For our purposes we use six sheep to the cow. There is some discrepancy between government agencies, textbooks and sheepmen (sheeppersons?) about how many sheep equal an AU (animal unit 1,000-pound cow with 500-pound calf at her side). To get any true working numbers you have to compare apples to apples. This included cost of production, expenses, labor costs of sheep against cattle, and profit margins. Doing the Math on Costs of Raising Sheep for ProfitĪt my wife’s encouragement (and threats) I sat down with pencil and calculator and started to figure the difference betwixt raising sheep for profit and raising cattle for beef. That put us up to 43 sheep, the cows, and the farming. Well, she kept three of the bums as replacement lambs and then bought a trailer load of sheep. So we converted the old hog barn into a lamb barn: Eight jugs, a nice dry pen, clean and out of the wind. This was when my better half decided we should have a lamb barn.
In a storm, lambs can fit through a doggie door. We came home on the 4th of July and found the lambs in the house grazing contently on the plants. Well, that didn’t last long as lambs grow rapidly and turn into sheep.
They were cute as little buttons, bouncy, friendly and just plain lovable. We were farming about 2,500 acres, running around 350 cows and had these tiny little adorable creatures. A few years ago my wife started us raising sheep for profit with eight bum lambs.
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