Bottle Babies

[DaisyDo]

I am interested to hear different opinions and/or experiences regarding bummer/bonus lambs.

In the past we have kept our flock fairly small, no more than 20 ewes. We believe that good moms breed good moms, so we have only kept replacement ewes out of those ewes that we consider good moms. It is my opinion, that because of this we have had very few bottle babies.

Over the last couple years we have let our flock grow and this year we purchased some registered hamp ewes, so naturally I am a little nervous.

How do you deal with bummers? Do you prefer milk machines, bucket, or bottles? What is your criteria for culling or keeping ewes? Do you anticipate a certain percentage of bummers?

Looking forward to your feedback.

[EmsoffLambs]

We usually only end up with one, maybe two bottle lambs a year lambing out 40-50 ewes. For just one, I usually end up bottle feeding it. However if I do end up with more, I prefer a lamb bar bucket. It is a huge time saver as you only have to fill it once a day. Lambs grow well on the free choice cold milk replacer.

I strongly prefer the Pipestone milk replacer over all others I have tried.

As far as culling factors for ewes, any ewe that rejects a lamb would be gone. I have no tolerance for ewes that won't raise their own babies fortunately, in 17 years lambing, I have only had that occur once. A ewe that is fed well but doesn't have enough milk for her lambs is also gone. Aside from that, it comes down to quality. Since we are raising show lambs, a ewe that does no raise show quality lambs is moved out. We do also sell good ewes every year simply to make room for our keeper ewe lambs. These ewes are normally our older genetics, often very good proven mothers, but since we have to keep moving forward, they are sold.

[Polymom]

With Polypays, we often have triplets and quads so we have a lot of bottle lambs each year.  When we had lots of free labor (children at home) we used bottles and supplemented the triplets and quads while leaving them all with the mother.  Now we pull the extras and put them on nipple pails, usually divided by size and/or age.  This has worked really well for us.  We will still use a few bottles if a lamb needs a little extra supplementing while we are waiting to decide whether to pull the lamb or leave it with mom. 

Ewes are shipped if they can't take care of twins.  When we had fewer ewes, we put up with more issues but with 45 ewes, if they cause trouble they are gone.  Someone said once that 10% of the sheep cause 90% of the problems so get rid of the 10%.