Questionable truths

This afternoon while listening to America’s Test Kitchen on Minnesota Public Radio, I heard Michael Moss, a reporter for the New York Times, discussing US Department of Agriculture research on meat animals. His story made me rethink a lot of the things we do as a matter of course on our farm.

Breeding for twins and triplets was one example. When a ewe has multiples babies, the chances of her having troubles during lambing increase with tangled twins, ruptured uterine ligaments because of the sheer mass of babies, and increased calcium demands which can lead to hypocalcemia and problems with labor, nursing, and as we learned this year, death. A single ten pound lamb is a big baby. Three six or eight pound lambs seems impossibly big and yet that is not unusual. Three big lambs probably reduces the number of years a ewe can be healthy and pregnant, just from wear and tear. I know that single lambs get to sale weight faster than twins and triplets, so why do I breed for multiple babies? Because I read thirty years ago that twins double your income per ewe. This is only true if those twins mostly graze and don’t require medical intervention.

Another “truth” that I learned when we first started lambing was that I should dock (or cut off) all our lamb’s tails so they wouldn’t get manure on their tails if they get diarrhea. The manure is inevitably followed by maggots which feast first on the manure and then on the lamb. We’ve had maggots only twice and both times it was horrifying.  They don’t dock lamb tails in the British Isles or in Europe, why do we do it here? I’ve always said that they don’t have the cold winters we have and thus don’t change their animals feed. When you change an animal’s feed, they sometimes get diarrhea. But when I look at it rationally, I’m not sure the if/ then aspects of the decision make sense.

Finally, we castrate all our male lambs. The lambs cry out when we dock their tails, but the females don’t stop eating or running around their pens. The tool that crushes their tailbones also crushes the nerves and theoretically, the pain is intense, but very short lived. When we castrate lambs however, the boys lay on the ground for the next few hours, obviously uncomfortable. We castrate the males so that our job is easier, we don’t have to worry about ram lambs getting the ewes pregnant before we are ready to breed them.

It would take a small change in management and a small improvement of our fences to keep the ram lambs away from the ewes in August and September. Two changes that we could make next lambing that might improve the well being of our lambs or might decrease it if they get diarrhea or if the ewes lamb in the depth of January cold when we weren’t expecting them to lamb for a number of weeks yet. 

What is the right decision? I don’t know, but it is something to think about.