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West Salem, Illinois | My advice would be to find someone with the type or breed of sheep you are looking for and work with them. We started out with a couple of market wethers, second year we purchased two ewe lambs along with the two wethers. Third year we took the ewes back to the breeder we were working with and he bred them for us, lambing went good we are six years in and have eight ewes that we lambed this year. If this would have been the first year lambing we might have called it quits, we tried AI, used frozen semen because we were breeding a smaller number of sheep. Got 75% stuck, which I'm told is fantastic for AI with frozen, also had a young Ram we didn't CiDr because we were coming off AI so lambing got spread out. It's a learning thing.
Showing, most of the lambs that are shown are going to be a black face cross or white face lamb. All of these will require shearing. Its not to bad to do but I will be the first to say it kills a whole weekend for us because we shear and do feet and worm each animal. We also trim feet an additional 3 times per year on the breeding ewes and ram, lambs in the "show string get the full treatment before each show. For us we started with Black face cross lambs (suffolk, hamp, shrop) we soon discovered that these are more market show animals, we enjoyed the breeding stock so we landed on Hamps. Our opinion they are kind of a best of both worlds deal. The ewes we can compete in the breeding stock which is more laid back in the show world than the market stock, but the wether lambs are still competitive in the market shows. | |
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Gimme advice on getting some sheep
