BREEDING SHEEP Small Scale (my full system) Grass Fed Meat Sheep Farming Lambing Homesteading

🐑FREE (pdf) Pre-Breeding Checklist: https://bit.ly/breedingPREP
🥩Waitlist for lambs and meat: https://bit.ly/ShepherdessNWSLTR
🟠Sheep Mineral: https://bit.ly/4cmxilj
⭐Lambing Playlist: https://youtu.be/5qhe6NjQCHg?si=NW7SPMEUITSCF7JA

Questions/Topics:
0:00 My low-input Pasture Based Sheep Farm
2:29 Choosing the right ram for your flock
3:47 How many rams do I keep for breeding?
4:13 Can you breed a ram to his own ewes? (line-breeding)
5:14 Where I keep my ram when he is not breeding my ewes
6:20 Preparing ewes for breeding season
7:44 How old should a ewe be before breeding?
8:45 Chicken Lady says Hi!
9:26 Important minerals for sheep fertility
10:25 Beware of Selenium deficiency in sheep!
11:16 Flushing ewes before breeding
12:12 What month should you breed your ewes?
13:09 How long should I leave my rams with my ewes?
14:43: Why I changed from spring to late-winter lambing.

This video is an overview of my breeding program for my small flock of Dorper Sheep that I own and manage on 30 acres.

I discuss:
What I look for in a breeding ram.
How I prepare my ewe flock for breeding season,
Minerals that impact flock fertility.
And how to time a breeding season for a successful pasture based lambing.

For some context:
I farm on in Northeast Texas. Winters are mild and summers are extremely hot.

I raise purebred Dorper sheep as a primary enterprise. Dorper sheep are meat sheep. I also raise a small amount of stocker cattle for grass-fed beef.

Rainfall in my area is about 45 inches annually.

Which makes for the perfect environment in which to practice regenerative pasture-based farming.

My sheep farming system is very simple and low-input. Feed input besides pasture is reserved for emergencies. I do not perform any fancy broad-based pasture planting or cover cropping. My sheep eat whatever grows on pasture by itself, and the variety and quality of forage improves year over year with good pasture management.

I rotational graze my flock using electric fencing, moving my sheep to a new pasture paddock at a minimum of twice a week during the growing season. I consider this regenerative, rotational grazing system to be the real crown jewel of my operation and work… because it was really these practices that took our sheep and our land from simply surviving, to truly thriving.


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