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Additional Information on Sheep Nutrition

Now, from the standpoint of various feedstuffs that can be utilized for sheep. Sheep can utilize just about any kind of feed. We just need to look at substitution values using corn as the standard.

Barley has about 90% of the value. Oats 80. Wheat is about 1 to 1. However, when it comes to feeding wheat to sheep, we want to make sure that we add, the general recommendation is that, no more than 50% of the grain in the diet be from wheat. You can feed 100% wheat, but it does take some management because the starch in wheat is more readily, undergoes microbial breakdown more readily, than the other starches and so it's easy to get digestive disturbances.

Urea as a nonprotein nitrogen source can be used in sheep diets. It’s not widely used, but it is possible from time to time where feeding urea might be a consideration. And the general recommendations for the use of urea would be 1% or less of the total diet or 3% of the concentrate portion and we don’t want to exceed 1/3 of the total nitrogen in the diet. Definitely, we don’t want to have urea in diets of young lambs because we need fully-functional rumens to get utilization out of urea. You wouldn’t want to have urea in the feedstuffs that ewes were eating if the lambs could gain access to it. When it comes to feeding urea, we want to introduce it gradually, it takes some adaptation time, generally 2-3 weeks, and it becomes very important that the feed be properly mixed to avoid any problems.

From the standpoint of processing feeds for lambs, it varies, but, generally, we recommend that whole grains for sheep. We don’t need to process grains for sheep. Why? Because the cost will not pay for increased utilization. If you can get the processed feed for the same price that you can whole, then, processing would be the way to go. But if you have to pay extra, it’s not going to pay for the increased utilization that you will get as is the case, say, in beef cattle feeding where we do need to process to get increased utilization. Now, there are some times when it might be feasible to process grain for sheep and this is especially true with young lambs for creep diets, getting them started out, and also where we want to prevent sorting. Say, for instance, we were mixing ground limestone into a mix, especially with pelleted, and sheep are very selective. We would want to probably process to keep the sheep from sorting out the ground limestone from the pellet, so we would probably want to add it to some kind of a pellet to avoid it. Processing sometimes is necessary.

From the standpoint of growing finishing lambs, as I said earlier, we can get lambs to a desirable market weight on forage alone. Depending upon the desired performance, forages can be a major part of the growing program. In many cases, however, lambs are fed in the feedlot on high concentrate diets. But, in some situations, feeding forages solely can get lambs up to market weight without any problems. We can get them to an acceptable market weight and we can get them to an acceptable quality grade solely on forages. Of course, bottom line, lambs fed on concentrates will have a higher average daily gain and greater feed efficiency.

From the standpoint of comparative differences, grazing habits, comparing sheep to cattle and goats, sheep have different grazing patterns and preferences than cattle, that’s why sometimes we see some benefits of mixed species grazing. Sheep are able to utilize more forbes and browse. Goats are even much more selective in the use of grasses, forbes and browse. And plus, goats have something that sheep aren’t able to have and that is the use of the bipedal stance or getting up on their hind feet to obtain specific portions of high growing plants, to especially browse. But, I think the bottom line is, taking advantage of these comparative differences allows us to utilize mixed species grazing and get better utilization out of our feedstuff because of knowing these differences in grazing habits.

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