Last fall we had a big frustration when we found that we had purchased an infertile ”breeding” ram for our flock. We had just recently returned to the farm after having gone through the nightmare of the largest wildfire in Colorado history and evacuating over 60 farm animals in less than two hours in clouds of dark smoke that made midday seem like midnight. We then scrambled to get a new breeding ram in to replace him before the ewes went out of season, only to find that the new ram was also infertile. These experiences might lead us to be a bit paranoid, as we lost an entire breeding season on the flock and only had one ewe give birth this year…a ewe that had been bred early in the season by an entirely different ram that we didn’t have anymore. But paranoia or not, it seems like history might be (somewhat) repeating itself (minus the fire and evacuation – thank goodness ☺️).
We brought in two new ram lambs this year: Orville, for the dairy flock, and Wallace, for the wool flock. We separated out the breeding pens back in October. We realized we couldn’t really tell what was going on due to the layout of the new farm, so in early November we got the rams into breeding harnesses with crayons to be able to track the breedings better. We have also been doing pregnancy tests through a local lab (using blood draws). Orville quickly settled his adult ewes and looks to be working on settling the one ewe lamb he has. Wallace on the other hand, can’t seem to settle anyone as the ewes keep coming back into heat over and over again…just like last year. We have been trying to give him the benefit of the doubt…he is a first-year ram afterall…but so is Orville, and they are about the same age. Maybe it is the difference in breed and Wallace is going to take longer to mature? Again, we are trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. And our vet said last year that infertile rams are rare, this would be our third in a row, seems pretty statistically impossible.
The problem is, like last year, we don’t want to run out of breeding season time and have all those ewes unbred. So while we don’t ideally want them crossed with the dairy ram, we prefer it over them not getting bred at all. So we gave Wallace as much time as we felt we could spare, and then this last week we took him out and gave Orville every single ewe, wool or dairy, to breed. He already went to work and time will tell as we wait to see if they come back into heat and we do their pregnancy testing.
Meanwhile, the question becomes, what do we do about Wallace? Hmmm, that seems like a familiar blog title…didn’t I blog that last year, except it was about MacDougal?
Willow Creek Farm 