After my last post I received a lot of questions regarding flock health. Yes, we have a very low loss number this year due partially to losing no sheep/lambs during lambing & to only losing one lamb as of mid-September. To begin, this has been the best lambing season & summer we’ve had in nine years! Shepherding is hard & a percentage of fatalities is customary, especially as your flock moves further away from double digits & closer to triple digits. We have been extremely fortunate this summer, without a doubt, but when someone asked me to share the number one thing I would recommend doing to maintain a healthy flock, I had to pause.
It’s not quite that easy. There’s preparation & there’s execution. After years of rough summers, the subsequent losses & the eventual development of management strategies that fit my flock, environment, philosophies & end goals I have reached a point of execution.
The preparation in a nutshell is: soil analysis, determining loose minerals & boluses, liver analysis, setting up rotational grazing, providing shelter & shade, ensuring that pasture & hay contain enough protein, selecting for specific traits, introducing outside genetics to further those traits, & developing trust with your flock in order to keep stress low. That’s the nutshell explanation.
Once these are done then it’s a matter of executing your strategies. So back to the original question, the most important thing for our flock is HEALTH CHECKS.
During the summer we will gather the flock every 2 weeks & every 3 weeks through beginning of October. This usually looks like June 1, 15, 30 July 12 July 25 August 9, 23 Sept 10, 24 Oct 9. It’s usually ten checks for us but when we started doing them the flock was smaller & less hardy. At that time, weekly health checks were needed to stay on course. Now there are times when the flock looks great & I want to skip them, but the insurance of health checks is too good to skip. I feel the investment of the time to complete 10 flock health checks yields excellent results.
At first it’s easy to see them as too time consuming, but in my experience they save me SO much time! I avoid all those time consuming emergencies. The nights spent nursing sick lambs & adults, the multiple day treatments you’re left scurrying to make time for, the odd hour vet visits that are expensive & oftentimes useless because the sheep is too far gone.
Yes, health checks help to avoid all this! Health checks shift your program from being intervention focused & reactive to being support focused & proactive. By doing health checks you can monitor the flock’s health before problems arise. You can learn to spot symptoms of impending problems & give the appropriate mineral, vitamin & herbal support.
This is even more critical if you are interested in raising your flock in a natural fashion with minimal chemical or pharmaceutical intervention. Then weekly or bi-monthly health checks are a must. Natural & herbal support is wonderful, but it is not equipped to pull a sheep back from the edge of death. Natural methods work, but my experience is that they take time & are best used in a holistic fashion. They are amazing in the right program, but they are seldom enough to save a very sick animal. Health checks & natural methods go hand in hand.
Our health checks are simple. We take FAMACHA scores on every sheep (reference an earlier blog post on helping lambs thrive for an instructional video) & we weigh every lamb. These two simple data points provide you a big picture. Let me explain quickly.
FAMACHA is self evident. If the eyelids are pale then it indicates anemia. There are multiple factors that can cause this, but the barberpole parasite is usually the culprit. When people tell me that their lamb ‘just died’ mid-summer it’s often due to the barberpole (especially if you are in a warm or humid region). I’ll have them say, but they were healthy two days ago, there weren’t any symptoms! This is the sad part. Your strongest lambs & sheep are usually the ones that won’t show symptoms. Yes, weaker sheep will sometimes get scours, or be lethargic, from a barberpole burden, but the strongest will often only have one symptom: white eyelids. It’s important to remember that lambs develop resistance to parasites in the first year of life. As young lambs they lack resistance & are particularly vulnerable to parasites.
This is why health checks help so much. If you see FAMACHA scores dropping you can offer the appropriate support BEFORE they are in danger. Everyone does things differently & operates with a different level of risk. I personally do not deworm a FAMACHA 3. I will instead refer to any previous notes on the sheep & then chose from this selection: BoSe, Vitamin B, Nutridrench or my own molasses & garlic drench, COWP, Chlorophyll, Red Cell, Vitamin A/D/E gel, a wormwood tincture & garlic bolus I make, or a couple of useful essential oils & fresh herbs.
I know these are words I use a lot, but comes down to: Support & intervention. By giving support I have dramatically limited my need to give intervention. I could not have achieved this without regular health checks & the notes I gather during those (keep notes!!). These health checks also help to provide objective data when it’s time to make selection & culling decisions.
The second data point is weight.
Initially I began weighing because I wanted an objective number to help me make culling decisions. I also was building a natural, grass fed lamb program & I needed to better understand ADG (average daily growth) patterns. I credit taking lamb weights with finally cracking the code on fast growth & getting the majority of my lambs to 75+ lbs in under 6 months. But weights turned out to not only be helpful for processing, but it became another holistic, preventative data point.
I’ve found that when I see a lamb’s growth begin to plateau or even worse drop, I can usually go looking for a culprit LONG before any symptom would appear. By giving a little extra support early, it’s usually only hay or extra protein, I ward off 1) an underweight lamb 2) any ailment that may have killed the lamb or been shared with the flock. By tracking weights I get a much clearer view of my lamb crop’s underlying health. I credit this with lowering our fatalities.
Does this mean health checks will guarantee that you won’t have any small lambs or you’ll be spared all ailments or deaths? No, but my experience is that it will so dramatically lower the rate of them that you’ll be a much much happier shepherd! Prevention is always preferably to intervention & treatment. I’ve found health checks to be the best tool to achieving that. So to answer the question: name the most important ONE thing. That’s it. Health Checks.
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