BaaaaaaaaaaBaaaaaaaaaBaaaaaaaaa. I force myself to screw my eyes open. The clock says 12:30 AM. The bottle lambs are hungry early. I close my eyes and try to nap for another 30 minutes thru the din but it is hopeless so I get up early. I pull on some pants, turn on the light in the kitchen, light the stove burner, put the bottle milk in the double boiler and throw another log on the wood stove. I release the two bottle lambs from their pet carrier in the living room and the lambs start to romp and scamper around searching for the milk bottle now warming on the stove. I check the thermometer and it is 18 Deg. F outside with no wind and low moisture. The barometer is steady. I step outside briefly into the cold dark night. A sliver of a moon to the west shines bright and the Milky Way sparkles overhead. On these cold nights the stars seem extra close. All is quiet on the farm so I opt out of the scheduled late night walk to check the lambing paddock and lambing jugs. On a quiet night like this the sheep don’t seem too interested in lambing. Although it’s cold, any lambs born tonight will have no problems so long as they stay with mom and there is little wind and no moisture.
By the pound Lamb lags behind as the fifth most popular meat eaten in the United States behind every other livestock meat except mutton and goat. The average American eats less than a half pound of lamb per year. This, however, is starting to change as American chefs start to serve more good lamb and a new generation is exposed to it. Good grass fed lamb by nature is tender and mild of flavor with a light marbling and excels in the oven or on the grill. The US produces relatively little lamb at around 90 tons per year compared with Australia at around 500 tons per year and the US has a small national commercial sheep flock at under 10 million head. It always surprises me how many people I meet that have never tried lamb. Looking for a quick dish to take to a potluck a couple of months ago, my wife Jerre sautéed up a pan of lamb shoulder steaks. The steaks were cooked in grape seed oil with nothing but a little added sea salt. We cut out the bone and diced up the meat and served it on toothpicks. Many people at the party raved about what they took to be beef tenderloin steak and were quite surprised to find out it was lamb.
I shiver from the cold night air and step back inside the house. The bummer lambs are at the door to greet me and start to suck greedily at my pant legs. I gently herd the lambs back into the kitchen and check the milk bottle. Three squirts from the nipple on the inside of my wrist confirms that the milk is slightly above body temperature. I herd the lambs into the living room by the wood stove and sit down for some serious lamb feeding. The little male lamb jumps for the bottle and starts to suck hard. The little girl not wanting to be outdone tries to push him off the nipple then settles for sucking on the end of the little boy’s tail while she waits her turn.
While our heritage Jacob sheep are typically excellent mothers a small percentage of lambs will be rejected by the mama ewe either because she does not have enough milk or more typically because either the lamb got separated from mom right after birth for a time or because the lamb has a sharp tooth that hurts the ewe’s nipples. Worst case the mother has died due to birthing difficulties. There are many tricks including jacketing, powders, stanchions, tooth filing, etc. to help graft an orphan lamb onto a surrogate mother but this is typically only somewhat successful. If a lamb does not graft onto a surrogate mother the lamb becomes a bummer. Bummers pose something of a dilemma. Bummer lambs tend to be small and require expensive replacement milk and more labor. Typically it costs more to raise the bummers than they are worth in the market. Large producers typically don’t bother with bummers and since lambs typically need a little coaxing to remain alive anyway it is usually less than a day before these bummer lambs succumb to lack of food or care. Being more stewards of the land than agro-businessmen we see it as something of a duty to raise the flock’s bummers. This is why I am sitting in the living room at 1 AM between a big dog crate and the wood stove feeding the lambs.
Interestingly, commercial lamb production is tied to sheep’s second product, wool. Sheep are a dual crop species producing both meat and wool. Central Oregon used to be a huge producer of wool and lamb. Now you can drive around Central Oregon for days and never see a sheep. My next door neighbor, as an example, ran between 3 and 5 thousand Romney cross ewe/lambs in the 80’s and the early 90’s. During World War II, the Korean Conflict and the cold war the US military needed lots of wool for uniforms. US production was not up to the task and the US was importing tons and tons of expensive wool from England and Australia for uniforms. To cut costs congress enacted a subsidy to promote US production of wool and this made sheep production viable. Sheep production had declined significantly after the great depression. As a result of this subsidy the number of sheep in Central Oregon and across the country boomed again. I have a picture of me as a toddler standing next to my dad in his Army Uniform. My dad’s wool kaki uniform (called “pinks” at the time) was a great example of American high quality wool gaberdeen. By the time I joined the Army in post Vietnam 1983 uniforms were mostly cheap plastic (polyester, rayon, nylon) with little wool or cotton. Wool was no longer a strategic commodity so it was only a matter of time until congress killed the wool subsidy. In 1993 the subsidy was completely eliminated and to the day that was the end of large scale sheep production in Central Oregon. Aside from the little heritage boutique herds like ours there are still a couple of commercial sheep producers trying to buck the trend but with commercial wool worth less than the cost of shipping it to market sheep production becomes a hard way to make a living. If you want to see the benefit of more sheep around demand and buy more American wool. Good wool is a joy to wear. I love wool. Wool socks, wool underwear, wool shirts, wool whipcord pants, wool coats, wool mittens, wool hats, I love wool. Unfortunately most of the wool I wear has to come from Australia, New Zeeland or Canada instead of the US because they all value wool enough to subsidize it as a nation and all of these countries proudly market their high quality wool. We as a country place no value in our wool. Sadly, even old establishments like Pendleton and Woolrich import much of their fiber from outside the US.
The little boy lamb has had his fill of milk replacer so I coax him back into his crate and switch to the little girl. The little girl struggles with the rubber nipple and I have to hold her and coax her to take the milk replacer. Lambs either take quickly to the nipple or they struggle with it the whole time. A lamb that struggles with the nipple is a cause for worry. Last year a late season storm in March came fast with high winds and a cold driving rain. Our bummers were a couple of months old by then and while living outside had cover out of the wind and rain. Even with shelter, to a lamb, those that struggled with the nipple caught pneumonia and died within 48 hours of the storm. This same fluke storm killed over 5000 freshly shorn ewes farther east in Oregon and Idaho.
New lambs are about the cutest thing around but they grow fast and by the time they are 9 to 10 months old they are mature and as rams are at this point quite a handful. Sheep meat is graded based on the animals tooth wear. Lamb is graded based on no visible wear on the incisors. Lamb is typically anything up to 1 year old. Hogget is any sheep showing no more than 2 permanent incisors in wear and is typically under 2 years old. Anything older is considered Mutton. We typically process our sheep at anywhere from 9 to 16 months. While the sheep processed at 16 months are not “technically” lamb we find the quality to be the same as those processed within the 1 year boundary. One of the big reasons for the big decline in lamb as a meat source comes from the prevalence of mutton during the depression and thru the war years. Mutton has a rich typically overpowering taste and can be excessively fat. GI’s and sailors coming back from eating too much mutton during WWII wanted nothing to do with any sheep product and taught their children to avoid it as well. My dad and I believe his dad as well liked lamb with mint sauce so I grew up eating lamb once a year for Easter dinner. Until I was an adult my only lamb experience was the leg of lamb with mint sauce every Easter. As a young National Guard trooper I spent time in the 80’s with the Scottish territorial “Cammeronian Rifles” as part of a military exchange. Scotland was my first experience with mutton. Mutton kidney pie, mutton stew, mutton fat in the breakfast black pudding & beans, a sheen of mutton fat on the big hot tanks we dunked our mess tins in. I can understand why the WWII veterans came back with a distain for any sheep product. If I hadn’t had earlier good experiences with lamb I doubt I would have ever tried sheep again. My distain for mutton was again reinforced on the Oregon Trail Sesquicentennial wagon train when the mutton gravy on biscuits served at a local community breakfast celebration was rancid and I believe all including the hardest outriders lost their breakfast about an hour after eating that mutton gravy.
Ok, I am tired of fighting the little girl to get her to drink more. With effort she has worked down about 1/3 of a bottle of milk replacer. I supplement her a little with some colostrum paste and put her back in the crate. Happy now, both lambs turn about, lay down and fade into a milk induced stupor. We won’t be hearing from them again until about 6:30 in the morning. With the stove blazing the house is warm again so I stretch out in front of the fire to absorb some of the excess heat before heading back to bed.
So with all of the disadvantages why raise sheep? To answer this you have to think like a producer not a consumer. Sure dollars and cents commodity wise it does not add up but when managed well sheep are excellent grazers and I can easily run one lamb ewe combination with every cow calf pair at virtually no extra cost. The sheep favor different plant species than the cattle and as a result the pasture grazing becomes more efficient and we get a more even sward height. Unmanaged sheep can devastate a field of grass quickly. Managed sheep grazing can fine tune a field to optimum solar production. Aside from the practical grazing reasons I like sheep because they seem to me to be the most compatible of the livestock grazing species. The lambs running around the house intermingle with the humans, dogs and cats with a certain indifferent harmony I don’t see in cows. Sometimes the ewes almost seem grateful for the help you are providing their babies which is very different from the standoff behavior of cows. I guess I just like sheep.
Mojo our herding dog just came in and nudged me with his cold nose. I must have dozed off in front of the wood stove. Time to bank the fire, get up and go back to my bed and sleep. 6:30 lamb feeding is only a couple of hours away…..
By the pound Lamb lags behind as the fifth most popular meat eaten in the United States behind every other livestock meat except mutton and goat. The average American eats less than a half pound of lamb per year. This, however, is starting to change as American chefs start to serve more good lamb and a new generation is exposed to it. Good grass fed lamb by nature is tender and mild of flavor with a light marbling and excels in the oven or on the grill. The US produces relatively little lamb at around 90 tons per year compared with Australia at around 500 tons per year and the US has a small national commercial sheep flock at under 10 million head. It always surprises me how many people I meet that have never tried lamb. Looking for a quick dish to take to a potluck a couple of months ago, my wife Jerre sautéed up a pan of lamb shoulder steaks. The steaks were cooked in grape seed oil with nothing but a little added sea salt. We cut out the bone and diced up the meat and served it on toothpicks. Many people at the party raved about what they took to be beef tenderloin steak and were quite surprised to find out it was lamb.
I shiver from the cold night air and step back inside the house. The bummer lambs are at the door to greet me and start to suck greedily at my pant legs. I gently herd the lambs back into the kitchen and check the milk bottle. Three squirts from the nipple on the inside of my wrist confirms that the milk is slightly above body temperature. I herd the lambs into the living room by the wood stove and sit down for some serious lamb feeding. The little male lamb jumps for the bottle and starts to suck hard. The little girl not wanting to be outdone tries to push him off the nipple then settles for sucking on the end of the little boy’s tail while she waits her turn.
While our heritage Jacob sheep are typically excellent mothers a small percentage of lambs will be rejected by the mama ewe either because she does not have enough milk or more typically because either the lamb got separated from mom right after birth for a time or because the lamb has a sharp tooth that hurts the ewe’s nipples. Worst case the mother has died due to birthing difficulties. There are many tricks including jacketing, powders, stanchions, tooth filing, etc. to help graft an orphan lamb onto a surrogate mother but this is typically only somewhat successful. If a lamb does not graft onto a surrogate mother the lamb becomes a bummer. Bummers pose something of a dilemma. Bummer lambs tend to be small and require expensive replacement milk and more labor. Typically it costs more to raise the bummers than they are worth in the market. Large producers typically don’t bother with bummers and since lambs typically need a little coaxing to remain alive anyway it is usually less than a day before these bummer lambs succumb to lack of food or care. Being more stewards of the land than agro-businessmen we see it as something of a duty to raise the flock’s bummers. This is why I am sitting in the living room at 1 AM between a big dog crate and the wood stove feeding the lambs.Interestingly, commercial lamb production is tied to sheep’s second product, wool. Sheep are a dual crop species producing both meat and wool. Central Oregon used to be a huge producer of wool and lamb. Now you can drive around Central Oregon for days and never see a sheep. My next door neighbor, as an example, ran between 3 and 5 thousand Romney cross ewe/lambs in the 80’s and the early 90’s. During World War II, the Korean Conflict and the cold war the US military needed lots of wool for uniforms. US production was not up to the task and the US was importing tons and tons of expensive wool from England and Australia for uniforms. To cut costs congress enacted a subsidy to promote US production of wool and this made sheep production viable. Sheep production had declined significantly after the great depression. As a result of this subsidy the number of sheep in Central Oregon and across the country boomed again. I have a picture of me as a toddler standing next to my dad in his Army Uniform. My dad’s wool kaki uniform (called “pinks” at the time) was a great example of American high quality wool gaberdeen. By the time I joined the Army in post Vietnam 1983 uniforms were mostly cheap plastic (polyester, rayon, nylon) with little wool or cotton. Wool was no longer a strategic commodity so it was only a matter of time until congress killed the wool subsidy. In 1993 the subsidy was completely eliminated and to the day that was the end of large scale sheep production in Central Oregon. Aside from the little heritage boutique herds like ours there are still a couple of commercial sheep producers trying to buck the trend but with commercial wool worth less than the cost of shipping it to market sheep production becomes a hard way to make a living. If you want to see the benefit of more sheep around demand and buy more American wool. Good wool is a joy to wear. I love wool. Wool socks, wool underwear, wool shirts, wool whipcord pants, wool coats, wool mittens, wool hats, I love wool. Unfortunately most of the wool I wear has to come from Australia, New Zeeland or Canada instead of the US because they all value wool enough to subsidize it as a nation and all of these countries proudly market their high quality wool. We as a country place no value in our wool. Sadly, even old establishments like Pendleton and Woolrich import much of their fiber from outside the US.
The little boy lamb has had his fill of milk replacer so I coax him back into his crate and switch to the little girl. The little girl struggles with the rubber nipple and I have to hold her and coax her to take the milk replacer. Lambs either take quickly to the nipple or they struggle with it the whole time. A lamb that struggles with the nipple is a cause for worry. Last year a late season storm in March came fast with high winds and a cold driving rain. Our bummers were a couple of months old by then and while living outside had cover out of the wind and rain. Even with shelter, to a lamb, those that struggled with the nipple caught pneumonia and died within 48 hours of the storm. This same fluke storm killed over 5000 freshly shorn ewes farther east in Oregon and Idaho.
New lambs are about the cutest thing around but they grow fast and by the time they are 9 to 10 months old they are mature and as rams are at this point quite a handful. Sheep meat is graded based on the animals tooth wear. Lamb is graded based on no visible wear on the incisors. Lamb is typically anything up to 1 year old. Hogget is any sheep showing no more than 2 permanent incisors in wear and is typically under 2 years old. Anything older is considered Mutton. We typically process our sheep at anywhere from 9 to 16 months. While the sheep processed at 16 months are not “technically” lamb we find the quality to be the same as those processed within the 1 year boundary. One of the big reasons for the big decline in lamb as a meat source comes from the prevalence of mutton during the depression and thru the war years. Mutton has a rich typically overpowering taste and can be excessively fat. GI’s and sailors coming back from eating too much mutton during WWII wanted nothing to do with any sheep product and taught their children to avoid it as well. My dad and I believe his dad as well liked lamb with mint sauce so I grew up eating lamb once a year for Easter dinner. Until I was an adult my only lamb experience was the leg of lamb with mint sauce every Easter. As a young National Guard trooper I spent time in the 80’s with the Scottish territorial “Cammeronian Rifles” as part of a military exchange. Scotland was my first experience with mutton. Mutton kidney pie, mutton stew, mutton fat in the breakfast black pudding & beans, a sheen of mutton fat on the big hot tanks we dunked our mess tins in. I can understand why the WWII veterans came back with a distain for any sheep product. If I hadn’t had earlier good experiences with lamb I doubt I would have ever tried sheep again. My distain for mutton was again reinforced on the Oregon Trail Sesquicentennial wagon train when the mutton gravy on biscuits served at a local community breakfast celebration was rancid and I believe all including the hardest outriders lost their breakfast about an hour after eating that mutton gravy.Ok, I am tired of fighting the little girl to get her to drink more. With effort she has worked down about 1/3 of a bottle of milk replacer. I supplement her a little with some colostrum paste and put her back in the crate. Happy now, both lambs turn about, lay down and fade into a milk induced stupor. We won’t be hearing from them again until about 6:30 in the morning. With the stove blazing the house is warm again so I stretch out in front of the fire to absorb some of the excess heat before heading back to bed.
So with all of the disadvantages why raise sheep? To answer this you have to think like a producer not a consumer. Sure dollars and cents commodity wise it does not add up but when managed well sheep are excellent grazers and I can easily run one lamb ewe combination with every cow calf pair at virtually no extra cost. The sheep favor different plant species than the cattle and as a result the pasture grazing becomes more efficient and we get a more even sward height. Unmanaged sheep can devastate a field of grass quickly. Managed sheep grazing can fine tune a field to optimum solar production. Aside from the practical grazing reasons I like sheep because they seem to me to be the most compatible of the livestock grazing species. The lambs running around the house intermingle with the humans, dogs and cats with a certain indifferent harmony I don’t see in cows. Sometimes the ewes almost seem grateful for the help you are providing their babies which is very different from the standoff behavior of cows. I guess I just like sheep.Mojo our herding dog just came in and nudged me with his cold nose. I must have dozed off in front of the wood stove. Time to bank the fire, get up and go back to my bed and sleep. 6:30 lamb feeding is only a couple of hours away…..
Lamb is in the book "The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth." It's low in calories and high in protein. Plus it has calcium, magnesium, selenium, niacin, potassium, healthy monounsaturated fat, zinc, and B12.
ReplyDeleteBut, since I was a vegetarian for about 20 years of my life, I don't know how to cook meat, especially lamb. Can you cook a lamb steak under the broiler like a beef steak? I don't eat meat very often, but I like a simple healthy grass-fed steak here and there, just pretty plain. With lamb, I would have a reason to eat mint sauce...mmmm.
I'm glad you take care of the orphans. It's not cost-effective, but I like to think of it as a way of giving back to the animals that are providing food for us. And by giving the dead calf to the wildlife, it's an exchange for the habitat we have fenced off from them. Without a little give and take, it seems ungrateful and disrespectful to Earth and her creatures.