Fall Lambing Results

For the curious, here's how our autumn lambing season is going.

So fall lambing isn’t quite done but with only a handful of ewes left, I had to crunch the numbers. Based on udders and dates, there are maybe 2 ewes left to lamb. That’s not really going to change my results. For the new readers, we run a flock of Katahdins with a decent number of Katahdin/Romanov crosses and the odd Dorper on a modified accelerated lambing system.

Since we live in the Northern Hemisphere, autumn lambing is technically out of season for lambing. These ewes were bred in the spring and early summer when not all sheep breeds readily and reliably cycle. Breeding between April and July involves a bit more luck than usual. We did have to trick their biological clocks a bit to make this lambing happen.

Breeding Plans

When we plan out of season breeding, we turn to an MGA protocol. It’s more cost-effective for our operation at this point in time. It is very time-sensitive and pretty much takes over our life during breeding. Unlike the more popular CIDRs, which are inserted and left for up to 14 days, MGA involves a feed additive that has to be fed exactly 12 hours apart for two weeks (I mean exactly, we have alarms on our phones to be accurate within a minute). Just like a CIDR protocol, after the 14 days, they get a shot of Folligon and the rams go do their job.

We exposed approximately 153 ewes. We used 13 rams. Eighty of the ewes were on MGA protocol. The remainder were bred naturally. No, that was not a 12:1 ratio for rams. The ewes are split into two pens. One had 58 ewes that are 3-4 years old and the pen includes a bunch of half-Romanovs. This pen was bred first. The whole pen went on MGA and the 40 Katahdins got a shot. All 13 rams went in. So that’s a ratio of 4.5:1 for rams. For the rest of this post, this is Pen 1.

The other pen had 95 ewes in it, mostly older Katahdins, the majority over 5 years old. Forty of the ewes were in the best shape when on MGA in two batches of 20, 7 days apart (yes, we have a lot of gates). The remaining 55 were exposed naturally, they’re older and I would really rather not have multiples from them. Seven of the rams from Pen 1 went in after the first batch had their shot. This is Pen 2.

Conception Results

The whole goal here was to have 80-100 ewes lambing in the fall and the best way to ensure that happens was to use the protocol. The rams were in Pen 1 for 30 days and 35 days for Pen 2. Lambing was dragged out a bit, we started in late September and just finishing now.

Out of the 58 that were exposed, 54 lambed. That’s a 93% conception rate for Pen 1. In Pen 2, 75 ewes have or will lamb, which is 79%. Considering less than half of Pen 2 was on MGA, around half of the ewes that lambed likely bred naturally. The overall conception rate was 84% and we exceeded our goal by about 30 ewes.

Lambing results

In the end, there are 203 tagged lambs from 122 ewes. Five ewes failed to lamb live lambs or had mishaps that resulted in their lambs being fostered elsewhere. We tag our lambs within 24-48 hours and track that result. Pre-tagging mortality of lambs is around 8% which includes mummified, aborted, stillborn and well, anything that didn’t live long enough to be tagged. Once a lamb is tagged, the odds of it surviving to be shipped or bred as a replacement is over 95%.

This works out to 1.6 tagged lambs per ewe that lambed. The ewes actually doing the raising are feeding 1.66 lambs per ewe. Pen 2 had fewer lambs on average, which we expected since the risk of a ewe needing help increases with age and most of the pen was bred naturally. We aim for two lambs per ewe and will foster if possible with triplets.

Overall Thoughts

Spring breeding is always a risk and we definitely did push these ewes to make this possible, every one of them lambed last in January and February 2021. There was a bit of a hustle involved in getting them dry fast enough to flush again for re-breeding. We’re really happy with the results of these groups so far and will definitely do large group fall lambing again (especially compared to summer lambing, which we dislike greatly).

Obviously, this group has not been weaned, so things can still change. We’re now at just over 500 lambs tagged this year from roughly 250 ewes. If they get tagged, they either end up sold or kept for replacements, so all in all, it’s been a good year for our sheep. Next year could be different so I’ll celebrate every success I can (read this if you want to know why).

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