Every time a ewe lambs with triplets, I say “YAY! we’re still at 300%!” 300% lambing is unheard of, but why am I rooting for this?? We don’t let ewes go out to pasture with more than two lambs for this simple reason: our ewes, as dairy ewes, have more than enough milk to feed triplets, but inevitably there are stronger lambs and weaker lambs, and the stronger win out and get most of the milk. If you have 30 ewes in a pasture and 2 or 3 of them have triplets, you can check on those triplets, maybe wander out in the pasture once or twice a day and supplement the trips with a bottle. But if every ewe in the pasture has three, there is no way to keep track, and lambs are going to starve. So, with these kinds of numbers, we need to pull excess lambs from their mothers to join the bottle-lamb gang. And feeding those bottle lambs 4 times a day is a lot of work. Probably costing more than we can recoup from the sale of the lambs. So…why am I rooting for 300%? Because it is a remarkable number? Because I’m more into breaking records than breaking even? I’m not sure. Our bottle-lamb gang is growing. They are a pretty cute bunch. Maybe I just love to be buried in lambs.
