Let me explain.

During the last three lambing seasons, we have had over 170 Soay lambs born on our farm, and three or four of the ram lambs, and a couple of the ewe lambs, have failed to mature by fall.  We have been unable to find anything in the literature or on the web about why this happens or how we can prevent it.  We know it is not a case of breeding too late in the year, because the vast majority of our ram lambs go roaring through ovine puberty right on schedule in late summer, early fall and cannot wait to show their stuff, and show it they do! 

But occasionally a ram lamb does not butt heads, sniff other animals’ private parts, show dramatic horn growth or impressively-sized you-know-whats for his age.  Or a ewe lamb simply does not grow anywhere near as quickly or as much as the other ewe lambs and her horns do not grow, either. It is as though, if they do not reach a certain hormonal point by, say, September, their hormones go into arrest and they do not mature sexually until the next spring.  Let me say right up front that we have not figured out the biological explanation for this phenomenon, but we have found ways to address it successfully on our farm.

The first couple of times this happened, we assumed it was worms even though the little ones did not have dirty bums, and we dutifully treated them with Ivomex.  Nothing happened.  We also noticed that the apparently stunted ram lambs were much less asssertive about bellying up to the feeder once we took them off grass for the winter.  In one or two instances, we have moved a slow-growing ram or ewe lamb into a small pen with some other small sheep and supplemented them with grain until we felt it safe to return the small lambs to the general melee of the bull pen or the ewe pasture.  The nutrition boost at least keeps them growing generally so they will not fail to thrive, but does not provoke them into puberty and does not kick-start them into the kind of rapid growth we expect from our lambs for at least a full year.  Quite apart from their small size, they are clearly way to immature to breed.

In each case, thankfully, once the days began to lengthen in the winter, and especially when the dramatic increase in daylight started in March, the slow-growing lambs began catching up with an impressive growth spurt in all respects.  By their second fall, the rams were stomping their feet to get at the ewes and the ewes were ready to breed.

How do you know if you have one of these slow-growing Soay lambs?  Not surprisingly, they are unusually small (even more so than some lambs who have sexually matured quite nicely by fall), generally they have far less horn growth than their sexually mature pasture mates, and most conspicuously, they will not assert themselves at the feeder and none of the more mature ram lambs will butt heads with the slow-growing lamb. 

We do not want to lose even one healthy lamb, of course, so we devote enough time to watching our littlest lambs’ behavior to catch problems before the lambs give up and wither away.  In fact, this year we had the mixed fortune of having both a little ewe lamb — our cute bottle baby Patterdale — and a little ram lamb who needed to be sequestered for a few weeks because they simply were not keeping up in the big pen.

Since I have done all the talking about Patterdale in the past, I think I’ll let her pick up the story from here and explain the problem of being a slow-growing lamb and how to deal with it. 

Dear readers,

You are such nice people to keep reading Priscilla’s blog.  But she really talks too much, especially about me.  I wanted to be the one to talk this time so I can tell you how to help your sheep if you have a little lamb who grows too slowly, like I did. 

As you know, I arrived in less than ideal circumstances and frankly, it has been a struggle ever since to catch up.  Once Priscilla and Steve took me out to the Maternity Ward where I did not have to live in their kitchen in a dog cage, I was very happy.  Whenever Priscilla would ring the dinnerbell, I would let out a loud “whoopee” and come running for my bottle.  I loved being in the nursery with Sedgwick and Threlkeld and their moms because they had just been born so they were my size (I’m very small for my age, but I’m really smart).  I missed my own mom, of course, but since I never really knew who she was, I didn’t know who to look for so I was content just being in the same small area with my friends and their moms and they were very nice to me. 

When Steve let us all out onto the pasture grass in early July after the other lambs were weaned, I was even happier.  I love grass.  It is just my size.  I can put my head down, see the grass, and snarf it up whenever I am hungry and I get to behave just like the bigger lambs and their moms.  It is really nice to be on grass.  There is plenty of room for everyone to have her own space on the pasture. 

And that is why I was so sad when fall came and the grass ran out.  Steve puts a lot of hay out in the feeders for the ewe group — a whole bunch of big sheep who are not very sympathetic to us wee ones.  It’s not that easy for me to get my head up high enough to reach the hay and to make matters worse, those rude old ewes shove me out of the way all the time so they can have my share of the hay to themselves.  It’s not fair.

So I went out into the barren pasture by myself and kept trying to find enough grass to stay alive.  It got really cold out there way before winter was supposed to start.  I have a spunky personality for such a little sheep and I was trying so hard to be like the big girls that Steve and Priscilla didn’t realize how much trouble I was having.

We have a big dog named TJ who lives with the ewes and takes care of us so the coyotes don’t eat us for their dinner.  I really like TJ.  He’s really furry and sometimes he lets me lie down beside him when it’s extra cold outside.  He dug a big hole in the ewes’ winter pasture so he can have a place that feels like a bed to him.  One cold day Steve found me in TJ’s hole all by myself.  I didn’t understand that if TJ was not in his hole with me, it would be too cold to be there alone, but I was so tired from trying to find enough little grass nubs to fill my tummy that I just could not get up enough gumption to stand up any more and I figured I was done for. 

But Steve never gives up.  He took me back to the nursery in the Maternity Ward and put me in there with another little sheep — my buddy Sedgwick actually — who also was having trouble being with the big kids, especially for him because rams are supposed to be tough but he isn’t.  He’s just a nice little guy and I like being with him.  Now the two of us are living happily in the nursery together.  Sedgwick has not grown up yet, if you know what I mean, so it is okay for us to be together for now.  

Steve gives us our own grain

 and our very own customized hay feeder, a scrap of “hog” panel tilted up on the batter boards of the nursery.  I don’t know why shepherds call it a hog panel when it is so perfect for a little Soay sheep like me.

We can reach right up and get all the grass we want and there are no big ewes or rams to push us around.   I hope Steve will make more of these beginner feeders for the lambs next spring because they are a really fun way to practice eating hay without having to compete at the regular feeders.

I’m glad you were willing to listen to my story.  I have to ask you something, though.  Please watch out for your little Soay sheep who avoid the feeders after they have lived on grass for awhile.  It is scary to look up at those big feeders and at the same time be careful not to get stepped on or shoved by the grownup sheep.  It just seems easier to try to make it on the old grass in September but we can starve if you don’t pay attention to us and help us make it through until we grow some more.  And by the way, Steve says that even though I think I am precocious (it is the longest word I know), I really am not, and that I am both physically and psychologically immature.  I call it being scared. Me and Sedgwick are growing okay, I guess, but Steve says we have to eat a lot, and that is why I can’t go back to the winter pasture with the ewes until later.  I really need to pay attention to eating and besides, I don’t do very well with grownups yet.  But I am determined to become a big sheep so I can have lambs and Steve thinks I will grow up much faster when the seasons change in the spring and my body tells me it is time for one of those growth spurts you humans talk about in serious voices with your teenage children. Maybe you can come out and visit me in my new home, which is really my old home but I am much bigger now than when you saw pictures of me as a Soay bottle baby last summer.

For those of us lucky enough to have grass pastures in summer, feeding hay twice a day through the winter in the cold and rain is an annual reminder that not everything related to sheep-raising is fun.  In plain fact, it’s a nuisance having the animals’ dietary needs dictate our daily schedule.  How to keep the hay dry.  What to do about the accumulated muck from all those little feet trampling the same spot twice a day.  How to get the hay into either a feeder or a rumen, and not on the ground.  All of this is daunting at first.  The good news?  Enterprising metalsmiths, carpenters, and Soay breeders have devised a goodly number of economically rational solutions to the winter feeding dilemma.

Before I launch into the sampler of feeders, I’ll share with you a few factors you might want to keep in mind when considering what will work best for your setup.  Not surprisingly, there are tradeoffs.  

Purchase or build.  Cost is a threshold factor, of course (assuming you can make a feeder for less than you’ll pay a commercial source), but for many shepherds, time and access to a supplier also enter the equation.  Plus, homemade feeders can be customized in ways that off-the-shelf products cannot. 

Cover or don’t cover.  If you feed your animals in a barn or other building with a roof, skip this one.  If you feed outside, read on.  Chief among the advantages of covered feeders is the assurance the hay will stay dry until the animals eat it.  Also, your gluttons – the big ewes who always shove their way to the front of the cafeteria line – will not be able to stand up and pull great tufts of hay out and spill it on the ground.  Our Soay have no table manners and I refuse to install a TV in their pasture so Martha Stewart can give them lessons.  Here is our “rainbow” breeding group – mahogany, tan, and black — at their small feeder.

The big girls chomping away are Portia on the left and polled Allspice on the right.  They should be grateful they drew stud muffin Fenugreek (the tan fellow in the middle) as their playmate this year and mind their manners.  Not a chance.

The only real downside to covers is they tempt a shepherd to fill a large feeder and then not show up in the field again for two or more days, during which time the sheep will pick through the hay for the goodies and leave all the less attractive stems in the bottom of the feeder.  Despite their legendary stupidity, sheep figure out quickly whether or not they need to be members of the Clean Plate Club and if they get accustomed to cherry-picking, they will waste a lot of pricey hay.

Sizing the slats or grid.  The typical commercial feeder has either vertical slats 4 inches apart or 4-inch mesh fence, too large for Soay.  Although adult rams and ewes probably would do okay with them, a 6-to-8 month old lamb can poke his head through a 4-inch opening in search of hay, get caught, panic, and hurt or kill itself.  Feeders sized for Soay with rigid (steel or wood) feeding slats or mesh must have openings of less than 3 inches.  Another solution is to use flexible pipe such as PVC in vertical slats, which solves the problem of a lamb getting stuck because the pipe will “give” enough to let the lamb’s head work its way back out, but it probably also means replacing pipe more often than if the slats are made of steel or wood. 

Wood vs. metal feeders.  The tradeoffs here are weight and ease of handling, durability in the weather, cost, and the ability to withstand the occasional battering ram.

The Sampler.  Since this is my blog, I get to talk about our feeders first.  Of necessity (the barn is full of hay), our Soay live in the fields day and night, with 12 x 8 roofed shelters in each pasture area.  Here are the older, non-breeding ewes taking shelter from a recent rain.  The contraption in the background that looks like a carnival wagon is a dandy sheep trailer made locally eons ago.

This style and size of shelter is good for protecting our animals from winter rains and the highest-sun days of summer, but is not designed for, or big enough, to include feeders.  For feeding, we need stand-alone equipment.  Portability also matters because we re-group and move at least part of our ewe flock twice each winter, first in December once breeding is over, and then again in early March when the pregnant ewes migrate to the Maternity Ward for lambing.  Once we figured out how long it would take to build the number of feeders we needed, we decided to purchase ours from Bill and Susan Shaul in California.  Here’s what our biggest Shaul feeders look like in the pasture area we use to winter-feed all our ewes before lambing.

Shaul’s and other commercial feeders of this style do a good job of protecting the hay from tumbling onto the ground.  Our smallest weaned lambs will feed quite adequately from the hay that falls into the trough below.  The next picture shows a mixed group of ram lambs and adults chowing down in the Bull Pen.  As you can see, the little guys are not shy about bellying up to the bar.

In all candor, we did have one enterprising lamb crawl into a feeder recently and somehow she got stuck below the slatted section, a first for us.  Thankfully, Steve was able to extract her without harm, thank goodness.  The shorter Shaul feeders like the one pictured above can be comfortably carried by two people or by one person with a pair of Shaul’s wheels, like a hand truck only the wheels fit into the end legs of any of their feeders.  The really long ones need to be moved using the tractor and forks.

In lieu of covers, Steve is in the process of making ramada-like structures of 4×4 pressure-treated wood posts and corrugated metal placed astride each set of winter feeders.  When we bought our feeders, we elected not to get covered ones, and not just for economic reasons.  Oregon is so mild compared to Chicago that until we had been through a full winter, we simply failed to appreciate the impact on our sheep and our pocketbooks of feeding them consistently wet hay.  Plus, we thought the extra step of opening and closing lids sounded like a hassle.  I don’t really know whether we would get covered feeders if we were starting from scratch now.  But it has worked out well for us anyway because the existing shelters in our winter pasture areas won’t hold all our animals now that our flock has grown so much.  The stand-alone covers Steve is making will provide additional space for the sheep to come in out of the rain.

If they were large enough, our new stand-alone covers also could solve the problem of the persistent deep muck that builds up over the winter where the sheep feed.  For this problem, we decided to keep the covers a smaller size and instead to concentrate on the ground itself.  Look back at the picture of our long feeders.  See that nice raised area surrounding them?  It is the pasture equivalent of rubber shower mats.  Our trusty summer ranch hand, Shawn (”Red”) Olsen, built us a perimeter of railroad ties set slightly into the surface of the pasture for stability, then filled with crushed rock.  I am happy to report that after a full rainy season of experience, these “balconies” mean no longer do either the sheep or the shepherds slip in muck at the feeders.   

And there’s a nice side benefit.  Remember hoof trimming?  We’ve observed a significant decline in the rate of new hoof growth in our Soay who have to walk across rock twice a day to eat.     

On to covered feeders.  The next set of pictures shows the feeder in my friend Anne’s field in Knayton, near Thirsk in Yorkshire, England.  Remember Anne?  She’s the total stranger I heard from out of the blue almost a year ago when I was starting this blog.  Anyway, since last we encountered Anne on these pages, she has acquired a new adjacent pasture, lucky her, and from the looks of her sheep feeder, it should roll next door to the new pasture quite easily if need be.   The first picture is the design itself.

And now the feeder itself.  Look at these wheels.  I’ll have to ask Anne if they are big enough to allow her to move the feeder by herself when it is empty.

In some respects, Anne’s feeder is just a Shaul of a different color, same open sides for feeding, same trough to catch the scraps of hay.  But look at that wonderful roof, hinged on the ends so Anne can simply tip it back on its hinges (marked with an arrow) when she is ready to fill the feeder.

Reminds me of the red and white coolers, Igloos, I think is the brand name, that have the same sort of balanced, roll-back top.  Anne’s hay certainly does not get fouled by rain, does it?

The mesh in Anne’s feeder is 2.5″, small enough to keep her lambs safe, and don’t they look contented facing the camera here.

Although the transportation costs probably eliminate Anne’s supplier for most readers of this blog, in the interests of completion, here is what she has to say about her source:  “They are purchased from our local agricultural supplier. I guess they are made by a local small-time workshop by the look of them. All in this area are the same – we all use the same supplier (”Sam Turner”).”

Now it is true confessions time:  I have hay feeder envy, big time.  A couple of weeks ago our friend Kate Montgomery of Blue Mountain Soay, from whom we purchased a major part of our foundation flock, sent me pictures of her brand-spanking-new hay feeders, and are they ever the cat’s meow.  Look at them, first unpainted and lined up in a row,

and then with their first coat of not-John-Deere green paint.

Kate and Bob made these feeders, hinged roofs and all, just before a major, 100+ MPH windstorm struck their farm.  When I asked Kate for a sketch, here’s how she described their work:  “It’s a way-easy thing if you build them in assembly line status.  We used good plywood and 2×4s. 2 people can “rickshaw” them around.   The sheep love them.  Otley has to wait her turn but others are right in there.   For tiny sheep you need to make the ’shelf’ more narrow.”

What versatile feeders these Blue Mountain Beauties are, big enough to feed a good number of Soay but small enough to pick up and move.   Kate and Bob chose to use flexible pipe for their vertical slats.

We’ll be eager to hear how this material works out.  Meantime, I’m seriously considering putting a couple of these feeders on my Santa wish list. 

So much for the brief tour through Soay feeders.   In the course of putting this post together, I came across several helpful websites and I only scratched the surface.  For example, the MidWest Plan Service run by Iowa State University in Ames bills itself as providing “practical, expert agricultural information for 76 years” and we cannot say enough good things about these folks.  The design of our shelters, for example, evolved from a MWPS plan.  In response to an inquiry about feeders for “miniature” sheep, Kathy at MWPS sent me to www.ag.ndsu.nodak.edu/abeng/sheepplans.htm, which also looks promising for purchased creep feeders, especially for newly-weaned lambs until they can belly up to the bigger feeders. And so on and so on.  If you have another feeder style that works well for Soay, I hope you will share it with readers of this blog, either by commenting directly or sending me a private e-mail and I’ll do an update to this post. 

Best wishes to everyone reading this post for a bountiful Thanksgiving feast with your friends and family.  May your animals’ dinner stay dry and your dressing and turkey stay moist, and let us all give thanks for our good fortune in finding and raising these appealing little creatures.

For now …

As we approach the autumnal equinox, we begin our annual fretting about how long the pasture grass will last and when we have to convert to pricey hay feeding for the winter.   The worry meter reads particularly high this year because much of the Pacific Northwest got far too little rain, so the demand for hay outstrips supply.

Short of taking the flock down the road to the knacker, we have few options for keeping the hay bill in check.  Our most promising tactic is disciplined pasture rotation.

For the grass novice, pasture rotation is neither an astrological gimmick nor a game of chance.  It refers to the notion of putting grass-eating livestock on very small portions of a pasture in succession so they will of necessity eat all the green stuff – grass and weeds alike – evenly and not move through the entire pasture all at one time, cherry-picking the tastiest new grass and leaving everything else to flourish in its place.  Move the animals  systematically, before they take the vegetation down too far, and each part of the pasture recovers nicely, ready for the animals again when the rotation starts a second time.

Let me illustrate.  The following picture shows five sections of one of our pastures, labeled sequentially according to when the sheep first grazed on them in this rotation.  Please bear with me in this labeling and description and I will do my best not to be unduly pedantic.  Section ”A” was the first section eaten, B the next place we moved the sheep to, and so forth.      

The sheep are in section D, which still looks pretty green.  They already have eaten, in turn, sections A, B, and C.  When I took these pictures on August 24, the sheep had been on section D for one day.  Mind you, there are over 50 sheep and two llamas, our adult Llucy and her cria Hank, eating this pasture.  At least from a distance, section A, which they ate 7 or 8 days earlier, already is in pretty good shape, regenerating nicely.  Section B doesn’t look very good in this picture, but take my word for it, it has turned over a new leaf or two.  In fact, I will show you a closeup of section B in a minute to illustrate how much has regrown in just one week.  Section C of course looks awful because the sheep have only been off it for a day or so.  Section E, to which the sheep will be taken next, looks even better than a “last” section usually does because no sheep have been on it for several weeks while we worked other paddocks.     

The downside to pasture rotation is that to make it effective, you need to enclose areas smaller than your instincts tell you or than you want to.  Even more important, you need to move the sheep every 4 days.  If you have the right sized group for the right sized area, the sheep should eat it down in those 4 days.  Even if you guess wrong and all the grass has not been eaten down, you still need to take the sheep to the next area.  Grass starts regenerating after 4 days and you must get those hungry mouths moved before they start eating the new growth.  You can move the animals before all the grass is eaten, of course, but then you are not taking full advantage of your pastures, are you?

Here’s the good news:  if you use something lightweight for your interior pasture dividers, it is really easy to move the sheep from one section to another.

Now let’s look at the same section of our fields from a different angle. 

Areas A and E, where the sheep have not been for the longest time, are quite lush.  The most recently-munched areas, B and C, are starting to recover.  Area D is in the process of disappearing into rumina.  And by the way, the far and near paddocks in this picture held a good portion of our flock about 3 or 4 weeks before this picture was taken.  Recovered nicely, didn’t they?

What is amazing about pasture rotation is how effective it is, and how fast pastures recover in the summer and early fall if they are irrigated.  Let me show you comparative closeups, actual photos with zero retouching and zero tampering from any photo software program.  In the next picture, you are looking at section C taken with my zoom lens, the section the sheep left just a day or so earlier.  From a distance, it appears a wasteland (look back at the first picture above), but look more closely and you will see a lot of live green grass shoots under the scruffy-looking stuff on  top.  Those shoots are healthy enough to start growing robustly again now that several dozen efficient mowers have moved on to greener pastures.

Truth to tell, Steve left the sheep on this section one day too long.  Live and learn.

Next I want to show you what 5 or 6 days of recovery had done to section B by the time I photographed it on the 24th.  First,  look at this medium-range picture of section B, tucked between the “virgin” section E below and the first-eaten section of this pasture, section A up there in the left-hand corner.  See how “hurt” section B looks from mid-range?

Now look at this same section B up close through my zoom lens.  Again, absolutely no retouching and taken within minutes of the other pictures. Not bad recovery for land that had several dozen sheep on it just a few days ago, eh?

And finally, here is what the grass looked like up close in section E, where the sheep had not been for several weeks.  Obviously it is the most lush, lots of high quality grass, lots of clover, pasture yearning for a bunch of cute little Soay mouths.

Because this is our first year of disciplined pasture rotation, it is too soon to know know how far we can extend the grass-eating season into the fall.  For our large flock of about 130 Soay, every week we can keep them on grass and off hay saves us a lot of money, easily enough to get a shepherd’s attention.  Even if we had a small flock, perhaps 8 -12 animals, the process of moving temporary fencing every few days would still be cost- and time-effective.  Using the theory of compensatory cash flow, any shepherdess worth her salt can readily convert the savings into a weekly visit to the local spa, perhaps a leisurely pedicure, or something equally worthy.

As for how you divide up a large pasture area into the small sections required for effective pasture rotation, almost anything portable and capable of fooling the sheep into staying in one section at a time will work.  The best and easiest setup uses three “sides” worth of divider material, one for the leading edge of the procession across the pasture, one for the trailing edge (so the sheep will leave the “used” section alone and let it recover), and a third one to create the new leading edge while leaving the current setup in place.  You can do it with two pieces, but try persuading the sheep to wait in their well-worn section while you set up the yummy new one next door. Life’s too short.

If you happen to have a bunch of lightweight plywood panels, or sheep panels, or horse panels, you can string them together into dividers.  Or you can do what we did, and spend part of the savings in hay costs to purchase three lengths of ElectroNet, a dandy product from Premier that is lightweight and effective.  The amount of electricity it uses is miniscule, and it is remarkably easy to move around.  It will not suffice as your permanent perimeter fence, because once in a while a determined Soay will simply walk through it and accept the electric shock, but since the animals get moved before they perceive themselves as starving, they generally do not want to escape.  I have assigned myself the director of hay procurement so I can pilfer the remains of the savings for the aforementioned compensatory self-indulgence.

Before closing this interminable post, I have to boast a bit.  I just went down to the fields  to be sure the pasture featured in this recitation (South Cannon by name, but that’s a story for another day) still looks good.  Wow!  Have a look.  The first of these “after” pictures was taken from the same angle as the first picture in this post.  The second “after” picture shows the same area as the section B mid-range wedgie photo above. 

Data report: (What, you thought the wife of the geneticist-turned-shepherd could get away with zero data in a post?)  I took these pictures and their counterparts above 19 days apart.  You can judge for yourself whether pasture rotation works.    

Educational note:  If you ever see a flyer announcing a pasture management seminar given by Woody Lane, by all means attend.  We learned more about caring for our fields in a couple of hours with him than anything we had picked up from books.  If you can’t find a Woody Lane seminar near you, here’s a link to an excellent summary of what he and others of his ilk have to say about pasture rotation and pasture management.  For serious pasture managers, the bottom line is that we shepherds do not keep Soay for their fleece, their meat, their genetics, their attractive appearance as lawn statues, or their status as a rare and endangered breed — all attributes near and dear to a Soay breeder’s heart.  To the contrary, sheep exist only as grass conversion machines.  Not a bad way for all of us to think about our flocks, actually.  If nothing else, it turns the beautiful fleece, tasty meat, and intriguing genetic puzzles into appealing bonuses beyond the core pasture rehabilitation function.   

We are still experimenting with the right size for each section as we march the sheep across pastures of differing grass density and quality, but one thing we know already.  To every field there is a season: turn -  turn -  turn.

For now …

The realization that lambing starts in five weeks sent Steve out to the barn today to count what’s left of our winter hay supply.  Do we have enough to last until the pastures green up?  When we put in our order last summer for winter hay, we factored in the extra needed for gestation and nursing, but the thought of running out is so scary that Steve ran the “are we sure” count again.  I would like to say we always remember to check about this time each year, but without reminders in the datebook, the final pre-lambing hay supply check might get lost in the shuffle.

We buy enough for November through April, more or less.  The grass is getting pretty crummy by the end of September, but hay is so expensive that we let the Soay scrounge the remaining grass in the fields for as long as we can.  And when we put our breeding groups together in late October, we can’t rotate the sheep any more so we have to turn to hay.  In terms of the end of hay season, some years we have lush fields by mid-March, some years it’s a little later depending on when the ground warms up.  The hay keeps pretty well so we err on the side of having a few bales left over.  Last-minute orders of hay in February can really poke a big hole in your Soay budget. This year, both the Capital Press and our local paper report that for all intents and purposes, there is no hay left to be bought.  Southern Californians suffering through drought apparently bought up all the extra Oregon hay.    

The formula we use is one we heard about in a seminar on pasture management run by Woody Lane, who by the way knows more about grass and how to maximize pastures than anyone we’ve come across.  To calculate the amount of hay you’ll need, start by assuming pounds of hay at 5% of body weight per day per animal.  We use 55 pounds as our ewe weight, 75 pounds as our ram weight, and 40 pounds as the weight of our lambs born the prior spring.  So for a lamb, .05 x 40 = 2 pounds of hay per day.  If you’ve remembered to ask your hay supplier for an average bale weight, you can easily calculate how many bales you need.

From watching our pregnant ewes the last couple of years, we estimate they eat about 1.5 times as much during the last month of gestation and easily twice as much while they are lactating (nursing).  But by the time they are nursing, the rams and the non-pregnant ewes are converting from hay to spring grass in the pastures, so with these offsetting factors, the original 5% calculation is sufficient.  These numbers worked well last year and based on our bale count this afternoon, they’re holding steady this year as well.

More on how we choose our hay later. 

For now …