The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Sheep => Topic started by: crobertson on December 11, 2017, 10:47:51 pm
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Just out of interest how many people bring their sheep indoors in sun zero conditions?
Our area is forecast around -8 to -12 degrees tonight (currently -6) and on the drive home from work I noticed several local sheep keepers had brought theirs indoors but also several hadn't which got me thinking.
Ours don't have an actually man made field shelter so I spent a good hour or two bedding down an outbuilding with new hay, straw etc and setting up a hurdle run from the field to give ours the option to go in and out as they please. Half of them wondered down to see what was happening and then returned to the field and settle down in the snow between the hay feeder and energy block ! But they are a hill breed and there I was feeling soft . . . :)
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mine are out, but they do have a pallet shelter they can get under, or at least out of the wind, i think wet bothers them more than cold, and of course the risk of being lost in snow drifts.
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Sheep are fine out in snow ..... One of my ewe lambs walked round all day with inch of snow on back ...... They have best insulation going! As long as they have some shelter (good hedge) from driving windy rain and plenty of good hay they are fine. Better to up hay quantity than concentrate cos rumen action keeps their temp up.
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The ones round here that have been brought inside are the early lambing ewes and they would have come inside for lambing anyway within the next week or so.
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Most livestock can cope with cold, it’s wet that does the damage. And with snow and sheep, drifting can be dangerous, as can narrow irrigation / drainage ditches, which when covered by snow can become death traps.
Ex-BH used to feed his commercial sheep hay twice a day when the ground was frozen and/or covered in snow. Generous quantities, spread out in a long line. They’d eat most and then lie on the remainder, which presumably was warmer than snow as a bed. And if he wanted to give hard feed too, the line where they’d lain on leftover hay provided a hard surface to dispense the feed and not lose it all in the snow - better than troughs in that sort of weather.
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Mine do have a field shelter, but only half of them use it - the others seem to prefer to be outdoors. Not keen on the snow, but not looking forward to tonight when it melts and we have heavy rain as well! As others have said, they seem to mind the cold less than the wet.
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I have ours out all year round, but come winter time they are put in the more sheltered fields on the farm :) Usually well, although any weaker ones or small lambs I bring inside or closer to the house for more feeding/protection :)
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Mine are out, they have haylage in a ring feeder and do have a nice shelter that they ignore unless its heavy and persistent rain. Most of the time they just tuck into the hedges for shelter
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Ours too. Fortunately all the fields have ancient hedges. If it's going to be really dire we let the pregnant ewes into the wood, where they have an area under Scots Pines with hedges on two sides and a metre-high pile of brash on the other. The pine needles make a soft, warm carpet and when it snows the brash pile fills with snow and makes a windproof wall. A field hayrack lives there permanently, just in case.
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More often than not they are brought in just to make feeding or management easier - i.e. if they are stores over wintering, they won't put any weight on otherwise (or they'd lose it), or if they are lambers that would be coming in in a few weeks anyway.
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We built a new field shelter for ours last weekend and they were all standing under there during the sleet in Norfolk yesterday. When they do have shelter options, they hide in there only in wet weather. They are hebs
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Thanks for all the responses, I was slightly concerned about the -12 degrees we had last night which was the coldest we've had since sheep keeping! They were all fine this morning, just one had a big clump of snow / ice frozen to her fleece but other than that they hadn't gone into the outbuilding at all.