Great Lakes Dairy Sheep Symposium - the Department of Animal ...

MAXIMIZING PRODUCTION ON PASTURE
David Major
Major Farm and Vermont Shepherd, Ltd.
Putney, Vermont, USA
The title of this talk is “Maximizing production on pasture,” but as I begin to think about
how I pasture my sheep I realize I pay as much attention to the health and quality of the milk and
cheese, the animals, and the grass and soils as I do to the production. So I am going to rename
this talk, “Pasture systems for maximizing the health, quality and production of the farm and its
products.
Everything is a balance on the farm. When I made the morning pasture for the 176 ewes
we are milking currently, I had to decide whether to make the area 30 X 300 feet or 300 X 300
feet or anything in between. The animals have their own needs - too little, and they'll quit
producing; too much and they'll become sick with acidosis. And the pasture has its own needs -
the more evenly and thorough the days grazing the better. Do the needs of the animals coincide
with the needs of the pastures? Never exactly. So I try to strike a balance. I give the sheep a
little lecture on the way out of the barn. Sheep, I say, I've given you a really good meal today,
but you'd better finish in up or I'm not going to be able to give you such a good meal another
day.
Major farm is actually a couple of older farms, Major Farm and Patch Farm, now
combined as one. It is approximately 250 acres. We milk 220 sheep, though usually not more
than 200 at any one time. We make all our own hay and raise most of our own lambs. The
numbers of sheep and lambs on the farm vary over the year from a minimum of 275 to a
maximum of 700.
The farms yearly production cycle is timed to take advantage of our pastures. 2/3rds of
the ewes lamb in March, The remainder lamb in late May. The lambs nurse for one month after
birth, and then they’re moved to pastures where they are moved daily. The ewes are milked
almost the entire pasture season, from mid-April to mid-November.
I will sketch out for you the nature of our pasture management for the different groups of
ewes, then I will detail for you a few lessons I have learned over the years to keep up the health
and production of the pastures and the sheep, what I have learned about the pastures’ effect on
product quality, and a few ways to make the whole process work efficiently.
The Milkers
We give our milkers new pasture space every 12 hours, after every milking. This does
not mean that they are moved to an entirely different spot every milking. Rather, I make their
pasture larger and larger with every milking until about 3 days pass, and then I start on a new
area. This allows lazy me to move the pipe and water trough only every three days, plus it gives
me some flexibility in being able to compensate for my mistakes. On day one, I like to make the
first pasture of a new area bigger than I think the milkers will need. Then I can make the
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