United Suffolk Sheep Association

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April/May 2004

It’s the ninth of March.  Only four more ewe lambs to go, and I’ll go back to my normal life.  I’m not sure which I look forward to the most: the first lamb or the last one.  My days of being a nursemaid are over, at least for another year.  We started lambing in the middle of January with our older ewes, then bred fifty ewe lambs for the middle of February.  This has been one of the easier and most rewarding lamb crops that we have had in many years.  Lambing the ewe lambs is always a challenge, something that I probably would not do, mainly because of the fatigue factor, after lambing out 250 older ewes.  My sons and all of the experts think that this is a must, so I go along with their thinking.  For those of you who lamb ewe lambs, you must remember that they are still very young and are not fully grown out; they are not sure about being mothers at times.  They should always get special care after they have had their lambs, and maybe more importantly, after their lambs have been taken off of them. 

            I always feel that one of the most interesting parts of a magazine or newspaper is the letters to the editor.  I congratulate John Hall on his long, interesting letter in the February-March issue of our Suffolk News.  I realize that writing letters is a thing of the past, maybe a lost art in this modern, fast-paced world.  Perhaps if more breeders would take time to express their feelings like Mr. Hall did, the business of raising purebred livestock, in all species, would be far more important and profitable.  I feel that we have forgotten the power of the pen and putting words on paper. 

            I’m sure that Mr. Hall is a man of wisdom and vision, and while I appreciate his remarks, I do not agree with some of his thoughts.  As someone who has raised sheep all of my life, I have probably had my hands on more sheep than most of you good readers will ever see.  I’ll throw out my opinion on his written thoughts. 

            I feel that many new breeders make huge mistakes going to our great sales and trying to pick out foundation yearling ewes to start their flocks.  They go to these big sales and spend hundreds of dollars on one ewe when they could go to a breeder and probably buy 5 for the same price.  Plus, they could get the knowledge of the established breeder and see how be raises them.  While I’m all for the big sales, it can be a nightmare, as Mr. Hall states, when these ewes are turned out to pasture.  He states that these great-framed sheep just seem to melt.  The reason for this is that many have never eaten a blade of grass before in their life, and it’s a very difficult adjustment.  Mr. Hall tells of growing up with a dairy background having worked with Holstein cattle.  For those of us who have raised and milked Holstein cows in our youth, we would be shocked to see what has happened to this great breed.  Most of these cattle are now raised in huge herds in total confinement.  If these cattle were turned out on a great pasture field, they would run and jump, kicking their heels, eat a few blades of grass, then run back to the confinement area, hoping to get back to their normal feed.  These cattle would do just as the sheep; they could no longer gain weight on the pasture because of the great environment change.  The same thing would happen to a bunch of gilts if they were taken of our great hog barns and put on dirt. 

            Today, the life span of a Holstein cow in these huge dairy operations is three years old, and then she is burned out.  Twenty-five percent of the beef being sold in this country is Holstein cows and steers that are fed out.  These cows are merely identified by a number on their neck.  Registrations are not nearly as popular.  77 percent of cow herds surveyed had less than 10 percent of their cows registered.  Sort of like many of our wether breeders, they could care less about registering them.  In fact, some herds were using Jersey bulls to downsize their cows, making them tougher and getting more butterfat.  While on the subject of these cows, they need to pump 40 gallons of blood through their udders to produce one gallon of milk.  Hopefully, these great herds of 50 to 150 cows that are still owned by great breeders who take care and pride in their cows can survive against these giant factory herds.  I got all of this information from one of our vet college students whose uncle had the top producing cow herd in Michigan.  His herd of 100 cows was producing 29,000 pounds of milk per cow, per year: some difference from when I was young.

            Yes, I know that this is a sheep magazine, and I did get carried away with the cows, but I was just trying to make a point of how things have changed in the livestock world.  Back to Mr. Hall: he is disappointed that we are not publishing the sire summary in the Suffolk News.  He writes that we all know that one breeder dominated the performance data.  I never looked at it this closely, but I know that out of the 14 to 15 pages it took to get this information, five or six breeders had the majority of rams entered.  Mr. Hall must understand that most purebred registry associations are working on a shoestring.  We can look at some or most of the beef breeds and, of course, the pig breeds, and see that they have cut their staffs in half, if not more.  My question is why aren’t these breeders paying for advertisements in our magazine?  Purebred associations must show a profit to keep going.  Our Suffolk association is no different.  It’s time that we get our heads out of the sand.  If we have great producing sheep, we want to sell.  Why not spend a few dollars and get our information out by advertising in our magazine?

            Mr. Hall is applauding the job that Bob Kimm is doing with complete, balanced performing sheep.  He appreciates the job that Tom Slack is doing in Indiana, and he tells that Culham and Stevens P-80 is maybe one of the greatest sires of our time.  I just had a new breeder here yesterday telling me that of the great website that Bob Kimm had: everything from great pictures to long production records.  This fellow was so impressed that he could hardly wait for Bob’s production sale so that he could get started with Suffolks.  I’m not sure what Tom Slack does to promote his sheep.  Maybe he doesn’t need to.  Tom may well be the greatest salesman and promoter of his sheep of anyone whom I have ever known.  He has sold more stud rams in our state alone last year than anyone ever will.  In fact, my sons and I purchased two of his older stud rams last June to get our flock back to breeding middle-of-the-road sheep.  I’ve known Al Culham since he was a kid.  My son George graduated with him from Michigan State in the same year.  Al is a smart promoter.  I’m sure that publishing the sire summaries was his idea, and he used it to great advantage.  The moral if this story is that its time that we change our ways and start promoting our sheep.  Many, many breeders must lighten up and be thankful that they have the great privilege in our free society to be able to raise Suffolk sheep.  Maybe they should go out into the sheep barn and watch the lambs play and think about how lucky they truly are.

            The raising of sheep should be simple.  Why do we get the idea that its some complicated business?  We must set some goals and then write them down so that we’ll be able to follow them and know why we are raising sheep.  The sheep business should be a family project, a fun, profitable business, like it was for my father and now myself and my sons.  For those of you who doubt the money that can be made from the sheep business, I’ll bring you up to some positive facts.  The first of March, we sold the last of our lambs that were born on pasture last May.  Lambs weighing 143 pounds sold for $1.03 per pound while the lambs at 137 pounds sold for $1.30 per pound.  The remaining 83-pounders sold for $1.49 a pound.  We loaded on 20 commercial and purebred ewes that did not do their job; they weighed 243 and sold for 56 cents per pound.  This trailer-load of sheep grossed over $10,000.  These are the things that we should be talking about and stop concentrating on the negatives.  Why do we almost try to invent some dumb disease that sheep can have?  The job of the experts, sheep magazines, and sheep breeders is to promote sheep.  How else can we keep our packing plants going?  There are too few now. 

            I’ll end this article by telling you about the enjoyable experience that happens here most years.  We get Veterinary students from Michigan state to spend five or six days with us each year.  The students work in pairs.  My wife loves to have them, probably spoils them, and they live with us for a few days.  At the end of this period, we get two more.  I never try to educate them.  I leave this up to my sons, but I do explain to them why we have chosen the life of raising livestock and growing crops, a hard yet rewarding life.  I find this very interesting: out of the 1300 to 1400 applicants to get into veterinary school, only 110 are chosen each year.  In these girls’ class, there were only four young men.  Anyone that thinks that it’s a mans’ world had better forget it.  The young women of today are on the move.  They are filled with drive and ambition, to say nothing of their many talents. 

            Another fun guest from Troy, Missouri is Gay Reed, a retired school teacher.  Gay didn’t get here until late February because she had to sub for another teacher.  She had read my articles in the old Sheep Breeder and was here with a 4-H exchange group a few years ago and has been coming back ever since.  She is a ball of fire.  There is nothing that this lady has not done or cannot do.  It’s just fun to hear her talks of her many experiences.

            As I stated at the start, this has been one of the best and easiest lambing years that we have had in some time.  The disappointing thing was the large number of ram lambs.  It’s seldom that the number of rams and ewes are not even.  The veterinary students who were here on February 17^th when we were nearing the end of lambing recorded a lot of facts on the lambs and ewes.  Of the last 40 older ewes and a few of the ewe lambs, 70 percent of their lambs were rams.  My son George who records each ewe and their lambs at birth went back and checked his records and was surprised at the number of rams which was also at the 70 percent mark.  I’m sure that you all keep a lot of records, and hopefully, you check them when you pick your replacement ewes and rams.  I wonder how many of you mark down the most important thing: how quickly lambs got to their feet and were trying to nurse.  A good lamb will be up and ready to go in about 5 to 10 minutes.  Lambs that lie there like a pile of stones are not the ones that we want to keep.