Maybe It Looks TOO Easy?!

Photo: Sequoia Williams

This year marks my seventeenth lambing season. When I think back to our early years operating a small-scale, commercial sheep business, I sometimes marvel at the things we thought we needed to do then - and the ways we manage today. Some of these changes are simply reflective of a never-ending quest to improve our efficiency - simple things like learning to build electro-net fence more effectively; complex things like learning to train and use border collies. Some of these changes, though, reflect lessons we could only learn by doing - and by making mistakes. And while the work can still be challenging and the days long (especially during lambing), after 17 years, I feel like I mostly know what I'm doing!

During this time, we've often shared our management approach with others - through this blog, and as we gained more experience, through informal internships and formal workshops. Last week, we held what I think was our tenth pasture lambing school. Our students were a mix of aspiring shepherds and folks who had gone into sheep in a big way (one operation ran more than 2,000 head of sheep). I tried to convey my experience in the importance of developing a systematic approach to lambing:

• We plan our winter grazing with an eye towards saving the more sheltered pastures for lambing in late February and March.
• We constantly evaluate the amount of forage ahead of us, so that we can plan for dry years like this one.
• We stock our lambing kit with everything we need in the field - processing supplies, lambing aids, nutritional supplements, etc.
• We "mark" the lambs the same way every time (record dam's ear tag and EZ Care lambing score, ear tag and record lamb, weigh lamb, dock and castrate, dip navel in iodine, paint-mark lamb with dam's ear tag). This ensures that we don't miss a step.
• We track maternal traits during lambing to continuously improve the maternal abilities of our flock in future years.

I suppose this can seem like a lot of complicated steps for what should be an easy thing - the ewes will lamb whether or not we treat lambing season this deliberately. If we're short of feed during lambing, we can simply feed hay. Does it really matter which ewe produced which set of lambs? But even at our small scale, we try to think through what's best for the sheep and what's best for our economic well-being. Even at our small scale, we take our sheep operation seriously as a business.

Another part of this deliberate approach extends how we organize other parts of the work, like building fence. When the sheep are moved, the fence around the old paddock is picked up. We roll and tie the electro-net fencing (which comes in 164-foot sections) to make it easier to move to the next paddock (and to keep livestock and wildlife from getting tangled in a non-electrified fence). We try to set up a paddock ahead of our current grazing site so that we're ready to move when the feed gives out. We think about the economics of trading our labor (for building fence) versus buying feed (and it's almost always better for our business to move the sheep to grass rather than move baled "grass" to the sheep).

I don't mean to suggest that we have a perfect system - and I guess that's another component to taking this seriously. I still make mistakes; I still learn from other producers. I have a much better sense of how much I don't know now that we're 17 years into raising sheep than I did when I started!

From the outside looking in, I imagine, all of this planning and forethought is probably not apparent. How hard can it be to raise sheep? Grass grows, sheep eat it, they reproduce, we sell their lambs and wool. Repeat. But on the inside - of any serious ranching operation, I think - a deliberate, thoughtful approach is critical to this year's success. And next year's opportunity.