A Story About Sheep

Five years later, here we are.

In August 2016, Andrew and I got on a plane and went to Alberta. By mid-September, we were sheep farmers. Here’s the thing, we never set out to be sheep farmers. We (or rather I) wanted to continue milking goats. When we were out west, it was Open Farm Day. We never toured Sungold that weekend, we toured the biggest dairy goat farm in the province. We came home with two decisions, we were not going to move out west and we were not going to be beef farmers.

The dream to farm was still very strong. We lived in the land of dairy goats, there are numerous dairy goat farms around the area we grew up in. There were was one big issue with dairy goats, marketing access. Unless your farm is located somewhere on the milk truck routes, it’s very costly to market goat milk. Those routes are primarily in the most expensive parts of Ontario and Quebec. Secondly, at the time, the easy access to marketing was ending, it was no longer a guarantee that we would actually be able to get a contract to ship milk.

Goodbye Goats

Slowly the dream to milk goats became a realization that financially, it was not going to work. I’m not sure when I realized that, when FCC said we couldn’t build a barn for less than $500,000 or a starter farm of barely 60 acres was priced at just shy of $1million. We travelled north into the Little Clay Belt several times. We considered raising meat goats. I don’t even know how we ended up looking at sheep specifically. Andrew had a grand idea one day to feedlot lambs. The cattle were not working out, he’d been backgrounding cattle for six years by that point.

So I got out the calculator, and I started researching what it would take to feedlot lambs. When I got done, I figured it would be a whole lot less complicated to just get ewes and raise lambs ourselves. Getting meat goats had already been dismissed, the market was too volatile and we’d both had misadventures trying to raise meat goats. The main issue with sheep for us was shearing, we knew that relocation to an area with fewer services was definitely still a possibility.

Enter Hair Sheep

A few of the offspring of our original flock

Somewhere along the way, I found out there are essentially two types of sheep, hair sheep and wool sheep. Hair sheep sounded like they would suit our goals, they didn’t need shearing, they have decent parasite resistance, reasonable lambing percentages and good growth rates. I decided that Katahdin sheep sounded ideal. At this point, Andrew is just along for the ride. His exact words were probably something along the lines of he didn’t care as long as I never expected him to milk a sheep.

This is where Kijiji comes in. In hindsight, I now know that Kijiji is not where you should be shopping for sheep. Nevertheless, in a matter of a week, we went from zero to 85 sheep. We bought a complete flock dispersal of starving ewes, a ram and a couple of ewe lambs. They looked terrible but at least the price was right. So we convinced Andrew’s parents to lend us a building and just like that, we were sheep farmers.

One Wrong Turn

Those ewes recovered (for the most part) and after accidentally flushing them all when we brought them home, produced a lot of lambs. We had to buy a new ram and the ewe lambs that came with the flock never recovered enough to be considered for breeding. Our first winter lambing went off without any major issues, the lamb survival rate was amazing. We were off to a decent start as sheep farmers.

The building was basically full when the sheep arrived and through all of this, we were still looking for a permanent place to call home. That place turned out to be Shawville, Quebec. We moved in September 2017. And that’s where things went completely off the rails for about a year. We lost a third of the ewes over the next 10 months and almost half of the lambs. I spent six days in Ottawa in the trauma unit and another five months in a body brace. Things got dark and stressful.

All The Mistakes

It took months to find out what was wrong with the sheep. I spent hours reading anything I could find on the sheep’s symptoms. Numerous autopsies were inconclusive. In the end, another sheep farmer suggested we send in the livers. The sheep had died of copper poisoning. Others of too much sulphur. There were management errors, our little barn was way too crowded and the feed ration inadequate for the housing situation. Half of our sheep were lambing out in the snow.

Little by little, we made changes. After 100 days, we had a new bigger barn. The sulphur was coming from our water so we installed a recirculating system. The new barn had enough space for all the sheep. I taught myself how to use SheepBytes to make better feed rations. There was nothing we could do about the copper, the best we could determine was that our original ewes must have been fed too much at some point and the stress of moving plus the whole situation caused the livers to dump the stored copper.

Keep Trying

I don’t believe sheep are looking for ways to die. That kind of attitude contributed to how long it took us to find out why the sheep were dying. We had to make a special request with every autopsy to have testing done. The livers that ended up finally getting us answers, we removed those ourselves, with the help of a textbook. Sheep don’t actually want to die, there’s usually a reason.

We’re still working our way back up with the sheep. Every year, things get a little bit better. There are still bumps along the way. We had a whole pen miscarry around day 70 in the span of a week and never found the cause. There was a devastating lambing involving ewe lambs and ringwomb, an unfortunately fatal condition. Short-term droughts have plagued our hay situation more years than not. Every season brings a new challenge.

Five Years Later

Still doing this sheep farming thing together.

This September marks five years of owning sheep. We still have some of those original 85 Katahdin ewes. We’ve added a significant amount of Romanov-crossed ewes and Dorpers. Sometimes we have to shear the odd ewe. The sheep fulfilled their original purpose though. That financial gamble paid off, sheep allowed us to fulfill our dream of farming. Andrew still dreams of his cattle and a part of me will always love goats.

This is our story of how we ended up raising sheep. For all its twists and turns, all the blood, sweat and tears, I’d buy those ewes again without hesitation. For all of their trouble, they were worth it as they let us turn a dream into reality.