Thank you Fleecewife, we were wondering about what kind of creep feeder would be suitable for our Soay and when we should start feeding. Will follow your advice as in other years we have had a lot of grass. They often seem more interested in browsing the hedges than grazing!
As SteveHants has just said on another thread, no point in treating a non-intensive breed intensively. With Soay, if you feed them too much concentrate they will scour. They will eat it though
Soay love to browse as do most of the primitives and some other breeds, and I feel they benefit from it. There is plenty of good stuff in leaves and bark and Soay seem to need some of that to prevent scouring which even really rich grass can cause.
One of the reasons to keep rare breeds is to preserve their unusual traits for future breeding back into more numerous breeds, to help them adapt to changing conditions such as no close shepherding, no housing, no added grain-based supplements, so it makes sense to maintain these differences between the types. Most of the sheep information out there is for the fast growing, intensively reared stock most sheep farmers keep, so it can be difficult to pick out what is essential for all sheep and what doesn't or does apply to your own breed.