Greg Judy failures by TJ

I am a huge Greg Judy fan. He has been more instrumental in my development than anyone else. But one thing you seldom see is how painful getting from zero to productive can be. That is the position I am in right now.

The beginning sheep flock is sort of a test run. I figure if its just a huge pain I can butcher them and do something else, but I am really trying to stick it out.

Greg says you have to get a flock that works for you. You cannot work for your flock. Part of that is training them to the electric fence, and culling the ones that don't comply. Today is that day, which sucks. We have one adventurous lamb who then gets followed by the main group, it is now a regular event. I haven't seen it happen yet (always just a few minutes from witnessing the event) but I think I know which one it is, and it is not a particularly high performer anyway- the smallest and holding onto its coat the longest. So this one is going to go with mint sauce tonight when the temp is not >90F.

Greg says this is necessary and pays off in the end. I trust you Greg! Freaking sucks today, I am totally bummed. Culling psychologically is also admitting failure on your initial selection process.

TJ, you're experiencing the really "hard" part of farming. Often it's necessary, sometimes it's smart, and occasionally there are ways around it.

First I would remember that any time two creatures procreated it is a "gene splicing experiment. No matter how well you have, or "think you have" chosen the parents, the outcome may be the combination of the best of the best or the marginal of the marginal features, so please don't beat yourself up by thinking of it as "your" mistake. I have the same problem with plants - the ruthlessness required to cull the ones that are marginal often escapes me even though I know intellectually that it should be done!

Second, in this case you've identified several reasons that the sad job should be done. If it were just that personality-wise the youngster was not a good fit for your management system, selling or even giving away the lamb might be an option. One year my husband was convinced to get a certain breed of chickens because the day-olds he wanted weren't available. He has a specific way he looks after his "business chickens", and this breed was not suitable and the results weren't good. A friend often had that breed and in her system they did well and she sought them out. However, in the case of the lamb, you've identified other characteristics that concern you, so for the good of the "gene pool", culling is the responsible approach.

Third, accepting in yourself that what you need to do is "hard but possible" is a good thing. "Pretending" it doesn't hurt is not the emotionally healthy thing to do. When Hubby presented me with a duck that had suffered from an eagle attack that was clearly beyond my capacity to save but was still clearly alert, having to do the "responsible" thing and put her out of her misery was not something I'd have chosen. All I could do was admit to her and myself that I didn't want to do this, but it was better than a slow death from infection. Honoring an animal whose life you must take is not a bad thing. Please don't pretend it doesn't hurt!

Forth, I try to make sure that I balance the "hard parts" with the "joyful parts". You need to remove a lamb, but maybe you can spend a few minutes choosing a spot where you'd like a tree or shrub today and dig a hole for it and compost in place the parts you can't make use of. Add extra compostable material all summer and by the fall tree planting window, you may have some good dirt there!  

Hang in there... Jay

That’s a good idea and thanks for it. Maybe I should just Craigslist the problem lamb. She might be fine in another system.

On the other hand I want my kids to understand the nature of the enterprise, and I want to experience the crappy days as they are, not how I want them to be. I’m not impressed with the performance of this particular animal anyway compared with the others, and part of good husbandry is not passing off bad animals to another breeder.

I’m genuinely torn because it’s a nice animal, friendly but doesn’t work here and maybe should be out of the gene pool.

I usually cull with a happy heart.  I'm making more room and grass for the animals that perform.  As a side note, old ewes taste just fine as long as they are in good condition, which they usually are after not breeding for 2 cycles (my limit for non-production).  

Many moons ago, when I butchered my first sheep, it was my first animal ever.  No one told me about the reflexive kicking.  I felt absolutely awful about it and felt I had done a poor job with the kill.  This went on for several days, until we cooked and ate the first piece of homegrown lamb, then everything was fine!  I think your mint sauce will make everything better!

Perhaps this would be an ideal "4H" lamb? It sounds personable, and with one on one care it may thrive...

Well make a long story short, we are keeping the lamb and using nets again. We can’t get replacements right now because apparently there has been a run on sheep as people decide to get the f out of the cities. Can’t say I blame them but it’s annoying because I either have to drop down to a few sheep which isn’t worth rotating since I think there may be another who learned the behavior (we really need about 4x the current stocking density) or I just have to suck it up and keep them in nets for a
While and hope they forget. Then back to three wires, then back to two.

I also found out in the first escape I made a line that wasn’t hot. Normally I run a jumper to electrify any lines not connected to the charger but I was rushing to get the move done so I could do another project that someone was helping me with. The next escape was just garden variety, they had figured it out by then. They had two days of “field day” so as not to further reinforce the behavior and then into the net. They absolutely won’t challenge the net they learned that when they were little.

4H would be an option but normally they get weaned lambs. Plus at this rate our state government is not going to approve county and state fairs or even meetings. My understanding is that the clubs are basically shut down. My kids do FFA and nothing is happening.

I am going to try to retrain the flock. It could be a mistake but I’m giving it a try.

I have found that sheep are damn near as bad as what the interwebs say goats are when it comes to getting out. I had to cull one expensive breeeding ewe i purchased this year because she was extremely flighty and skipped the fence left right and sideways.
I have also found that even pos/neg netting was not sufficient to keep them in this year. right nwo they are penned for the winter and I am thinking about what I can do to continue working with them, I've kinda come down to two options

1) i can search out a very high power fence energizer and HOPE that it is sufficient deterrent for the animals against testing a fence, i know that the energizer i was using was enough to make me second guess ever touching a hot wire, so it'd have to be pretty damned strong i think.
2) I can invest a lot of time and/or money into developing physical fencing that is sheep proof, this is not ideal as it is not as flexible as wire or netting and I am currently renting my property so it would be an additional hassle in the event that i move.

I HATE moving netting so it would sure be swell if i could keep them in with polywire, but unfortunately with our dry and sandy soi... sand, electric has not proved effective in the least with sheep

I'm sorry for the stress, and fingers crossed that Judy's methods work well for you... but...

Tj Jefferson wrote:Culling psychologically is also admitting failure on your initial selection process.

I couldn't disagree more about that. Culling is no sign of any sort of failure, especially when you are talking offspring.

If you expected that you were going to be able to select an entire flock with no suboptimal genes or learned behaviors in the lot.. this is IMO not realistic for anyone, and pretty hard on yourself.

Culling is not a sign of failure. Failure to cull, is planning to fail.


So, how did the retraining work out?

Wow! I totally forgot about the posting.

Since that time they were in the nets 4 months. Then in triple wire for one month. Just went to two wires last week. So far no escapes.

So encouraging! It really is minimal to do two wires compared to one so will probably just keep it until spring. In spring the grass grows so fast they never get hungry. Summer will tell. Did not eat the one underperforming one yet, my mentor suggested we wait and see if she’s a permanent runt or catches up.

What kind of  conditions do you have there TJ? Dry and sandy, heavy and wet, some kind of loam?
Average rainfall?
What kind of Energizer are you using?

Tj Jefferson wrote:Wow! I totally forgot about the posting.

Since that time they were in the nets 4 months. Then in triple wire for one month. Just went to two wires last week. So far no escapes.

So encouraging! It really is minimal to do two wires compared to one so will probably just keep it until spring. In spring the grass grows so fast they never get hungry. Summer will tell. Did not eat the one underperforming one yet, my mentor suggested we wait and see if she’s a permanent runt or catches up.

Nice, that's definitely encouraging!

My experience with nets was Not Good, but I put this down to a wussy energizer and crappy grounding on that farm...

Did you put a lot of effort into preventing grass etc from contacting the nets, or just run a powerful energizer and live with some shorting?

Worst case, there will be more to eat if you do end up culling her, and you get the peace of mind from providing maximal opportunity for her to shape up.

I am definitely a bit jealous of the managability of culling/butchery with sheep; my goal is to start running cattle in the next year or two, and culling even one animal will be a Big Deal, solo...

I have a 24 joule charger. That runs a perimeter fence and I use jumpers to run nets. So yeah grass pressure isn’t a big deal. I would recommend 0.5j per 100’ net for sheep to keep it spicy. They will not respect anything under about 4kv. If it’s dry double that, which most nets are not really designed for. Hot/ground alternate should be effective in dry climates, when it’s dry I dump water around the ground rod, and I drive two rods down with the portable setup (which is still 6j). With my alley setup I also have a couple of 8’ ground rods in permanently in strategic areas. Most of the issues with electric fencing I have seen are lack of grounding.

For cheap and decent ground rods I got some 1/2” rebar, drive it in when wet, and use double clamps from the plumbing section to hold the ground on from the charger.  Cost is pretty modest. Make sure you mark them so you don’t mow them!

Would you mind linking to your charger TJ?

It’s kencove. Recommend getting the remote turn off if you can afford it- I wish I had done so.