Recent content by Aped

I have both and I think many people on here do. They get along well. I actually prefer the sheep, they are more well behaved and lower maintenance but dairy goats produce more milk and have a longer lactation than most sheep. Their milk is more versatile too, I prefer not to drink sheep milk...

One of my katahdin ewes lambed in the beginning of this month. I started milking her a week after lambing and with one milking a day I am getting about 20 oz from her every morning. I feel like there is more in there but the emptier her udder is, the harder it is to milk so the lamb takes care...

How much do your southdowns milk a day? How long is their lactation? I'm just curious of how non-dairy sheep compare to the dairy breeds.

I have to agree with this statement because I am experiencing the same exact thing. No eggs for months, now i have more than I know what to do with. I hope that doesn't mean I will be dealing with prolapses in the next couple weeks.

Oh well that's good to hear for me I guess haha But not so good on your end. I hope you get some babies somehow. If you are looking for a katahdin ram I don't know if I will have an extra to sell this year but then the breeders I work with deal only with katahdins and I am sure they will have...

well you wouldn't say that if you knew that they basically charged me the cost of a full-grown sheep just for breeding! Yeah they were way overpriced but it was close and convenient. I actually posted on a different forum about the cost and some people said it was expensive while other people...

If you can't find a dairy breed, another option is finding a breed that regularly has multiple lambs and that can feed them without help. They have to produce a lot of milk to feed all those lambs. But doing that, it's pretty much the luck of the draw because milk production will vary within breeds.

I just went through this whole thought process around fall of last year. I ended up finding some people on craigslist who raised katahdins and would take my katahdin ewe and put it with one of their yearling rams. They also had a 2 year old ram and once I saw that thing I knew I could never have...

SOunds like a lot of people have had some bad experiences with blu-kote. I know I didn't realize it was actually that blue when I got it. I got it to spray on my goats after disbudding but the first time I actually used it was on my dog's outer ear because he was scratching it raw. He shook and...

I was looking around to find a formula per acre to pay to lease. Those formulas make more sense when you are leasing 5 or 10 or more acres out of the however many acres the person owns. But for just one acre in a somewhat denser rural area, I'm not sure I could use that same formula.

Thank for the suggestions. Maybe I will lowball her and see what she says. I feel as though if she is setting it up for horses then she is looking for a little bit more than I am willing to pay. I see horse boarding around here from 200 - 500 a month. That range covers both full care and self...

Has anyone ever leased land for sheep? I have someone that is willing to lease some land for me, just to keep my sheep there. It's only about an acre, fenced with electric and automatic water but no shelter. They were setting it up for a horses. I can't figure out how much to tell them I would...

I don't have electricity to where the goats are so I fill once or twice a day depending if it freezes or not. I keep the water inside my goats' shelter. The floor is covered with straw which I don't change much in the winter. I have found that if the straw accumulates around the bucket, then the...

cmjust0, you are absolutely right. No one feels the need to know more than one thing and everything outside of someone's profession is just superficial fluff unless they have some hardcore hobby. I still get people who say why do you raise goats for milk when you can go to the store and buy...

I have 5 nigerians and one sheep. They go through 1 to 2 bales a week depending on the type of hay(1st cutting,2nd cutting,etc). They don't have access to pasture unless I occasionally let them into the rest of the yard so the majority of their diet is the hay I provide.