so we're doing a little sheep school what i thought we would do is so many people
have wanted to know various things about sheep and they asked if they could come and stay and
have me teach them and stuff but my goodness i don't know how to do that many people at one time
so what we're going to do is do what we do every you know every season according to what we need at
done at the farm and then record that and so that'll be the beginnings of our sheep school
and so today's topic is weighing sheep the winter solstice weighing
and and i actually made a little something here in case anybody wants this to follow along
but there are really a couple of reasons why we weigh the sheep and the reason number two
is so that we know how much food to give because that's a good check to see that that i'm giving
them the right amount of hay and so what we need is a flock weight so we want to weigh each sheep
and add those up and then about four percent of that is a good amount to to plan to feed
every day so then that gives us our daily need and we're going to also be weighing a bale of hay
so that will give us an idea of how much do we need to feed each day and so that will
keep me on track if you remember the the calendar that we talk about the calendar of the farm the
reason that we use winter solstice is because it's opposite to summer solstice and summer solstice is
so useful because it's when a baseline of the you in order to make sure that she isn't lactating and
she's not pregnant and she's back on grass and so it's a really kind of a baseline and then we use
the winter solstice because it's enough time away from the breeding that we're not going to jostle
that little zygote that little embryo and we're going to talk a little bit more about that later
but the idea is that we don't want to we don't want to breed her and then jostle her around
or move her or anything like that everything has to sit still for a while and then winter solstice
is far enough away from the breeding time and also it's before she starts putting on the big growth
so a byproduct of that is that we can um sometimes guess how many babies she's going to have
by how much weight she's put on it's not always foolproof but it gives us an idea so so basically
for we want to get the right amount of hay and we do that by weighing the flock and so we'll come
up with a number and then we multiply that times four percent point zero four and that'll give us
what we need to feed every day so my estimation right now um is that we're going to come up to
probably around 2 300 pounds and then we've got a llama also and so you know we've been feeding
three bales and we we're going to talk about how much does a bale weigh and weigh a bale
the second reason is the health of the used gestation how how's her pregnancy doing
that's so important the body condition score is really really important
so here's here's a person who doesn't have very good body condition score
and right here is a guideline this is not mine i'm i got this from a book which is very very well
respected and that is the laura lawson book if the u is a one this is probably a one
right here you can see that the spine will be very prominent it'll be sharp
you'll feel that sharp and you'll feel these bones that are sticking out on the side
that's these bones here so when we put our hand down on there just as you would put your hand down
on that there's no muscle there's no love handles you just feel bones and particularly it feels kind
of like a table on the sides so two you feel some flesh but not enough and then three is sort of the
minimum that you want you want to have a little bit of flesh there on the sides of the bones
a three and a half is where i want them to be when when we breed i don't i don't like to put anybody
to breeding until they are on an ascending plane of nutrition from a three to a three and a half
because that will tell me that their body is going to produce sufficient hormones to to ovulate and
to succeed in their pregnancy so we're going to be doing body condition score on each one of them and
and it's very very important that they not drop below three on the body condition score because
if they do then i have to take some radical action and we'll talk about that if we find one
so about 40 pounds let's see yeah yeah so it's a 40 pound bale okay so you can just
bring that down because it's important to know how much your bales are because i was sort
of thinking it was a 50 pound bale but it's only a 40 pound bale and it's a typical one
and and so that gives us information that we're going to use later it kind of prepared a list of
our use and and we don't have very many yet it's the least number i've ever weighed
so this year is so different because we usually have five times as many sheep and some of us
who have helped me before like carol and arlene they really remember how crazy it is sometimes
when we're trying to identify sheep and and herd them in and get them on the scale and so forth
i can't believe my whole flock fits just in one little tiny place
it's crazy isn't it look at you look at all these beautiful girls
girl where you going
really okay yes oh perfect connie connie you be the first
okay so i'm just putting pressure on that's connie come on
oh hey nobody's in here
you're doing it you're doing it beautifully
so she's about a three three yeah okay and how much she's going to one time away she can go up
okay so this is what a one looks like yeah this is a starving animal she is the one who did not
recover well from the um you know from her having quads last year and um and she was in ketosis
and and was paralyzed and you know there was a whole long story which you could see on the videos
but um the only reason she's with us and alive is because she's the babysitter for these yearlings
she was not able to breed because she wasn't in good condition
and when she's not doing well then she will have to go to the freezer
and so then she will become a livestock guardian dog at that point in molecule by molecule
yeah she is less than three i feel like i can get in she's a two and a half so she is
she's a she's in desperate situation so we have to keep make note of that
come on terry let's go in here there we go
it feels like a three maybe three and a half to me but three i would i guess three i think three
watch out watch out yeah that's it you're all right
i think she's a two and a half but i want you to know because you
tell me for sure yeah so i'm feeling her spine i can feel that too easily and then
her transverse processes yeah she's a two and a half okay opal you need a little more nutrition
and that's partly because she's not pure freezing i mean she's not pure um katahdin
she's part frisian and you know the frisians just don't have that same um thriftiness they are more
of a dairy sheep and you can see that she's got the dairy hair of course and her dairy background
requires that she has a lot more nutrition than a katana just pound for pound they're just more
needy so we have completed all the weighing of our sheep and um and have kind of a little synopsis of
everybody and one of the things that i found particularly interesting is all the girls all the
yous that have a 3.5 body condition score or even a three they are all katahdin fuel full katahdins
and all of the ones that are kind of a little bit questionable like they got a 2.5
score or um or they just barely made it into the three they're generally my ones that are
katahdin mixed with east frisian for instance it just really demonstrates how the katahdin
the cotton breed is just so well suited for grass-fed homesteading and the the east friesians
are beautiful for homesteading but they're going to need more supplementation they um they're a
dairy sheep background and they they have to have extra calories and extra food compared to katahdin
so that was sort of something that jumped out it's the the placenta the building the placenta
that is so so important and so they have to be fed very well during that time and then it's the last
um month of the gestation where the the placenta is not growing anymore it's the baby that spreads
the the fetus that's growing more and more and more so 70 of its growth grows in last month
people say well my you just doesn't have enough milk or my you know the she was starving right
at the last well it didn't really happen right at the last it happened because the nutrition wasn't
enough for her task at the beginning so it's very important to do a body score body condition score
after the implantation time you don't want to mess with them during the implantation you want them to
rest and even give a little extra time there so after after about a month or six weeks then you
can do do what's necessary to get your you weighed and to to above all to check her condition score
and then make adjustments right away if you need to feed her because you think she's probably got
twins or even triplets you have to boost it up by 50 or 30 percent and you you need to make that
adjustment early in the pregnancy because during that early time the p the battery pack of that
baby is happening inside of her so that's a very important thing to to do now you're going to hear
me say something quite radical because you know this is grass-fed homestead and this is all about
not feeding grains and so forth but i can tell you from a lot of experience that
if if if she's below a three at this time if i do not supplement with at least a half a
pound to a pound of grain or some similar thing every day her milk production is going to be nil
and most likely she'll go into ketosis which is basically starvation mode she'll die the
babies will die it'll be a big mess so if she's undernourished at this point i have to take really
serious action in my case serious action would be to give supplementation other than other than the
hay if they're lower than a three then i give them a half to a pound a day of some sort of grain like
barley or corn or a mix of that kind using alfalfa just won't do it it won't it won't give them
enough and the my favorite book and my favorite author for any kind of nutritional advice is
from the feed trough by dr woody lane and if you got a hold of that book it would be really good
for you the total of our flock weighs 3 450 pounds plus the llama weighing 450 gives him about 3 900
pounds if i take 4 of that that means i have to feed a minimum of 156 pounds per day of hay so
one bale weighs 40 pounds so i need to be feeding four four bales a day and i have been only feeding
three bales a day so that might be one of the contributing factors to why three of my girls
are a little bit underweight so i need to to boost that up and i wouldn't know that if i hadn't done
the math you're not measuring you're guessing if you're not measuring you're guessing yeah