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Replacement Ewes and Growing Lambs

From the standpoint of feeding and growing replacement ewes. I think we need to take a look at this because it is possible to breed ewes to lamb at one year of age. And from the standpoint of nutrition, we have to keep in mind that if we’re going to be using this management practice, we need to make sure that they reach a target weight of 65% of their mature weight at breeding. If we get a ewe up to 65% of her mature weight at around puberty, at breeding, we can be quite successful in breeding these ewe lambs to lamb at one year of age. Now, the nutritional requirements and the feed must not only account for fetal growth during that pregnancy for the first year of life, but also we must provide adequate nutrition so as to assure normal body growth occurs during the gestation and lactation period.

The next area I would like to offer a few points relates to feeding lambs. Previously, we’ve been pretty well addressing things as it relates to the ewe and feeding the ewe during the various stages of production. Now, I’d like to talk about feeding lambs. This shows the requirements for young, rapid growth potential lambs.

And if you look at the NRC for sheep, they list rapid growth potential and moderate, less than rapid growth potential on the requirements. I think when we look at today’s sheep production, most all sheep are in this rapid growth production. And if you look at when these tables of nutrient requirements were set forth, it was 1985, and so we are in dire need of some new tables. And so most sheep are performing at this level or greater and in many cases we probably need to be feeding more to accommodate for these increased needs of these higher more rapidly growing sheep that we have in today’s production systems.

This slide shows the same requirement for these young growing lambs, but based on a percentage of the diet.

And we see these younger lambs need a high energy diet, 20% TDN for a 22 lb lamb, 26% crude protein. And then as they go on further and are consuming a higher percent of a dry matter intake or a greater amount of dry matter intake, we do decrease the protein percentage and the TDN is about 78%.

Some specifics as it relates to lamb nutrition. The first one I want to talk about is creep feeding lambs. And by definition, creep feeding relates a dozen other species supplying feed to, in this case, suckling lambs. Why consider creep feeding? Well, a couple of factors. In fact, three that I want to talk about. One is increased gain that can occur from creep feeding lambs. Lambs while they're suckling the ewe use the feed much more efficiently. And the overall goal should be to get lambs marketed at a younger age by creep feeding while they’re still on the ewe.

As we look at expected feed conversion, we see that lambs weighing from 40-60 lbs at 6-10 weeks of age are very efficient in converting feed to gain, that’s 3.5:1, that's 3.5 lbs of feed, 1 lb of gain.

And this maintains itself until they’re upwards of 100-120 lbs where it gets less efficient, but that young lamb while its suckling is very, very efficient in feed conversion. Older lambs aren’t nearly as efficient, but those young lambs during creep feeding, that’s why, one of the reasons why, we want to creep feed is because of this good feed conversion. Some considerations in creep feeding lambs. Number one we want to get those lambs started to eat the feed as early as possible, so we need to provide a very palatable feed. And some other things of concern would be health management. We have certain vaccinations that we want to ensure that have occurred. Vaccinating for enterotoxemia, these are the clostridial organisms, type C and D, in particular. Then, we want to make sure that we are taking concern about possibility of coccidiosis and so we’d use something like an ionophore or a coccidiostat that’s approved for sheep, Bovatec. Then, we also want to make sure our calcium and phosphorus ratios are properly in order so we don’t have urinary calculi. And then, finally, we want to prevent acidosis and make sure that we don’t make any changes so that we get acidosis in these lambs.

Looking at some data on what kind of feeds do lambs like to eat. We see from this table, that looking at consumption by two week periods of lambs that corn and soybean meal are, especially soybean meal, is a very much preferred feedstuff of young lambs.

And so one of the ways to gets lambs started to eat on a creep diet is to offer a feed that has a high percentage of soybean meal and this will ensure they will get started to eat a much earlier age. Often times, we think sweet feeds lambs really like, but, looking at this data, they really didn’t have a strong preference for sweet feed early on. It was no greater than bran. And so sometimes, we don’t actually know what sheep actually want to eat, but they do definitely like soybean meal.

The other category of lamb that we sometimes deal with in feeding is the older lamb, lambs that are weaned at 4 months or even greater. They are older and, from that standpoint, then they have a differing requirement. And shown in this table are the NRC requirements for these 4-7 month lambs on a daily nutrient requirement and then, also, as I showed previously, on a nutrient concentration of the lamb diet.

These lambs, we don’t need quite the high energy concentration, 76% would be kind of the typical, with about 12-14% crude protein in the diet. Keep in mind though that calcium:phosphorus ratios are pretty closely maintained at that 2:1 level as shown by the amounts provided.

From the standpoint of lamb feeding, methods that are used. We can feed lambs using self feeders or we can go through processes where we actually hand feed lambs. And the most common method that’s utilized would be self feeding because it’s less labor intensive, but you can do an adequate job of hand feeding lambs and get them to perform quite well. Types of rations that are normally used when self feeding is utilized would be concentrates plus hay or a complete ground mixed ration or a pelleted ration. Many of the lamb feeding programs that involve self feeding lambs involve self feeders that are primarily whole corn and then a pellet that contains the protein supplement and any of the other minerals and things that need to be added. That’s pretty much the kind of the standard that’s utilized.

From the standpoint of lamb feeding, very much similar things that we are concerned with from the standpoint of health concerns. We have enterotoxemia, making sure that the lambs have been vaccinated, provide problems with enterotoxemia. Urinary calculi, we need to watch and make sure that we have adequate calcium and phosphorus, our ratios are maintained. Coccidiosis, utilizing Bovatec. And then, watching for any cases of polioencephalomalacia that might occur. The goal of any good lamb feeder is to keep death losses at a minimum and one of the standards we see in the industry is 2% or less is a very common goal.

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