Healthy sheep are generally “low maintenance” when compared with other livestock species. But this does not mean they are “no maintenance”! You should routinely check your sheep daily – twice a day during lambing. Any disease or injury problems must be treated promptly.
For the most part, the labor is not hard, but they require quality time and quality labor. Timeliness of sheep management tasks is very important. You must have time to do the jobs when required and not put them off until next week or next month. You must have time to observe the animals and recognize their needs.
Sheep are grazing animals. They eat grasses and other low-growing vegetation and ruminate (chew the cud). They spend most of the day alternating between periods of grazing and resting/ruminating. Sheep only sleep for around 4 hours per day.
Sheep will eat 2–3% of their bodyweight each day, although younger sheep or ewes with lambs can eat up to 4%. Generally, the best option for feeding sheep and goats in drought is grain but there is no advantage in crushing the grain for sheep.
Provide them with fresh, clean water.
Sheep need access to fresh, clean water. Sheep will consume a couple gallons of water each day, and more when it is hot and it needs to be clean (free of algae and so on). You can use an automatic waterer if you don't want to have to carry a bunch of buckets every day.
Sheep are gregarious animals and separation is so stressful that individual animals show both altered physiology and stereotypic behaviours when isolated from others. Female and juvenile animals should therefore always be kept in groups, so that if one animal is removed for any reason, the remaining animals are not ...
Lambing outdoors in spring and early summer can be successful with no or limited shelter. While on pasture, shade is more important than shelter from wind and rain. Bringing sheep “back to the barn” at night is not necessary and exposes them to parasites where sheep concentrate each night.
As compared to cattle, sheep eat a greater variety of plants and select a more nutritious diet, though less so than goats. Sheep will graze for an average of seven hours per day, mostly in the hours around dawn and in the late afternoon, near sunset.
Supplementary feeding of sheep, with grain, hay or silage is necessary when pastures or stubbles are deficient in energy and protein. A good supplementary feeding program will ensure sheep utilise as much dry paddock feed as possible as well as provide sufficient supplementary feed for maintenance or growth.
Are sheep more profitable than cattle? Per animal unit or acre: yes. Compared to (beef) cattle, sheep have greater reproductive efficiency: earlier puberty, shorter gestation period, and higher prolificacy (multiple births). Sheep are efficient foragers that can produce (USDA) choice quality carcasses on pasture alone.
Sheep tend to bed in groups together, sleeping tucked away in steep terrain where they will be safe from predators through the night. During the daylight hours sheep move downslope toward gentler terrain, where they spend hours alternately foraging and resting.
Researchers find that most sheep are continually stressed unless kept in a flock of at least three sheep, so keeping a single pet sheep is rarely an option. The exceptions are bottle babies reared by humans and consider themselves small, woolly people.
Katahdin Sheep
They are low-maintenance and are a cheaper breed to own. This will be a great choice for anyone who has never raised sheep and wants to start a small flock. These sheep are very docile and great if you have kids. They will not need to be sheared and are very easy to care for.
It is best to keep them in flocks. It takes about five sheep for sheep to display their natural flocking instinct. In the minimum, pet sheep should be kept in pairs. They can also be kept with other livestock, especially goats, but their preference is their own kind.
Disadvantages of Producing Sheep
Sheep are subject to predation by coyotes, eagles, bobcats, lions, bears, domestic dogs, etc. Sheep require better fencing than do cattle. Internal parasites can create health problems when sheep are intensively grazed on irrigated pastures.
Feeding Farm Sheep
Sheep make excellent use of high-quality roughage stored either as hay or low-moisture, grass-legume silage or occasionally chopped green feed. Good-quality hay or stored forage is a highly productive feed; poor-quality forage, no matter how much is available, is suitable only for maintenance.
Sheep and goats can survive on grass and leaves because they're both ruminants. Their stomachs have four compartments that allow them to digest greens. A sheep/goat swallows her food without chewing and it goes into the first stomach, called the rumen.
You can reasonably expect to keep 6-10 sheep on an acre of grass and as many as 100 sheep on 30 acres of pasture. If you want to keep more than an acre can sustain, you'll have to look into purchasing additional land as you'll likely need to rotate your flock to keep them fed.
You should inspect livestock frequently enough to avoid unnecessary suffering - usually this is at least once a day. You should check more often during: extreme weather. lambing and kidding.
Average daily distance walked was 4.7 km/day with a peak of 6.2 km/day in late summer when forage on offer had fallen to low levels.
Feeding less hay twice each day allows those bigger, fatter and usually more aggressive sheep to eat their fill at the first feeding, leaving less for the others.
Various materials can be used for bedding for sheep, depending upon cost and availability: straw, hay, dried corn stalks, corn cobs, peanut hulls, cottonseed hulls, oat hulls, sawdust, wood shavings, wood chips, pine shavings, sand, paper products, peat, hemp, and leaves.
Donkey compatibility with sheep
Given ample opportunity, most donkeys will bond with sheep and protect them from predators. The donkey should be introduced to the sheep as early as possible to increase the likelihood of the donkey bonding to the flock.
Night-penning sheep
Electromesh Fencing: May be effective, and often a good option for small numbers of livestock and/or small acreages or pens. Types of fencing vary and may include multiple-strand electric or electric mesh, woven wire mesh, panels, or other hard barriers.