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

BONNIEVIEW FARM’S LAMB REARING STRATEGIES
Neil Urie
Bonnieview Farm
Craftsbury Common, Vermont, USA
We started milking sheep in 1999, and for the first four seasons, we left the lambs on the
ewes for at least one month, and then started milking as the lambs were weaned. In 2003 we
constructed a greenhouse barn for the lambs. We took the lambs off their mothers at one day
old, and put them into group pens in the greenhouse where they were fed from nipple buckets
with their mothers’ milk as well as milk replacer. In the last three seasons, the systems have
been modified slightly to better meet our and the lamb’s needs.
In 2005 the lambing season started on April 10. In the morning, we took any lambs off
their mother who were healthy, nursing well, and at least 12 hours old. The lambs were moved
down to the greenhouse barn where 280 pens were set up, each roughly 5’X12’. Most mornings
there were between 12-30 lambs to be moved to the greenhouse. The greenhouse has a dirt floor
and a generous amount of straw on top.
For lambs less then a week old, the population per pen was between 10-15 lambs, and the
only furniture in the pen was a four gallon bucket with ten nipples. Training them to the nipples
would take place in the early afternoon after they had gotten hungry. As the lambs were taken,
ewes were milked twice a day, and all of this milk was fed back to the lambs until a majority of
the lambs were weaned.
At two weeks old, the lamb population per pen is reduced to ten lambs per pen or one
lamb per nipple. Grain was offered free choice at nose level, and good second cut hay was
available in hay racks. They were given their mother’s milk in the morning and evening
immediately after milking, and in the middle of the day, they were given milk replacer as needed
so the buckets were rarely empty.
At three weeks and older, the pens were opened up, and four pens would become one big
pen with four buckets. Each bucket in the pen would receive at least 4 gallons of milk in the
morning and evening, and then in the middle of the day they would be given 4-6 gallons of milk
replacer. They would become hungry in between feedings and consume more grain and hay.
They would also have access to a paddock outside the greenhouse where they were introduced to
grass and electric fence. As the lambs reach 32-40 lbs each, they were sold to customers who
came to the farm to pick them up or they were moved to our pastures.
The problems this year that I would like to address for next year would be bloat among
the older lambs and bucket maintenance. As the pens were opened up, there would be a feeding
frenzy on the first bucket in the pen filled and the swarm of lambs wouldn’t move to the next
bucket until that one was empty. I feel that this rapid consumption of milk on top of grain would
cause more cases of bloat than might naturally occur. When there was less then one hundred
lambs we cleaned the buckets regularly but when the numbers went into the three hundreds, the
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