So its taken about a week to accumulate enough snow to equal about 3/4" on the frozen ground. Just the day before Thanksgiving it was still 45 degrees. This next week the highs are single digits. I'm not ready for the extreme cold. But if its going to be this cold, we should have a lot more snow! The snow insulates our water and sewer lines and helps keep plants roots from drying out and dying.
I've not much to report with the sheep. Breeding groups have been done for awhile. The clean up rams are back in with the rest of the boys and its now the long wait for lambs to arrive.
I've hit a wall so to speak with the sheep. I absolutely love my two breeds. I love everything about them. Their diversity, their uses, their personalities, their wool, their amazing traits. I have however realized that for the most part, those who keep these two breeds keep them for their wool and not really from a production standpoint. And I want both dang it!! Most meat breeds are bred and selected for with
EBV's (estimated breeding values), mothering abilities, milk, lambing ease, lambing growth etc. There is no data for my two breeds as they are used for wool here mostly in the US. Granted
BFLs are supposed to be the premier crossing ram onto hill and upland ewes. Its gaining popularity here in the US, but still not at the speed I was hoping for. They are known as a wool breed here as the wool is in high demand. I"m doing my part in compiling data, as like me, my neighbors who raise meat breeds select their next replacement animals based on data like lamb weight, average daily gain (or grass raised), weaning weight, and not so much on emotions or personalities (although temperament is highly sought after). With the Shetlands and
BFLs its more of a 'crap shoot' with breeding pens. yes you can breed for structure, you can breed for wool qualities and mothering qualities but not to the degree you can with the cattle. The cattle seem to have a better predictability when having used their
EPDs/
EBVs for the past several decades.
Shetlands are mainly used for their wool. Some people just keep them as pets, some actually eat them too (and boy are they excellent tasting!). I guess perhaps blogs with the sheep folk are more 'friendly posts that are more happy-go-lucky', which is fine, but it seems the moment I talk about how no sheep is perfect and trying to improve my flock all these red flags go up and people start coming down on me for trying to improve the breed or make them something they are not.
I"m not doing that.
Read that sentence again!
I was on the phone for three hours on Friday with a friend from Colorado. He, like myself, is in the same two breeds and had agreed that its hard to talk production or stocking rates or
EBVs with the majority of our fellow breeders as most do not have a desire to know this, or just simply don't care.
Now that's not a dig at anyone! Its perfectly fine if you have a spinner's flock, or are just breeding for fun or whatever, but it should also be allowed to talk about production. The breeds are not typically known for data for production, but why can't we have something to go on?
I'm not in to changing the Shetlands or
BFLs into something they aren't. But I am wanting to know what our 'base' is for each breed. What is our range of birth weights? What is our range of fleece weights? milk? body condition? If we were able to create a base, we could look at them and compare them (if nothing else but to just compare) to other breeds that are similar in nature, or completely opposite. What is wrong with taking down numbers that we currently could get and see the results? Wouldn't it be fun to see how a Shetland birth weight compares to say a
Dorper or Columbia or something? Just to have that data available to people who have curious minds like myself?
Maybe if person A had a flock who had the highest weaning weights, would be highly sought after for replacement ewes, if they were what the buyer wanted (i.e. pasture raised, no grain, naturally resistant to worms, etc). It might be another selling point. Maybe you don't want huge sheep or fast growing sheep! Find those flocks that have slower growing animals or find a flock that had the fleece weights you wanted. It would be more helpful if we had data fields to report this to, and then be able to compare them across the breed. Its not 'improving' the breed, its just defining where we all are with our breed as a whole. And figuring out where in that range of data your animals and your goals fit.
The cattle business is quite a bit bigger. They've done a great job of promoting beef, they've pooled their resources, come up with cutting edge technology like DNA testing, color coat testing, genetic disorder testing and loads of production based and maternal based data. I guess I'm spoiled with all the OPEN information. People WILLINGLY give their calving records, (birth, weaning, yearling) and maternal records to the open database! People are happy to claim in the Simmental breed that they can in fact register something that is only 1/4 Simmental and go on to make note of what the other 3/4 of the animal is. that 3/4 is then used in the database as well. They go back to the breeds that make up that 3/4 and take the data from that breed and then use that percent to figure out what affect it would have on the animal overall. Its an amazing thing.
Our association just passed a new rule by the B.O.D. that all animals of certain blood lines (breeds associated with the genetic diseases) had to be tested for 1-4 new DNA testable genetic diseases. While I think this can have a negative effect initially, I believe that in the long run it will better benefit our breed(s) of cattle as a whole as we will no longer have to worry about these terrible genetic diseases popping up down the road, like they are now.
Gosh I've barely scratched the surface and have said a lot, but still not really felt like I've defined anything I wanted to.
Maybe I'll just shut up and end with a few photos from today....
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