We’ve been busy! We just got a huge shipment of hay in – fortunately, right before over an inch of rainfall. Last year, our entire second cutting was destroyed by rain. We buy hay from a neighbor, and we’d already contracted for it, so we were out the entire cost.
This year, we bought hay from the same neighbor, but we managed to get it cut and baled earlier in the year. Although it didn’t all fit in the barn, it’s still a great feeling to have most of the hay safely under cover. We should have enough for the entire winter.
We’ve also finished sorting most of our ram lambs into their winter corrals. They all received their second vaccinations, too. We had planned to work the ewes again and look at all of the ewe lambs, but it’s been raining heavily, and the sheep are wet. Not only is it no fun to work wet sheep, but vaccinating them while wet increases their chances of infection at the injection site. It’s supposed to get warm and sunny again later this week, so we’re planning to do them then.
I’ve had some requests for more info on our sheep selection procedures. I have always used a selection index to choose who to keep and who to cull. I have, in my mind, the ideal Black Welsh Mountain sheep. I also have a list of characteristics that I consider important. This list can change or shuffle every year, but it includes things like teeth, legs, body style, temperament, wool quality, and horn shape, as well as objective measures like birth weight, fleece length, and average daily gain.
Each sheep is graded on a scale of 1 to 5 against each characteristic, and these grades are added to give a final score. Weights are converted to a numeric score. A 5 is perfect, while 1 is the worst score.
The overall lowest scores in the flock are often those eliminated during my first culling pass. In years past, the range from best sheep to worst was very wide, so culling was easy. Now, most of the index scores are very close and culling comes down to which individual characteristics we consider most important that year. This time, I’m focusing on the three characteristics that affect our income the most: fleece length, fleece weight, and average daily gain.