Managing flocks | Producer says an efficient handling facility can save 45 minutes per ewe
A good handling facility is the best labour saving device for farms, says an Ontario sheep producer.
“Handling facilities don’t have to be fancy, just effective,” Anita O’Brien, a former Ontario Agriculture sheep specialist, told the Alberta Sheep Breeders Association’s recent conference.
“We use it so often, it’s the most heavily used equipment on the farm.”
She said she moves her farm’s portable handling equipment between flocks on rented fields.
O’Brien said an Irish study that compared facilities estimated good handling facilities save producers 45 minutes per ewe per year.
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The money saved from reduced labour quickly adds up, she added, especially for larger flocks.
O’Brien said a good handling system is necessary for her Ontario sheep farm, which has 425 ewes. She plans to add another 100 animals this spring.
“We rent a lot of pasture and can take a portable system to each pasture where it is needed.”
A quality digital weigh scale is O’Brien’s next best labour saving device. Her farm was able to double the number of lambs weighed, moving to 170 lambs from 80 per hour, after switching to a digital scale.
“It doesn’t seem fast. It is just steady.”
A good cull strategy also saves time, said O’Brien, who uses an ear notching system to easily identify cull animals.
Animals that need deworming multiple times a year, have health problems or poor conditioning and performance automatically have two holes punched in their ears. She said it is a simple way to know what needs to leave the farm without looking at farm records.
“We cull ewes not pregnant at scanning, ewes that are dry at weaning, ewes with poor udder conformation, plus the usual lumps in udder, broken mouth and thin ewes,” she said. “We use the notching system so I have an easy way to identify them when they’re coming down the raceway.”
A good working sheep dog is another labour saving device on O’Brien’s farm.
“We couldn’t do what we do without Border Collies,” she said.
“They can move a lot faster and work a lot harder than people can. It really does eliminate the need for another person, or two or three people.”
Grouping animals into ideal breeding and lambing sizes also helps save trips to the barn during lambing. Walking to the barn or field to check on two ewes that may lamb gets a bit tiresome, but synchronizing ewes at breeding or having ewes lamb in a tighter cycle will help shorten the long lambing season.
“I strongly believe one of the easiest ways to manage labour is pull the ram out. Be committed to pull the rams out so you don’t have stragglers for weeks and weeks,” said O’Brien, who leaves the ram in for 34 days, or two breeding cycles.
“The beauty of that is we have a definite end to the lambing period. Being in a barn checking ump-teen times a day for 40 days is long enough.”
O’Brien said producers should try to reduce the amount of time they spend bucketing feed and water to the animals by using communal waterers or hay feeders, especially when the sheep are in lambing jugs.
Matching forage bales to flock size is another trick to saving labour. O’Brien suggested matching flock sizes to the amount of feed in each bale to prevent waste.
Labour saving methods change as flock sizes change. Producers need to continually evaluate how they manage their flocks, she added.
