Rams and Lambs
I had the camera handy and saw an opportunity to take a picture of our sheep in action. In the background are our 2013 crop of lambs that just moved into a new paddock a few minutes before. In the forefront are our rams; two yearlings from 2012, kept for our freezer, and our main ram Cam. (The folks we bought our ram from have a naming method where they use words from one category in a given year. In 2011 they named all their ram lambs counties in Africa and ours was named Cameroon. So we call him Cam for short.)
The three are helping with a little reclamation along a creek bed. I fence the area off with four strands of polywire and then move the sheep in there to clean it up, eating away the briers, weeds and saplings. This works well keeping the wooded area growth from moving out into the pasture without have to use our tractor to cut it back. The other great benefit is during the hottest summer months where we put them in the wooded areas either along a creek bed or between pastures so the sheep can lounge in the shade during the hottest periods of the day. They're still able to graze on the branches without being stressed due to the heat as they would on an open pasture. But this summer we haven't had the heat issue and I've had them on pasture pretty much all the time.
As for our ewes (which aren't pictured here), they are on a back pasture grazing and putting on weight after weening. I'll be setting up wire along another part of the creek and they'll spend the next two weeks cleaning this out for me too.
In the past I used the extra polynets we have to fence off these wooded areas, the same ones you can see in the picture. It worked well, but the nets took a bit of a beating. So I switched over to the polywire and as stated above running four strands around the given area. With the polywire there is almost no wear and tear. One thing we don't do is to run lambs in there. Lambs are likely to get out and coyotes could get in. If we were going to run lambs in there we would use seven to eight wires to create a good barrier for the coyotes. However, with the ewes we have our livestock guard dog (LGD) in there, so with a good charge, 5,000 - 8,000 volts, it's unlikely that we'll have a coyote attack. We don't run our LGD with the lambs because she's a pup right now and is a little too aggressive with the lambs, so for now she stays with the sheep that are least a year old.
The three are helping with a little reclamation along a creek bed. I fence the area off with four strands of polywire and then move the sheep in there to clean it up, eating away the briers, weeds and saplings. This works well keeping the wooded area growth from moving out into the pasture without have to use our tractor to cut it back. The other great benefit is during the hottest summer months where we put them in the wooded areas either along a creek bed or between pastures so the sheep can lounge in the shade during the hottest periods of the day. They're still able to graze on the branches without being stressed due to the heat as they would on an open pasture. But this summer we haven't had the heat issue and I've had them on pasture pretty much all the time.
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| Rams and lambs |
As for our ewes (which aren't pictured here), they are on a back pasture grazing and putting on weight after weening. I'll be setting up wire along another part of the creek and they'll spend the next two weeks cleaning this out for me too.
In the past I used the extra polynets we have to fence off these wooded areas, the same ones you can see in the picture. It worked well, but the nets took a bit of a beating. So I switched over to the polywire and as stated above running four strands around the given area. With the polywire there is almost no wear and tear. One thing we don't do is to run lambs in there. Lambs are likely to get out and coyotes could get in. If we were going to run lambs in there we would use seven to eight wires to create a good barrier for the coyotes. However, with the ewes we have our livestock guard dog (LGD) in there, so with a good charge, 5,000 - 8,000 volts, it's unlikely that we'll have a coyote attack. We don't run our LGD with the lambs because she's a pup right now and is a little too aggressive with the lambs, so for now she stays with the sheep that are least a year old.
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