[Jacob-list] Ewes Breeding Out of Season

[gordon johnston]

Hi Leigh

What a nuisance for you with your yearlings lambing now, as they will be completely out of sinc for next year too.

We like to restrict our lambing to one month only, April, so we run our rams with the ewes from Nov 5th to Dec 2nd, give or take a few days. We have not had problems with ewes not taking.
In August, when the lambs are 4 months old, we remove any entire ram lambs and rear them separately as they can potentially breed from this age (younger even if you are unlucky !). The ewe lambs we allow to stay with their mothers for a couple of weeks longer, partly as this helps the ewes to dry up gradually. We try to give the ewes a clear two months without lambs to build themselves up before breeding again. The male and female lambs are kept separately.
Once the ewes have been mated and the rams are removed to their own field, we put the ewe lambs back in with the ewes until we start the pre-lambing feed build-up, when they are separated again and live with our non-breeding 'old biddies'.  We have tried keeping the previous season's ewe lambs in with their mothers throughout the next lambing - this has mostly been successful, except that they eat too much, and there has been the occasional bit of bullying. Our reasoning for putting them in was that they could learn about lambs and lambing, as they would in a wild flock situation. Now they just have to watch through the fence !
The rams and ram lambs are kept separate from all the females (including the old biddies who would gladly get pregnant, to the detriment of their health !) at all times except the mating month.

You can bet your bottom Dollar that if you had tried to get your shearlings to lamb at this time of year you would have had no luck ! I think all you can say is that Jacobs tend not to breed out of season, but for practical management assume that they can and will.

Juliet in an extremely wet Scotland UK
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