The Start of Fall Lambing Season

Springtime felt like it had a great big hole in it—the first time with no spring lambing on the farm in 18 years. Happy sheep grazing in the pastures, yes, but no bouncing little ones because they had to wait for autumn and our off-season breeding experiment. Curious? Here’s the what and why of our fall lambing:
Load Balancing
Work on the farm seems to pile up in the spring with everything needing to be done at the same time. There’s the garden and the baby chicks and the start of the busy season at Farmstead. Lambing for us is a six-week no-sleep intensive, and when that butts right up to Memorial Weekend, it means we drag ourselves through summer, still exhausted by the spring workload.
This year, we were much better rested for summertime, and the ewes without babies in tow were easier to handle in the fields. So yes, summer was much smoother for sheep care, and we did tackle many projects that would normally have been pushed further down the priority list. Kara has not missed having to milk at midnight, after cleaning up from a long day at Farmstead!
Cheese Production
The cheesemaking process requires 12 hours of uninterrupted focus for Kara—a time frame not available in the event-filled summertime, making winter the best cheesemaking season for us. With a fall lambing, this puts milking starting up in January—offering fresh milk when Kara would have time to make product. Extra milk can then be frozen for making gelato in the summer. It’s a perfect combo in theory, once we’re able to better winterize the dairy barn (a project currently in process).
Parasite Outwitting
Another reason for fall lambing is to outsmart the lifecycle of a pernicious parasite that infests our pastures—the barber-pole worm. Living in the soil and crawling out onto the grasses to be consumed by its host, the barber-pole worm lives in the digestive system of the sheep, sucking their blood (I know, sounds like something for Halloween movies, right?). Young lambs are especially susceptible to this parasite, which can cause anemia and even death with too heavy of an infestation.
Immune to several deworming medicines, the barber-pole presents a special problem to the shepherd. Over the years, we have tried several approaches for combatting this pest. One is to keep the lambs in off the pasture and feed them hay (the parasite cannot live on dry feed). Another is to keep the sheep off large portions of the pasture for several rotations of the lifecycle of the parasite (without a host, they also die). The third is to let the pests be chomped up by a species that is not their common host (hence our addition of the heifers to serve as parasite vacuums because the worms are species-specific). All this has been helpful, but now we are trying a fourth approach: keeping the lambs off the pasture until they are bigger and more resistant to the worms. With fall lambing, they’ll be eating their mother’s milk and then dry hay until things green up in the spring, at which point they’ll be big enough to fend off the barber-pole scourge.
Genetics
Not all sheep breeds are able to get pregnant during the off-season. Some sheep only ovulate in the fall, priming the ewes for a spring lambing, just as the deer (a close cousin of sheep) are now in the rut for a spring fawn birth. In the wild, this is critical because the babies need all summer to grow in order to make it through winter.
But our sheep have the 1919 Gambrel barn to shelter in and plenty of feed stored away to keep them healthy and strong through even our coldest winters. And our flock’s choices of mixed-breeding genetics have put us in a unique place to be able to breed for a fall lambing.
California Reds are particularly known for off-season breeding, and our introduction of Finnsheep upped the multiple births considerably (which indicates high fertility rates in the ewes). So far, we have seven lambs in the barn from four ewes who have given birth, including the momma shown with her little brown twins from our California Red ram “Rusty.” She loves them dearly, caring not a whiff that they are a different color from herself.
Extra Perks
So far, the lambs have been quite vigorous and nice sizes—8 to 10 pounds. Their coats are long and warm, and they are healthy and strong. No doubt this is in part because the mothers were able to feed on more nutritious grass throughout their pregnancy than dry hay. We truly are what we eat, and so are our children. So here’s a cheer to the start of lambing—may all the lambs be just as strong and healthy as these first few! See you down on the farm sometime.