Roving's 2019 Lambs

[Baymule]

Hmmm...….. sell one, buy 4. Yup, sheep math at it's finest! 🐑

Sounds like you had a great time at the show, and who could resist that Moose face?

 

[Roving Jacobs]

Hmmm...….. sell one, buy 4. Yup, sheep math at it's finest! 🐑

I have a buckling, a ram, and two ewes going to new homes this month so it's not too bad

Hopefully no one disperses their flock next year! I can't take much more!

 

[Baymule]

Sure you can! There is always room for more!

 

[Roving Jacobs]

Recently we had a little oopsie involving the gate to the ram pasture not being latched properly. Got home from dropping the kitten I found off at a rescue and thought it was weird that I couldn't see any of my ewes in the pasture. Went to let the dog out and it turns out I couldn't see them because they were all in the rams' pasture. I must not have latched the gate properly after feeding hay and it blew open. Luckily it was surprisingly easy to sort everyone out and most of the ewes should have been a couple weeks bred already because I synchronized them. Of course this happened the day any ewes that hadn't been bred when they were supposed to would have been cycling again though and they were in with all of my (many) rams.

What I decided to do was to run blood pregnancy tests on everyone who is supposed to be bred already 30 days after they were originally supposed to have been bred. Anyone who came up open or with low pregnancy hormone levels got bred during the free for all and will get a dose of lutalyse, along with any of the old grandmas and young ladies who were not supposed to be bred at all. That meant I had 20 sheep to draw blood on, so I invited anyone who wanted to learn to come out last weekend and give it a try. We pulled blood on everyone in less than 2 hours and everyone who showed up managed to get blood at least once. I was super proud of them, especially since I think they all had needle phobias.

Just a box full of sheep blood, totally normal mail sent out on Monday.

Results got in today.

Only 4 that need dealing with! Truffle is a goat, I just wanted to make sure her son didn't breed her before he was weaned. Petitfour got her dose and got shoved in with the ram and the new cormo ewes that are still in quarantine. I need to figure out what I'm doing with Maddie and the two romeldales. I might just not breed them this year as we're getting late in the season (I hate May lambs) and setting up new breeding groups is going to be a big fiasco. I've got 22 other ewes lambing, I think I'll have plenty of lambs even without them and the romeldales at least are part of the Shave Em to Save Em program so their fleece should pay for their upkeep for the year.

Hmmm...….. sell one, buy 4. Yup, sheep math at it's finest! 🐑

To no one's surprise I ended up buying 6, which turns out to be exactly how many sheep you can fit in a Honda CR-V. I got a really good deal though!

 

[Baymule]

Shave Em to Save Em program? What are the details on this?

While you were away, the girls were making Whoopee! I bet the boys were nicely surprised. Inviting people to a draw blood party was a stroke of genius. Brilliant, you are!

 

[Roving Jacobs]

Shave Em to Save Em is a program put on by the Livestock Conservancy encouraging fiber artists to use wool from sheep on the conservation priority list. Fiber artists sign up and get a passport with all of the conservation priority breeds in it (and a cool pin), farmers sign up and get passport stickers to give the fiber artists when they buy qualifying amounts of wool/yarn. When the artists make projects with 5 different breeds (projects could be spinning or knitting or crochet or weaving or felting, it just needs 4 oz of wool from a single breed, no blends) they send pictures in to the livestock conservancy and get a prize. They can keep sending the pictures in for every 5 breeds until they fill the passport and people have donated some neat prizes. My jacobs and cvm/romeldales both qualify and we've been selling wool/yarn like crazy this year because of it!

 

[Baymule]

That's really neat!