The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Sheep => Topic started by: sarahdean_66 on January 08, 2014, 03:46:02 pm
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I have a couple of questions about running a ram with flock year round,
1, breeding with ewe lambs, they are soay and shetland soay x and ram is soay so would this be a problem?
2, if the wethers are in with them all will they fight?
I know he is a complete gentleman with the ewes at lambing and shares well at the feed trough as the first year when I only had 2ewes he was in with them and was fine.
Also they soays are pedigree can I still register lambs from ewe lambs?
Im sure these have been asked before but have searched and cannot find the posts.
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There are anumber of posts on breeding with ewe lambs - there are pros and cons. The rule of thumb is that the ewe lamb must be at least 60% of adult bodyweight. Personally, I wouldn't - I think the cons outweigh the pros.
We keep a wether specifically to keep our tup company and they get on fine.
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I routineley do it - but I wouldn't do it with primitives.
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I keep shetlands and castlemilk moorits - some how my shetland ram got into the ewe lamb paddock while I turned my back and tupped one of my ewe lambs before I could grab him.
She is a single and well grown in fact just as big as my smallest ewe so I'm not too worried if it did take but I wouldn't let the ewe lambs be tupped on purpose - that's me.
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I keep a Wether with my Portland Ram, although this is the first year that we haven't run him all year round with the flock as we have 5 commercial breed ewe lambs that we raised with the bottle this year and didn't want him tupping them too early. Usually he runs all year round with them and we're done lambing by Xmas.
I will say that we did put him to our other two commercial ewe lambs when they were 11 months old and he was a wee slip of a lad at 8 months (they were giant and we didn't think he'd be able to "get up there") but he did and both produced a couple of cracking little lambs each. The boys made slaughter weight within 7 months and it didn't do the mums any harm at all. He's a Portland ram and the girls are texel cross (was going to put an 'x' but it looked like I was signing off with a kiss ;D )