Eager capitalists have pounced upon this consumer fear by marketing new animal feeds which are soy- and/or corn-free (corn is another evil, according to some). I have watched with interest the growing success of this local feed company, Scratch And Peck, which caters to this very I-want-the-best-for-my-backyard-hens market. Brilliantly marketed, this feed has an adorable logo of a pastel chicken and little crooked hearts; a hard-to-argue byline of you are what your animals eat, and an ingredient list that makes me want to cook it on the stove for my own breakfast. I was surprised and amused to see it turn up in my local farm co-op store, in a large end-cap display, complete with charming clear plastic eggs filled with the different whole-grain mixes, all lined up in an egg carton. Genius.

But, oh, not only could my hens possibly benefit from all those probiotics and quaint whole grains, I could benefit from those beautiful marketing materials. I could say, my chickens eat Scratch And Peck. And people would love that. And they would pay more for the eggs. Except… it is nearly twice the price of Purina’s run-of-the-mill (literally) layer crumble. Twice! Fifty-seven cents a pound instead of thirty-one cents. Suddenly four dollar eggs become eight.

And that seems a little crazy. Part of how the company minimizes notice of the price hike is by selling the feed in forty pound bags, instead of fifty. Clever indeed. It’s an effective strategy, as one of the farm store employees and I had a debate: he insisted it was only a little bit more expensive, and he couldn’t buy my assertion that it’s nearly double. For people who have a few chickens in their backyard and aren’t paying any attention to how much it’s costing them to get those tasty eggs, it’s an invisible household cost. But once they are buying them from someone else’s backyard chickens, all of a sudden, there is sticker shock.

Soy Bad

One of the concerns people seem to have with soy is that it has phytoestrogens, or plant-based pseudo-estrogens that can fool our bodies and make them react as if they have more of this hormone than is normal. Studies of the impact of this phenomenon are conflicting, but some people are opting to avoid soy for these reasons. Interestingly, phytoestrogens in red clover are to blame for sheep having fertility problems when grazed on clover-laden pastures.

But does this concern over phytoestrogens transfer from the chickens eating soy to their eggs, or the chickens eaten as meat? This article implies no, that eggs and animal-based meat contain infinitesimal amounts of phytoestrogens compared to soy-based foods. Soy has more than a thousand times the concentration of phytoestrogens than eggs, chicken, pork, beef, fish, or milk products.

For people who are allergic to soy, do soy proteins turn up in the eggs of soy-fed chickens? I could find no reading to indicate that this is true.

Beyond the pseudo hormone effect and allergies, people are concerned that many soy crops are GMO and/or treated with pesticides. Here again, it’s hard to know, how much of this “bad stuff” impacts the bird’s health such that their eggs are measurably affected in a way that’s unhealthy for us to eat? And does it depend on how many eggs we eat? A weekender breakfast versus a lacto-ovo vegetarian who many be relying on eggs for protein in multiple meals each day?

So then maybe it comes down to ethical choices: if we oppose GMOs, then we should try not to buy them in any form, and that needs to go all the way back through the supply chain to the foods eaten by the chickens that lay the eggs we eat. Fair enough.

But ultimately, I have to wonder, is this just some crazed, not-based-on-any-facts-at-all consumer whim and peer pressure thing? Do stay-at-home moms shrink in embarrassment when their friends ask condescendingly, oh, you are still feeding your family eggs laid by soy-fed chickens? Will we someday know more, and be rueful of our soy feeding years? Or will this trend pass, just like the one that said margarine is way better for us than butter? Or the one that said that eggs are bad for us altogether?

Soy Good?

The tough part is, soy is really, really high in protein. Take a look at some feeding options we have for livestock:

Compared to soy’s whopping 50% protein, oats, wheat and corn look pretty anemic. Fish meal is an option, but is sometimes thought to pass along a fishy taste in meat and eggs. And there are all the ethical complications of overfishing and questions about farmed fish that make fish meal no prize winner in the “natural and ethically pure” category either. Cottonseed and linseed meal don’t seem to appear as much in animal feeds; I’m not sure if they can be produced as cheaply as soy, and probably have all the same GMO and pesticide concerns that soy does anyway.

Egg-producing chickens need a high protein diet. The currently accepted convention is 16% protein. So oats and barely alone won’t cut it; we have to have a hotter feed mixed in there somewhere. Scratch And Peck is using camelina, a crop now popular for use in biofuels and which can be found growing near us in the Snohomish River valley. But not everyone loves camelina either, it has its own controversies in threatening local brassica crops due to potential cross-pollination.

This farmer’s small experiment on comparing soy to non-soy fed chickens raised for broilers indicates that their Cornish broilers did grow slightly faster on soy feed; but also had some hint that mortality may be higher as well (more data would be needed to tell for sure). It’s interesting that they mention that when using peas as a protein source, they have to be ground into the ration, because chickens don’t prefer to eat them and will avoid them if allowed to. I wonder why they have an aversion to peas?

The Catch-22

So, I posed to this customer that I’m willing to try switching to the fancier feed, if she is willing to pay $8 a dozen for eggs. And there’s the catch. She’s not. Though this anti-soy thing is important to her, it’s not thirty-three-cents-an-egg-important for a family that eats a lot of eggs. There are apparently some people willing to buy these eggs for $9.69 at my local grocer:

But not very many people, as the store only shelves a few of these compared to all the other eggs, the rest of which are priced around three or four dollars. These Pasture Verde eggs don’t even meet the soy-free criteria we’re talking about here. In this case, they are organic, and non-GMO-corn-fed; but the exorbitant price seems to be due to the partially-grass-fed diet of the hens (other organic eggs on the shelf don’t command nearly that price). My hens also have year-round access to green grass, so maybe I’m not charging enough for the grass in their diet and their freedom to roam!

And this is the dilemma that seems to trap us all. Though we don’t like all that’s happening in our food systems, we also don’t like the idea of going back to the days where groceries consumed something like 30% of our income, rather than the 10% we currently enjoy. Ah, what to do?

I’m curious to hear from others who have cut soy from their farm animals’ diets, and how that has worked out for you from a cost and consumer demand standpoint? Has anybody else done the math or found a more affordable non-soy feed?

I have been working a lot with the sheep ration calculation program created by Montana State University. This is a really nice, free, online too for doing feed nutrient balancing for sheep of all stages of life. You can do this by hand using the Pearson Square method, but the online tool is easier, especially when combining more than two feedstuffs.

This is where it really helps if you can buy hay that comes with a lab analysis. If you don’t have this, you can still tinker with the tool, as it has a lot of generic feed profiles to choose from. But, you are guessing, so at most, you can do a best- and worst-case analysis of what your animals might be getting, and try to shoot for the high side with supplementation.

Here is a look at my hay, just by itself, in how it would serve my ewes in late gestation. This is for adult ewes weighing 154 lbs, pregnant with twins, and assuming I could get them to eat 4% of their bodyweight, or about six pounds of hay day.

If you blow it up a little (click on the image if you can’t see), you can see that the ewes would barely be skimming by on dry matter intake, digestible energy (DE), metabolizable energy (ME), and total digestible nutrients (TDN). This waters down to meaning they are taking in enough calories. But, the crude protein (CP) is too low, which would compromise lamb size and health. This tool doesn’t have a profile for ewes pregnant with triplets or quads, so I have to consider that some of my ewes will need even more than this profile requires. And, I know that my ewes may have trouble taking in that much hay, especially the ones pregnant with triplets, because there is diminished room in their abdomens, and they tend to feel full quickly.

Currently, the sheep are eating (and wasting) about 3.2 pounds of hay a day per head, just as they are entering the mid-gestation phase. This is as much as they are willing to eat, if I feed them more, they just make a bed out of it. If I assume their appetites will increase to four pounds per day, and I add some grain, along with my mineral supplements, this looks a little better:

I still worry that this is a little lean for ewes bearing triplets, but that is the disadvantage of feeding a mob. If I could ultrasound the ewes and separate them by the number of fetuses they were carrying, I could feed each group more precisely. But as it is, the ewes with twins will be fed optimally, the ones with singles will be over-fed, and the ones with litters will be under-served.

The ewelambs have a similar picture:

Interestingly, data on ewelambs specifies that they require a similar diet to the mature ewes. Despite the mature ewes weighing almost twice as much, ewelambs are still growing, so they need extra calories, and a lot more protein. This diet is very close to the minimum of protein for them, and it is maximizing the amount of grain I can give them. So, it’s clear why so many people choose to incorporate soy protein into animal diets- it is astronomically higher in protein than whole grains. (Soybean meal is about 50% protein, whereas the corn and barley I am feeding are lucky to hit 10%.) So despite some consumers now thinking soy is evil, it is a very cost-effective foodstuff for animals. So far, I am trying to stick to “rolled” (crushed) whole grains, rather than processed soy protein, because there is some research that implies that it promotes a healthier rumen. But it costs more…

The other fun fact that emerges in these numeric grids is how the mineral supplements contribute to the diet. You can see that my copper supplementation is about double what they are getting in the hay, so not shockingly large, even though I’m using a cattle supplement. Iron amounts are huge, nearly two thousand times the minimum required, so I am still a little puzzled why my sheep livers are testing deficient here. And the kelp offers pretty meager amounts of all of the “big” minerals. I’m still torn on its advantages- it is a very expensive way to deliver minerals, but it does have a lot of the “fringe” minerals that don’t appear in feed profiles or nutrition studies, that nobody knows about. And the sheep definitely love it. So I’m sticking with it for now, but am continually suspicious of its return on investment.

The tool offers this disclaimer:

These are only recommendations. Recommendations are based on the NRC and other research, not actual requirements. Actual requirements can vary with feed interactions, environmental factors, differences among breeds, management goals, animal health, and other factors.These calculated values are expressed as a percentage of a single “text book” animal recommended value. Consult the “Column Headings” section of this program or the 1985 or 2006 NRC, nutrient requirements of sheep to better understand the range of values, particularly with minerals, that may be appropriate.

So, we know these calculations aren’t the end-all. We still need to continually monitor the ewes’ actual physical condition, because they may not be textbook ewes. In fact, I have a hunch Katahdins are generally more efficient than textbook ewes, because they have been bred with that priority in mind. But I am trying to bump up my feeding from last year, to see if I can shift the bell curve of lamb birth weights higher. It’s so cold and wet here, I want good-sized, vigorous lambs that are less likely to chill; and I haven’t had a problem yet with too-big lambs. So we’ll see if this slightly more generous feeding schedule does the trick!

It made international news, I think, our gargantuan snowstorm. For us it wasn’t too big of a deal. Inconvenient, yes. Life-threatening, no. I stopped measuring snow at 11 inches in our pasture; and the cumulative snowfall was a lot more than that, because it was melting some each day. That’s the funny thing about around here: most of the time when it snows, it’s not even freezing, at least during the day. Over a foot of snow is a lot for this area; I think we set a record for something like on-the-day-of-January-18th.

But it’s not very impressive to people who live with snow all winter. A week of difficult roads, limited travel, some power outages, and harder work on the farm, and then it’s over, probably for the season. Here are some images from our big week of snow.

Snow-laden ex-Christmas tree.

The drainage ditches, topped off in slush.

Good news for collies, a new element to their pasture runs.

Catching snowballs.

The guardian dogs seem perfectly at home in the snow. I bolstered their dog houses with mounds of fresh straw, but they spent little time in them. They spent a lot of time wrestling, however. Moses looks a little victimized here, but he’ll get revenge on Bronte a minute later. They always remind me of bears when they play, it’s so rough. 

You can see why she has earned the nickname Big Bird- always smiling her big, dumb, cheerful smile, breathing hot breath in my face (she’s not that much shorter than I am).

Moses, maintaining vigilance at the boundaries of his pasture.

The ruminants are hardy in cold. We may cringe to see them standing out in snow, but the truth is, they are so insulated by their wool, that little heat escapes to even melt the snow on their backs. You would think Llama would find the weight of this snow blanket irritating enough to shake it off, but I guess not.

Ruminants have a huge bacterial fermentation vat inside their guts. Their digestive action produces a lot of heat. When it’s cold outside, they merely need to eat more, and they stay plenty warm. All of the animals look wet on the surface, but if you stick your fingers down into their coats, they are dry at the skin.

The sheep don’t prefer to walk in deep snow; prey animals know they are vulnerable when they don’t have good footing. They tend to make a single-file trail and they all follow it. Here they are making a stop at the mineral feeder, and then the water troughs after eating their morning hay.

The water troughs weren’t frozen most mornings when I kicked my boot in them to clear them, but they accumulated a frosting layer of snow within hours. This does not fool the sheep though, one of their rare areas of intelligence is finding food and water beneath snow. Here you can see the nose holes they’ve made for drinking. They also know how to eat snow, and often opt for that rather than making the trek to the water tanks.

If you aren’t tall enough to reach the common nose hole, then stepping a foot into the water tank can help…

Or, if you are a petite Jacob cross ewelamb, you can get your whole self into the water tank and paw at the snow with your hooves….

We don’t have new-fangled frost-free faucets in the pasture yet, that’s a project for another summer. So, when the garden hoses freeze, I have to haul water in buckets. In past years, I filled them at the house’s hose bib. Or, if that was frozen, I’d have to fill the muddy buckets in the bathtub in the house.

So this year felt like a luxury to fill them with scalding water in the new barn sink.

Three buckets fit in the ATV rack, so it takes several trips to the pasture to fill the stock tanks to last for several days.

In the evenings, there was a most beautiful blue cast to the landscape. I managed to capture it fairly well with my camera, though the sheep’s movements are blurry due to the low light.

Single file line back to the hay row where they will bed down for the night on the remnants of their dinner.

But if we don’t compete in shows, why would we care about type in working, performance or production animals? Well, for one, we want to stick to the observable physical traits which are the goal of the breed; whether it be fine wool production or deep loin eye. If you look at historical illustrations of meat-type livestock, they often look like the above engraving: corpulent bodies, tiny legs and head. These were exaggerations, intended to emphasize the traits they most wanted in breeding: good muscling, high capacity for forage intake, thriftiness, and high wool production. The facial appearance and leg length were don’t-cares, so they barely illustrated them. Our old #33, now nine years old, would not win a beauty contest, but she often reminds me of these old-fashioned photos: all body, no legs and neck!

Big Barrels of Grass

Practically speaking, for observable traits, a top priority in Katahdin ewes for grass-fed systems is the ability to digest a lot of grass. Though good green grass is high in protein (which equates to growth), it’s also full of water. So we need meat sheep to be able to take in vast quantities of forage. Lactating ewes turn this grass into rich milk, and growing lambs turn this grass into muscling and fat.

What’s interesting about a lot of modern sheep breeds in our country, however, is that they’ve been primarily raised on high quality hay and grain for many generations. Hay is dry, and has give up most of its water content, so it’s more nutrient-dense than fresh grass. Grain is denser still. Sheep fed on these inputs do not need to take in as much volume as pastured sheep. So many sheep breeds have diverged away from the historical corpulent, big-barrel-of-grass appearance to a more streamlined, leggy and slim animal. “Tube  shaped” is what many people call them, and the most extreme examples seem to turn up in American show Suffolks. A tour of Google images gives a great summary:

These tube sheep seem optimized for utilization of cheap grain produced in the Midwest; they don’t need a lot of stomach capacity, and they probably have a high tolerance to the acidity in the rumen that comes with a low-roughage feeding schedule. But they often do poorly when put on grass, probably because they can’t take in enough forage to grow well. It’s not to say that these are bad sheep, we just have to keep in mind their purpose; different management systems with different resource availability require very different animals for ideal performance.

Comparing the Suffolk pictures to the Katahdin ewes can make the Katahdins appear fat. But all these ewes are currently at a body score condition of about 3 to 3.5 (as judged by feeling the fat cover near their hip bones); so they are neither over- or underweight. They just have very large abdominal capacities full of low-protein grass hay.

Throwbacks

The Katahdin breed association encourages cross-breeding; they allow us to register crossbreds and “upgrade” them over time back to purebred status. The upside of this is hybrid vigor: we are continually introducing fresh blood into the gene pool. This can also allow us to bring in new genes which advance the breed in the traits we want to improve. The  downside is some continual degradation of breed type. We can get “throwbacks” that are pulling undesirable traits from some generations-ago ancestor, creating puzzling outcomes from what seems like a good pairing of two very typical Katahdins.

One interesting dice roll I’ve been getting is from the cross between my Montana ewes and some old-time Washingtonian genetics. They are sometimes (not always) very Suffolk-ey, more tube-shaped animals that look like nothing else in their pedigree. That’s the funny thing about outcrossing, is that you often get something that doesn’t resemble either parent. The girl above is still a good ewe, but you can see that long-leggedness, and just not as much body capacity as the rest of my ewes, even though she is in adequate condition. Even her facial expression and dark-point coloration resembles a Suffolk.

These twin sisters born this year look a little like thoroughbred race horses to me.

See the resemblance?

The difference between them and more Katahdin-ey ewes in the same age group is subtle, but clear. The one on the left, has a dromedary appearance, less muscling on the rump, and less filling out her stomach. The one on the right is more Hereford cow-like, with a big square butt end, short legs, and a fuller capacity in her rumen. They are opposites: all legs, no body; and all body, no legs!

Another comparison, this one shows how the one on the left has inherited something show people like: heavy bone in the legs, to go with the willowy body. The one on the right has more standard bone density, and a more barrel-ey abdomen.

And here is the other racehorse, walking along with some much fuller-capacity mature ewes; I think the tube-versus-barrel shapes are very evident here:

Bell Curve Boundaries

But notice, these three runway model ladies are still here! Despite my not preferring this aspect of their type, they are still good ewes with solid NSIP metrics as compared to my total spread. They beat out other ewes in getting to stay. And that’s because everything is a bell curve: we want general consistency in our flocks, but we also want to have some tolerance for variation from the mean. Just like in my rams, there is a spread of size and performance; and depending on pairings, they may produce progeny like themselves, or better or worse. We want to try to stay in the middle on many traits, but accept that we’ll have some outliers that fall on both ends of the curve.

On the other end of the spectrum from the two racehorses and the Suffolk-ey ewe is their auntie, above, who carries so much condition, her fat undulates with every stride. This does not thrill me either, as I suspect the cost to maintain her blubber over the winter is greater than the more modestly conditioned ewe behind her. But there again, it’s ok to have some variation, and daughters of all these ewes will vary yet again as different sires are introduced. These traits are just a few of many for which I select, others being mothering ability, milk production, birthing ease, birthweight, temperament, shedding coat and pounds-per-ewe-weaned. I’ll breed the racehorses to something stockier, and make sure that Ms. Blubber is paired with a trim fellow, and hope that subsequent generations continue to converge upon the ideal goals for which we all strive.

I felt a little insecure as I turned him out in the pasture- he looked huge compared to my rams! It made me wonder if I have a long ways to go in my breeding program. But a few days later, I got them on the scale, and was surprised to find out he weighed exactly the same as my mature ram, Liberace. They were both 200 pounds. Above is Lumpy, the new ram, and below is Liberace, or “Lee”:

Lee is not my favorite ram of all time, but he has his good traits. His sire and dam are both KRK stock, which is coveted in this region. Lee throws good growth lambs and nice daughters. But he is not very pretty- he is kind of “stuffy.” Lee looks like he should weigh a lot less than Lumpy, he is several inches shorter at the shoulder, for one. So it goes to show how visual appraisal can be deceiving, and that you can’t judge weight very well by just looking at them.

Lee is two years old, and Lumpy is a yearling, so presumably Lumpy will outweigh him as a mature ram. My other yearling ram, Lefty, weighed 170 lbs at the same time, back in August. Lefty is the love of my life: not only does he have the best metrics of all my sheep, he is gorgeous and gentle too. And, he has the ideal hair coat: all hair, no wooly fibers, and no hideous peeling-like-a-banana shedding period. Here are the two of them next to each other, getting fitted for their marking harnesses:

You can see that Lefty is also a good two or three inches shorter than Lumpy. But when I look Lefty’s muscular buttocks and deep loin, I can’t help but think roast.

And here’s the thing with breeding rams. We want them to carry genetics which produce lambs which grow very fast. Especially in grass-fed systems, we need those lambs to hit butcher weight while the grass is green, and before we head into winter and have to purchase feed.

But naturally these genes tend to come with generic growth genes- the genes which just produce a big animal. In other words, an animal that hits a nice butcher weight at six months, but then keeps growing! We don’t want mature breeding stock that reaches gigantic proportions, because they are expensive to feed and keep over winter. We mostly want animals that do the bulk of their growing early, and then slow down after that.

So which ram is better? Only spreadsheets and metrics will be able to tell me after I have seen what they produce. If Lumpy can generate lambs that hit butcher weight faster on grass, then his extra 30 pounds at yearling weight might trump Lefty. But if their lambs are similar in post-weaning weight, then feeding a slightly smaller ram over the long haul wins out.

And this is only considering butcher lamb output. I’ll be keeping replacement ewe lambs out of these fellows as time goes on, and I also don’t want behemoth ladies to feed. Sometimes its conceivable that one sire might be preferable for producing breeding ewes, and another sire better for “terminal” work, where his lambs all go to the butcher channel.

It’ll take me a couple of years to see how Lumpy performs. Due to his fever incident, I only had him breed six ewes. This will give me about a dozen lambs, and only a half dozen of each sex. This is not a very good data set for comparing against the other rams, so it’ll probably take two years before I have accurate NSIP metrics on him. But he has a good pedigree, so he’ll probably stick around here for a while!

Things have down-shifted here for winter. I bred 34 ewes in the first part of November. After the crummy and cold 2011 spring, I wanted to lamb a little later next year. But I decided I couldn’t push it too far, the timing is tricky for me.

There are several motivators for finishing breeding earlier rather than later in winter. For one, it avoids the most common flood periods, and moving and keeping separate five groups of sheep in preparation for a flood would have surely driven me batty! I usually start feeding hay in earnest by Thanksgiving, and I didn’t want to be hauling feed to five separate groups of sheep. And this year, we wanted to go clamming over Thanksgiving weekend; so I needed breeding to be done by then. (Keeping records of which ewes bred, feeding and watering multiple groups, and re-sorting the groups if they get mixed up is more than I would ask of a farm sitter).

Those needs for early winter breeding are in tension with wanting to lamb late in the spring, when the weather is kinder, the grass is coming on, and when we’re past the worst of the flood threats on the tail end of winter. Moving soon-to-deliver ewes and mamas with new babies is also a headache. This tension limits me to a small window of choice for breeding and lambing to make it all line up ideally.

And then, there are wrenches thrown into the system. Our new ram had a knee infection and a high fever, which, in theory, killed all of his stored sperm. By all calculations, he could have been sterile until the end of November. So after all the other sheep were done breeding, I had to leave him in with his ewes for another seventeen days. Thankfully for marking harnesses, though, I was able to cut this period a little short. I knew when he had bred his ewes the first time, and thus when they would re-breed if the first breeding didn’t take. He re-bred a ewe bred who was bred on the first day of turn-out; but that’s not surprising, as they often miss the fertility window on  that first day of being joined. The next four ewes didn’t re-breed, and the last one was never marked. So towards the tail end of that seventeen days, I called it good. If that last ewe was re-bred later by someone in the  bunch, I’d be ale to guess just by the lateness of the lamb births. So interestingly enough, the ram must have had enough viable sperm to service a modest six ewes, despite his fever just a few weeks before.

This irritating bit of timing paired with going out of town made me leave the larger group of sheep in our big field longer than I would have liked, and they overgrazed it. I hoped to leave a good four inches of grass out there, to give the plants ideal reserves for spring regrowth. But instead, I’ve left 1-2 inches, which I’m not pleased about. This will mean that grass will be ready to graze later in the spring as it struggles a bit to get started again. Oh well. Sometimes I just have to accept that I can’t manage things as perfectly as I might if I weren’t working full time and if we chose to never go on vacation.

For now, I have the sheep loose in the Reed Canary Grass field. RCG dies off in winter, and it’s a hardy grass, so I don’t mind that they eat it down after it’s dead. Grass experts have told me that RCG still benefits from leaving a 4” reserve. But I’m cheating, because I like the sheep to have some space to move and exercise during the winter. And by May or June, we’ll have more RCG than we know what to do with; we are still mowing it at least twice a year to keep it manageable. When it warms up in February or so, I’ll have to fence them into a sacrifice area, to let the RCG start to grow again. But then dealing with mud starts, since the sheep are confined in a concentrated area; so the shorter time in confinement, the better.

This time of  year is a low workload time. I feed hay twice a day, at about 6am and 6pm. I am careful to not vary that schedule more than an hour, so that means not sleeping in on the weekends (or sometimes going back to bed after feeding sheep in the dark). On freezing days, I have to break ice out of their water troughs, or even haul water if the hoses have been frozen for a week or two. But this winter has been gentle in that respect, an delightfully dry and mud-free to boot. Hoof trimming is out of the way until after lambing; this is the good time of year for foot health here. A month ago, and again yesterday, I handled all the sheep, to check for body condition and treat as I see fit for each one with de-wormer or a vitamin B shot to give them a boost. As always, there is a spectrum in their condition- some ewes make me cringe because they are chunkier than I’d prefer, other ewes are too lean, and most are in the middle somewhere. Feeding a mob is tricky that way.

Lambing will start in the last week of March, with the most lambs concentrated in the first two weeks of April. Until then, it’s a quiet time of year.

One of my favorite books of all time is Raymond an Lorna Coppinger’s Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior and Evolution. It does the best job of any book I’ve found in exploring modern, scientific thinking about dogs, or really the whole canis genus, rather: how they came to be, and our biological relationship with them. The book evaluates multiple intriguing angles of this subject.

A standout discussion in the book is on “village dogs” or those semi-domesticated versions of dogs that live alongside, but not quite “with” humans in third world countries. There is a chapter on the dogs and people on the island of Pemba, off the East African coast.

“Is that your dog?” I would ask. “Yes” would be the answer. “Do you feed your dog?” “Yes.” But “What do you feed the dog?” got a look of confusion. … Why would a Pemban say this was her dog? Because the dog was always in or around her yard. “Is that your tree [in the front yard]?” “Yes.” “Do you water the tree?” “We dump the dishwater there.” … Dog ownership was like yard tree ownership. Residents had nothing to do with the tree being there, but it was in their yard.

Our Pet Parasites

This quote has always stuck with me, because I think of coyotes much in the same way. Coyotes are a component of the landscape, just like the trees and the grass. Coyotes are omnipresent. We seldom see them, hear them more, and notice their scat often. To me, they are just another dog to be managed on the farm. Less our dogs than our house dogs or guardian dogs, but our dogs nonetheless. We control much of their environment, many of their choices and sometimes decide whether they may live or die. They consume resources that fall within our legal ownership, and possibly offer some benefits to us; with the scale often weighing further towards the side of cost than benefit. Just like many or most domestic dogs.

This argument doesn’t apply quite the same way with wolves, that’s a separate subject. Confusing them with wolves, people sometimes ask me if we are afraid of the coyotes. No way, they are little, around 35 pounds, the same size as our border collies. Documented incidents of coyotes causing direct injury to adult humans  in any given decade can almost be counted on one hand; they are generally quite afraid of people, so are of almost no consequence as a threat to us. Though I’ve read that in some places, they run in organized packs, more like wolves, here they don’t seem to. Their lifestyles are mostly solitary, hunting small prey and snacking on whatever they can find. They are just a medium sized scavenger, and a parasite. The same can be said of the border collies laying on our couch.

…and Survival Adversaries

All the same, of course coyotes do kill and eat livestock and domestic animals. They are more irritating than raccoons and weasels because they can kill bigger and more livestock than the little predators can and do. Losses of sheep, goats and calves are more common; and sometimes coyotes even manage to kill grown cows on a lucky day, like while one is giving birth. And this is what makes farmers learn to hate coyotes.

Anyone overly sympathetic with the coyote’s situation has never known the anguish of finding a fresh kill of pregnant ewes, some still thrashing, having been eaten alive, gut-first. The financial loss is painful enough. But the worst is knowing that our sheep are utterly dependent upon us for protection, and that we’ve failed them. The sheep aren’t like deer, lithe and carrying tiny single fetuses, unfenced and unhindered. If a predator catches a deer, we think, oh well, it was a 50/50 fight for who would win the survival game. Fair play. But not so with sheep. They are laden with selected-for heavyweight twins and triplets, bred down from sprinting bodies to waddling frames of meat-bearing cuts, and fattened with feedstuffs. They are trapped, physically and mentally, inside of fencing. And they are ours.

So when a coyote waltzes in and devours a sheep, it is like an act of war. The coyote is not only taking resources we own, he is attacking our most vulnerable, making the trespass feel ethically offensive as well as legally. We are nearly hard-wired to react to that; it seems to revert us to our most caveman instincts. Competing for the same resources, protecting our weak, and scrapping for the right to survive. So it’s no wonder that many old-school farmers wind up on a mission to kill the coyotes. All of them.

This is No Job for the Orkin Man

But the trouble is, you can’t. Newer research on these scavenger species has clued us in that it’s nearly impossible to extinguish them. Their populations are highly flexible and dynamic, and completely niche- and resource-driven. If you remove one coyote, that just opens up a space for another one to take his place. If the regional population starts to dwindle, creating unclaimed territories and freeing up resources, the bitches produce more pups to fill the gap. The more selection pressure they face, they more they rise to the challenge and increase reproduction. So the last thing we want to do is go on a killing spree; because the population responds exactly opposite to what we’d prefer. We kill one coyote, we might get three more vying for his spot in return.

Indeed this notion was confirmed by a man I met who ran guardian dogs with his sheep, and generally left well-behaved coyotes alone. He had gone a long time with no sheep losses. But one day, he saw a coyote outside his fence, minding its own business. He had his gun, and for no particular reason, he shot it. The next week? Sheep kills from a new coyote that slipped past the guardian dogs into this “new” territory! He vowed never to make that mistake again.

So what to do with the clever devils? I’ve concluded that all we can do is manage them, and view them just like our “other” dogs. With all dogs, we carefully structure their environment to get the results we want. We use tools to prevent them from being naughty. We train them using operant conditioning techniques to increase desirable behavior, and decrease unwanted acts. And we work with the ones we have, and only remove one from the population if it’s truly not working out. All of our dogs have the potential to learn to injure or kill livestock, the coyotes are no different than any other farm dog on that point.

Physical Techniques

These are the more obvious tactics. Plain old fences have some value, because I believe coyotes don’t like to be caught between a rock and a hard place. Or rather, areas with only one exit, or a dicey exit. Coyotes can climb, dig and squeeze with ease, over, under and through fencing. The above-mentioned Coppinger book has an amusing tale about some research coyotes they worked with, which were letting themselves out of their chain link kennels at night to frolic, and putting themselves away in the morning before any people showed up. Researchers were none the wiser until one day little footprints were revealed in snow. So there is almost no way to prevent these petite dogs from entering a space if they really want to get in. But they are no dummies. If the entry is awkward, so will be the exit, and they sense they are vulnerable going into closed spaces and getting preoccupied with killing and eating in there.

We have a narrow channel of land between our house and our fenced pastures, dead-ended on one side by a steep cliff up to the road. This is where our orchard and gardens lie, and also our poultry pen. And though theoretically it’s a “safe zone” where the coyotes could travel if they chose, there is little indication they ever go there. Neither do deer. I think the blind alley makes them wary: people and house on one side, guardian dogs and fencing on the other, only one way out. They just steer clear of it. Many acquaintances I know with small acreages cleaved up by woven wire fencing report coyotes don’t come in. So I believe good fencing can go a long way towards making a pasture a low-priority choice for a coyote’s main hunting activities.

Hotwire is even better- no dog likes getting shocked, it terrifies the bejeebers out of them. One friend told me about a coyote stuck in her cow pasture for a couple of days, having gotten shocked on the way in, he was scared to leave. But it has to be well-placed hotwire, or electrified wire mesh, because coyotes are smart enough to leap over or slide under a single strand.

And, of course, guardian dogs have solid statistics backing them: they are a major coyote deterrent. Even breeds which are not traditionally guarding breeds, but are good-sized and bark a lot in defense of their home, like good ol’ Labrador Retrievers, can make coyotes move along. But true guardian dogs that can live out with the livestock and make a habit of patrolling perimeters and warning away approaching people and animals are even better. Here again, coyotes are not stupid: their instincts advise them to avoid physical brawls, which risk injury that could lead to impaired hunting ability, or infection and death. They won’t fight for frivolous reasons. And they are respectful of other dogs’ territories, be it coyote peers or domestic dogs.

Teaching

Beyond physical means of influencing coyote behavior, they are pretty smart, and thus highly trainable dogs. I try to just think of this as any other dog training exercise: that we have to teach them not to go for the livestock, and to stay away from our fence lines. This is not unlike teaching our dog Maggie not to steal roasts off the kitchen counter. I rarely witness her doing it, but when I do, she’s going to hear about it! We do occasionally “catch” one of our resident coyotes lurking at the fence and eyeballing the sheep. One day, one was barking his fool head off at Bronte, our big LGD. Other days, they might just be rodent hunting, but starting to edge closer than we want them to be.

For one, I try to teach them presence: that they may never know when I might sneak up and surprise them. At night, if the farm dogs are barking, I’ll often get up and go talk to them outside, just to remind the coyotes, I’m here, and I’m keeping an eye on you. If there is really a ruckus of barking, I’ll walk all the way down to the pasture, and loop around so my scent trail is everywhere. Most wildlife have a funny mental characteristic in that they don’t seem to recognize humans when we’re on a vehicle, like a tractor or an ATV. This is a good way to sneak up on them and get way into their flight zone before stepping off the vehicle to reveal oneself. It scares the heck out of them every time!

And, of course, there is the gun. We tend to shoot at them with a small rifle- it’s not ear splittingly loud to bother the neighbors, and the goal is not to actually hit the coyote and injure or kill it. The intention is to give him a good scare, having shots land close enough to him that he hears the bullets hitting the dirt. This increases coyotes’ flight distance, because they quickly realize even if a human is far away, he has the capability of shooting those magic bullets too close for comfort.

This is not a bleeding-heart, naïve diatribe. Despite our best efforts, some coyotes will keep pushing in, taking livestock anyway, either out of boldness or desperation. Once they learn it, it’s hard to unlearn, and more livestock will be lost in the process of trying. Those dogs usually have to be culled. Beyond their own bad habits, they’ll teach their pups how to do it, and also pass on those boldness genes. But once an individual is surgically removed from the population, the new guy that takes his place is a clean slate, ready to train.

Our Coyotes

We have a lot of them here. At night, I can sit still in the yard and listen to them sing across the valley, and pick out the individual voices of at least a dozen in the immediate neighboring pastures, and more in the distance. They surround us. When we first moved here and started to interact with the resident coyotes, they had learned to come darn close to people. A no-shooting equestrian park nearby, lots of “pet people” and a huge commercial tree farm with day laborers gave the wild dogs too much exposure to non-threatening humans. If we’d chase them, they’d only run off a short distance, then turn back and stare at us, testing the edges of the territory and pushing them as far inward as they could. Not anymore. Now if they even spot us in the yard, they get the move on and disappear into the woods. They are hard to photograph because they hang back so much. We have two that hunt mice every morning in the hayfield next door, but they stay well off the fence and maintain a very large flight zone from us. Good dogs.

These good-dog coyotes, the ones that keep the rodent population down, steer clear of people, and leave our livestock alone are welcome to stay and we don’t bother them. They keep other coyotes out of the niche, other coyotes who have the potential to become bad-dog coyotes. Just like “our” trees and grass, our coyotes are just another element of nature to be managed in balance with the domesticated life on the farm.

So, anyway, this guy had none of the puffy head weirdnesses, just swelling beneath the jaw (not up high on the nose bridge and ears), and it felt much firmer. Seemed like textbook bottle jaw to me, at least from what the textbooks describe!

Only bottle jaw is most associated with barber pole worm in the South in the summer, or liver flukes carried by snails, and we have a meager-to-none snail population here. Bottle jaw is really just a manifestation of anemia, where fluid accumulates in the low point of the head; so it isn’t necessarily caused by worms. It’s just that a heavy worm load is one thing that can cause anemia, which in turn causes bottle jaw. 

Treatment and Recovery

I didn’t bother even trying to do a new fecal exam on him. For one, liver flukes apparently don’t show up well in fecal floats. Two, any worm load is too much worm load for a sheep struggling with anemia. So, I just de-wormed him, again. He’d been de-wormed once in late summer, which would normally be plenty. But sometimes some animals just succumb, so better safe than sorry.

The withdrawal time on oral de-wormers is short (as compared to drug injections); this one is seven days, so not a big concern for a lamb headed to the butcher channel. Which is where he eventually went, but not for several weeks after treatment. 

I gave him a series of vitamin B shots and Nutridrench doses, for good measure. Bottle jaw is serious, after all. I’ve read that what fluid accumulation you are seeing on the outside can be compounded drastically on the inside; concentrated in the lungs, where it’s a most worrisome trigger for pneumonia. He appeared chipper and ate robustly, and the swelling faded within days. So, fine. One sheep out of fifty, he recovered, I made note of it, and moved on.

Here’s a normal sheep head, for comparison- usually the jawline is clearly visible and rises up from the lip line, not down.

The Livers Speak

A few days later, I got liver assay results on six butcher lambs. Lo and behold, four too high in cobalt, two more on the edge. Added to an adult cull earlier in the year that was too high in it. And all too low in iron. Both imbalances can cause, guess what? Anemia.

I had already tried to correct for the low iron earlier in the year by changing my mineral supplement mix, but clearly I need to do more correcting. I had been using half Cattlemen’s and half Sweetlix. Then, diluted down with 1/6 salt and 1/6 dolomite; to cut back on the copper; and because I thought I was doing fine on all the other ingredients to where it would be ok to dilute. Not so. I’ve switched to half Cattlemens and half American Stockman, no dilution. This is the best I can do to try to bring up the iron, reduce the cobalt, and keep copper and zinc where I’d like them (though, IMO, nothing I’ve found has enough zinc).

I think it may still not be an ideal mix, but it’s closer. I’m getting pushed back in the direction of needing to possibly do something totally custom. I’ll give it a go for several months and see where we sit in the spring if I have more livers to sample then.

What’s most fascinating about all this is that I was originally obsessed with trying to avoid additional supplemental iron, because our forage tests insanely high in iron. I was worried about it tying up other minerals. So, go figure, somehow they aren’t synthesizing the iron that is measurable in the forage. I’m starting to become convinced that testing livers is even more important than testing grass!

His fiancée-to-be loves lambs, he explained, so he really wanted to work one into the proposal. His plan was to get her to go hunting for a Christmas tree in the woods, and at some point, they would arrive at a pre-determined and pre-decorated place where Nathan could flip on some Christmas lights and lead out the ring-bearing lamb (supervised by his brother, hiding in the trees) and pop the question.

This time of year, it’s hard to find small lambs, most of them are grown and gone by fall. Serendipitously, I had one bottle lamb from the spring that stayed little. He’s tame, friendly, lug-able, and clean compared to a lot of my woolier sheep. So off he went in a dog crate with Nathan’s brother, Josh, for an overnighter with the proposal scheming crew. I sent along a dog ex-pen, water bucket, bag of hay, some shavings and a lead rope and collar. Pretty much all a travelin’ lamb needs.

And here they are, the adorable trio. I love how Nathan’s knee is damp!

Like all tame lambs, this one’s a talker, but the Proposal Crew reported that he cooperated and was quiet when needed, not causing any suspicious noises during the hiding phase. Judging by the wisp of buttercup in his mouth, I suspect he used the down time as an opportunity to snack. All in a day’s work for a sheep, I guess.

Congratulations to Nathan and Cristen, what a fun day to remember, and thanks for sharing pictures with us! Cute, huh?

The Lamb Board was established in 2002, and has been investing significant effort in branding lamb (not the hot iron kind, but rather the marketing kind) to help it make a comeback. Given the beef industry’s powerful Beef, it’s what’s for dinner campaign, at some point, somebody must have realized lamb needs the same marketing oomph. Plus some, because it’s so far off the radar of most Americans, we can’t just encourage them to eat more of it; we really need to re-introduce Americans to the meat to get them to start eating it.

Of course this initiative needs to be paid for. So a law was introduced to tax sheep at the time of slaughter. It’s called the Lamb Checkoff. The beef industry also has a Checkoff program.

I think I had some vague awareness of this, but being a small producer and not that long in the lamb industry, it wasn’t really on my radar screen. Until last week, that is, when I received a letter from the Lamb Board Compliance Department in the mail personally addressed to me, reminding me of my responsibilities as a “First Handler.” I’m not sure how they even knew little ol’ me existed; except perhaps that since I’d joined the American Sheep Industry Association, they may cross- reference members of that against those who are paying the Checkoff.

I had to call the Compliance Department because I found the literature a little confusing, and I also wanted to know how it applies to small producers. The documentation is written with the assumption that the reader is handling hundreds or thousands of sheep, so it’s hard to see how it applies for people selling less than a dozen sheep at a crack. Here’s what I learned.

How It Works

It’s an interesting tax in that everyone who handles a lamb or sheep is required to “pay forward” some of the tax to the next handler (buyer). The final assessment is always due to the Lamb Board at the time the animal is slaughtered. So, each time we sell a sheep, we are supposed to pay forward to the buyer a fee of $.005 per pound. If that buyer were to later sell the sheep to someone else, he also, in turn, would pay this same tax to his buyer. And you can see how, if any of these handlers had added weight to the sheep while it was in their possession, their tax would go up a little bit from whatever was paid to them when they bought it. Thus each person who is making money on the sheep and “adding value” has to pay a small fee, which will eventually go to the Lamb Board.

The collection from all sellers “passes through” all buyers. When the animal is finally slaughtered, the $.005/pound fee is due, along with a flat fee of 30 cents per head. For most sheep and lambs, the fee will be a little less than a dollar. “First Handlers” are defined as people who buy sheep for slaughter, or a sheep producer who markets sheep directly to consumers. First Handlers are the ones who will submit the Lamb Checkoff payment, since they own the sheep at time of slaughter. First Handlers are required to remit Checkoff fees monthly. If they are late, a 2% late payment is compounded monthly.

Seems simple when you consider the role of large scale producers and meat packers. But I had some questions about how this applies to my situation.

Seed Stock Application

The fee applies to all sheep, whether they are butcher lambs or seed stock which is culled later in life. So when I sell breeding animals, I should be paying forward to the buyer the $.005/pound fee. And if I cull a breeding animal in my possession, I should pay the final fee of $.005/pound plus 30 cents Lamb Checkoff fee to the Lamb Board. If I purchase breeding stock from others, technically I should be discounting the Lamb Checkoff fee from their sale price ($.005/pound), or otherwise requiring the seller to remit this fee to me.

USDA Slaughter and Auctions

If I have lambs butchered at a USDA facility, and then market the meat by the cut, I would be considered the First Handler in this case, and would remit the Checkoff fee at the time of slaughter. Apparently also at auctions, the auction house typically does the accounting to acknowledge the Checkoff fee being paid forward from seller to buyer. I’m sure they do this just to be sure nobody is breaking the law under their roof, by “forgetting” to pay the fee, purposely or inadvertently.

So, seed stock, USDA by-the-cut sales, and auction transactions are pretty straightforward.

Non-USDA Direct Market

Here is where it gets a little interesting. We know that there is a growing market for direct sales, where the lamb buyer either does their own slaughter, or has the animal butchered at a local custom butcher. This is where all my butcher lamb sales go, because I don’t have easy access to a USDA slaughter facility. But the Lamb Checkoff law doesn’t really account for this, at least not yet.

In theory, the law requires that these buyers pay the Checkoff at the time of slaughter, because they are the First Handler in this situation. But of course, we can’t expect these types of buyers to even know what the Checkoff is, let alone be motivated to pay it. The Checkoff is designed around the concept that people in the sheep industry are motivated to fund it, because it’s there helping us market our product. And they are subject to enforcement and auditing if they are of large enough scale to be under scrutiny. But certainly the Seattleites who buy a single lamb from me can’t be expected to send a check for sixty five cents to the Lamb Board.

Paying in Good Faith

In theory, I have no obligation to do anything about this odd loophole, because the law says the First Handler must pay the fee, period. But, one could conclude that the right thing to do is to go ahead and collect the Checkoff from the buyer, or include it in the sale price, and remit it on their behalf.

I am considering doing this, because I leverage materials from the Lamb Board quite a bit in  my own marketing. I am honestly wowed by the Lamb Board’s stuff- gorgeous pamphlets and artwork with an early American Way Out West feel, emotion-invoking Celebrate With American Lamb byline sentiments, not one but three slick websites with recipes, health facts, and where-to-buy info for lamb buyers, and a well-monitored Facebook and Twitter campaign. The past is the past, but today I would say the Lamb Board is giving the Beef Producers a run for their money in effective advertising campaigns.

At least, to Americans. The only thing lacking in their campaign, IMO, is helping the ethnic market locate lamb and have it butchered it the way they want it done. Since we know the ethnic market is currently where the biggest growth lies, I feel we could be doing more to reach these people and make lamb available for their needs and cooking styles. We are so busy trying to convince Americans to rediscover lamb that we may be forgetting the biggest potential market that’s right under our noses. That is, the people who already eat lamb, and a lot of it; but who don’t know how to find us very well, and have a hard time understanding the way we move food animals through the system and the laws involved.

Lamb Checkoff literature claims that their campaign is generating an additional $44.14 in lamb sales for every Checkoff dollar invested. I’m not a marketing expert, but I believe that 44:1 is considered a very good ROI for advertising.

When to Pay

I mentioned that the Checkoff remittance is due monthly, and this was my final question. I estimate that this year, about 1700 liveweight pounds of lamb and mutton will enter the meat channel from my farm, coming from  about twenty-two animals. That adds up to a fifteen dollar Lamb Checkoff fee. But in any given month, it might only be $.65, if I sell one small lamb to a local buyer midsummer. Surely it doesn’t make sense for me to send such a tiny check; it doesn’t warrant the stamp on the envelope, or the processing time at the Lamb Board office.

The Compliance Department representative agreed, and said in this case, just use my judgment, send it once a year, or whatever makes sense. And no 2% late fee required. He asked that I just cross out the “assessment remitted during the month of…” line and write “… year of…” instead, so they can keep accurate records of the income.

So, there you have it, the Lamb Checkoff explained!