When to Shear Your Sheep

Video Transcript

Okay seasonal changes within your sheep herd. Now obviously shearing the sheep is one of the major changes and choosing when to shear is a good question. We shear our sheep early in the Spring. They can adapt to the temperature very readily once this wool is gone. They will not get too cold. You don't want to shear them in mid winter because obviously they will get too cold. But we shear early in the Spring so they can grow a good cover back by the heat of Summer because believe it or not, the wool actually keeps them from getting over heated. We think of wool as a cold weather type of garment that we wear but for a sheep, wool is an insulator both from the heat and the cold. The other issue seasonally would be when you choose to breed your sheep and you want to breed your sheep about six months or so before you want to have baby sheep. Actually it is a little over five months but you need to figure out when you are going to breed your sheep in terms of when you want to have lambs and those issues have to do with a number of different things. So you need to be concerned about the health of your sheep in terms of breeding. You would breed them in the Fall generally so that you can have Spring lambs and that is based on a number of things in terms of usually the best forage, the best vegetation, the best feed for her she needs when she is lactating and she can get that in the Spring once the fields are open again. So you are concerned with when you breed, how well she gets fed when she is lambing, when they go to market in terms of big your lambs are when you go to market. We generally send our lambs to market about four to five months after they are born in the Fall and all of those factors have to do with breeding. One of the major things seasonally is you have to shear your sheep. These have been bred to produce this very heavy undercoat. If you do not share them, they will start to felt, they will mat, they will be grossly uncomfortable. They will develop a coat that is detrimental to them so they need to be shorn ideally at least once a year. If not once a year, at least every other year.

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