The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Sheep => Topic started by: OhLaLa on May 31, 2012, 03:44:48 pm
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The youngest lambs are now 10 weeks old. How old should they be when I stop putting down hard feed for them?
:farmer: :sheep:
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Interested in this question also :)
New to sheep but my understanding, putting head on chopping block, is: Lambs stay on creep feed, fed ad lib, until 5 months, then onto a finishing nut ? for a faster grown commercial lamb :-\
Ours are lawn mowers / to be enjoyed / pets to be eaten, so get a couple of scoops into some buckets as a treat twice a day which allows us to get friendly with & give a good once over ;D
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If still with mum, so long as they have access to plenty of good grass, you don't need to cake them at all, they'll grow faster with, taste sweeter without.
If they're pet / orphan lambs, I usually keep them on half-a-pound to one pound per head per day of a lamb cake (not creep, I only use that to get them started on eating cake) throughout - they won't ever grow as well as naturally-reared ones and need the help. But they would eventually grow on and finish on just grass, I guess, if you wanted to stop the cake. I think I would tend to keep them caked until 4 months old, though, which would be a natural weaning age.
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I am likely to be put in my place but last year mine were bottle fed 1l a day till they were 8 weeks and had creep down till that point when they were weaned weighing in at 25kg they were left out soley on grass with our Shetland ewes and their lambs without any hard feed at all. At 6 months they went off for the freezer (having tupped the ewes) and killed out at 25kg without too much wasted back fat. Guess moral is depends in grass and lambs but I don't cake my lambs with their mums and wean them between 3 and 4 months depending on size do I saw no reason not to do same for bottled lot but we have a lot of grass here
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If you want the taste of grass fed lambs, but need the growth boost from cake feeding too, but don't want to be wasting money on the extra feed ... then ad-lib creep feed when they are young, making the most of the best "feed conversion efficiency" period which I *think* is up to about 2 months of age.