Trade-offs and Pay Days

Seems like most Mother’s Days, we’re shearing sheep. Most Father’s Days, including this one, we’re weaning lambs. Yesterday, we sorted off and weighed our lambs (all before 7:30 a.m.), sold our crossbred ewe lambs to some friends, and hauled the ewes back to dry feed for the summer. Today, we hauled our wethers and most of our cull ewes to our buyer. And we got paid for a year’s worth of work. We’ll be getting a bit more income - we’ll get second payments for our lambs; we’ll hopefully sell our wool this year, too. And we’ll get paid for reducing fuel load with our ewes. But this weekend represents the biggest pay day of our year.

Like all businesses, we’ve worked through the optimize-versus-maximize analyses of our economics. We could collect more gross revenue if we sold meat instead of live animals. We could raise more lambs by putting more nutrition into our ewes prior to breeding. We could raise heavier lambs by breeding our ewes earlier in the year, or potentially if we lambed in the fall. We could receive more money for our wool if we raised fine-wool sheep.

But there are trade-offs involved in all of this. We don’t have the irrigated pasture necessary to finish our lambs - we need to save it for our ewes. And even if we did have enough pasture, I’m not convinced the extra labor and expense involved in selling our own meat would make us more profitable. We could put more nutrition into the ewes during September and October to increase our lambing percentage from 165% to 180% - but the extra expense wouldn’t generate enough extra income to justify 15 more lambs. We could lamb in January - or even in November - and be able to sell bigger lambs in June, but we would need to lamb in a barn and feed hay at lambing to make this work during the depths of our foothill winters. On top of this, we’d have to change breeds - our ewes won’t cycle before the summer solstice, which means they won’t lamb before the winter solstice. This is related to our breed choices; with more than 25 inches of rain (usually), fine wool sheep (who will lamb in the fall) do not do well in our environment - we’d have more foot rot and wool rot with fine wool sheep.

The beauty of sheep is that there are breeds that fit every environment. Our sheep do well on our annual rangeland and low-quality irrigated pasture. They lamb on pasture with minimum labor. They grow a coarse fleece that actually has tremendous strength and softness. They make us money - especially in a year like this when the lamb market is strong.

Now that we’ve been paid for our lambs, we’ll pay our pasture rent, buy some hay and grain for flushing, and think about any additional capital purchases we need to make. And we’ll pay ourselves. A once-a-year pay day is much like a report card - heavier, healthier lambs mean a higher grade. The trade-offs described above suggest we’re graded on a curve, but I’m pleased with the “A” we earned this year!