Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Nursery Furniture

One can never have enough equipment for handling sheep and sometimes you really NEED more equipment.  Brian Magee, the gentleman who used to shear our sheep is also a shepherd himself and operates his flock using the Star System which he and Doug Hogue designed when he worked at Cornell University.  This system breaks a breeding flock into five groups which lamb in a staggered sequence around the calendar and evens out lamb production so one theoretically has lambs ready for market several times a year rather than one seasonal glut in the fall.

Anyway, Andy had built Brian some folding panels a while ago with which to make temporary pens. They functioned so well that Brian wanted more, plus a couple of creep gates and creep feeders.  He picked up eight of the bifold panels......


Three of the creep gates (the horizontal bar keeps ewes from trying to wiggle through and can be raised as the lambs grow.  Lambs can slide through a narrow opening but it's harder to crawl through a low space)....


And three grain feeders.  The bar across the top is plenty high enough to allow them to eat but keeps lambs from easily standing in the feeder and fouling the feed.


It ended up being quite a load for the little trailer Brian brought but the guys got it strapped down for safe transport.




A great many lambs ought to benefit from safe and sturdy surroundings.

4 comments:

  1. Are you going to use the star system, then?

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    1. No, our breeds don't cycle out of season (fall). There are only a few breeds of sheep that will function in this system. Plus, we're all about the wool! Our freezer lamb venture was a way to handle the extra lambs while we worked to improve the quality of fleeces in the flock.

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  2. I use my panels similar to those all the time. Couldn't live without them. That's quite a grooming box there ;-D.

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