All you sheep owners: Feeding & Bedding questions! UPDATED

[KrisRose]

Dairy sheep??

 

[MissPrissy]

Yes, dairy sheep - for the milking of - I have Friesians.

http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/dairysheep.html

http://www.sheep101.info/dairy.html

Sheep cheese is excellent! I live less than 5 miles from a sheep dairy. They make incredible cheeses! Hoepfully I will too if these girls lamb in the spring!

 

[KrisRose]

Holie smokes! Never heard of dairy sheep. Guess you do learn something new everyday, even with 50 years on these tried old bones

!

 

[Chick_a_dee]

Quote:
Yeah, they should if pregnant, will be lambing in February, they have a 10x10 stall in a bank barn, I wouldn't call it draft FREE but it's pretty good, considering it's a bank barn ... well actually it's a foundation barn that was converted into a bank barn LOL. I can string up a heat lamp if necessary. We will eventually harvet their fleece, and I am using shavings as bedding for them in the stall, they will be together at night until lambing at which point i'll split them up gradually towards the end of january into two different stalls, next to each other, or across from each other. I'll get some milk replacer for sure! ... We've ordered 2 halters from our co-op for them, so as long as we get those halters on them, we'll have some way of grabbing them and handling them, but I'll also grab some sheep feed to bribe them with. They're not handled a lot, but since it's only two i'll be able to do more handling than if we had a huge flock of them.

We have about 400 bales of hay sitting up in our barn, and mostly we bought them for their excellent lawn mowing abilities, we have about 2 acres of land that needs to be cleared, so they have loads of pasture, and we also had 400 bales of great hay and no animals! so we couldn't just waste the hay, especially since we won't have the pump on the well at the barn until spring, at least we can take water from up at the house for the sheep, i wouldn't do it for horses only because they need so much more water.

 

[Chick_a_dee]

Quote:
I've heard of Milking sheep! Very cool.

We've bought them halters so we can catch them easier, and yes I will be bribing them a bit.

 

[Ugly Cowboy]

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I agree with that. We give ours a mineral block, hay, and pasture, thats it.