Winter Management | Sheep
Winter can definitely be a bit brutal here in Western NY with lows in the negative teens, gusts of wind around 50mph, and potentially several feet of snow. So this is something we knew we would need to prepare for here on our farm. Here are some of our winter management practices, and learnings. There is never a one-size fits all solution, and my experiences and findings may be different that others - please take everything with a grain of salt and consider your conditions.
Winter Shelter
There are a few things to consider when determining how you plan to shelter your animals in winter. Depending on your conditions and the prevalence of trees, maybe tree-shelter is enough for your purposes. If you live with conditions as we do here, you would probably want either a 3-sided shelter or to house them fully in a barn.
If you decide you want to house them fully in a barn - Are you easily able to enter and exit to perform your chores? Feed them, get them new water, clean their water, clean up their space? Is there enough ventilation moving through the building to keep the animals healthy?
If you are more interested in a 3-sided shelter - Which direction does the wind come from in the winter months? If there are dangerously cold temperatures, do you have a way to keep the shelter warmer? Or if there’s an accidental January or February baby, will that be enough?
This also means, animals will be bedding down and eating in the same location for 4-6 months - and bedding will need to be a consideration. Do you want to regularly clean out the bedding to keep things clean and figure out how to do so with your animals around? Do you want to let the bedding build up putting more on top of existing bedding to create a warmer bed and only clean the bedding out once or twice a year with machinery?
Our Practices
All of our sheep have access to a permanent 3-sided shelter during the winter months, each with access to a small barnyard.
We house our ewes (lady sheep) in our “barn” in the winter months - which is a detached garage, where we leave the garage door open unless it is very cold, or we need to work on an animal.
For the males, we have a 3-sided run-in, we have deemed the bachelor pad.
Our winter shelters have bedded packs - we clean out the bedded pack once a year, and use the built-up bedding to create more warmth.
In the summer months, we use portable shelters - in the winter we see a lot higher winds, so we stake them down the portable shelters and repurpose them as LGD shelters so they do not get destroyed.
Fencing
Does your warm weather fencing plan carry over to your winter management plan?
If it’s permanent - Will it be impacted by snow building up?
If it’s electric - Will it carry a current through ice and snow?
If it’s poly-wire or a lighter material - Will it be impacted by the weight of ice or snow? Will it get stuck to the ground?
If it’s portable or semi-permanent - Will you need to move it once the ground is frozen? Once there is snow on the ground?
Our Practices
Our perimeter fencing (also used for the ewe’s barnyard) is a 5-strand electric poly-wire. During winter, we detach some of the bottom wires from the electric as needed when ice or snow builds up.
Because the fencing may droop with extra weight from the ice/snow or may not have the same charge it does during the winter months, we prefer to use a second layer of electric netting.
We can move electric fencing in light snow, but not heavy snow or when the ground is too frozen, so this just needs to be put in place when we’re able to.
The bachelor pad’s barnyard is built out of cattle panel, so the only concern may be the height of snow - we have yet to have an issue here but could also snow blow the perimeter of that barnyard easily.
Feed
One of the things we love about sheep, they eat directly off the land, with what the land provides them for half or more than half of the year. But that brings us to the other half of the year… When will your pasture’s forages not be enough to feed your flock? When will it grow back enough that the animals can graze it without killing it?
Do you plan to bring in hay or create your own hay? What are you able to move around? To source? To store? To transport? What is your plan if you run out of hay? Does the quality match your animal’s needs?
How will you feed your animals? On the ground? Out of a feeder? What type of feeder do you want to use? Is there enough feeder space so there isn’t too much competition? Are you able to access the feeder easily? Are you worried about contaminating the sheep’s wool with hay if you have wool sheep? How can you reduce wasted hay?
Our Practices
We feed hay from late fall to nearly May, to give the pasture a chance to get a head start.
We are only able to manage square bales at the moment. Which are much more expensive, but a lot easier to manage.
We bring in the hay - due to when we try to lamb, the ewes are on hay from right before breeding, to shortly after lambing - so we feed 2nd cutting the majority of the time and we get our hay delivered here from a local farm.
We are currently storing it under a hay tarp. Last year we stored hay in our chicken tractor and the barn. We had some issues with the tarp this past year, so we might change our hay storage plan for the following year.
We feed our hay using 2 feeders, with enough room to feed all the sheep at once. One feeder is a repurposed IBC tote, the other is made out of a cattle panel. We use the waste as additional bedding.
Water
Our Practices
We added heated waters this year, and that has been a game changer.
Outdoor water access is also a challenge. We’re looking at adding frost-free hydrants.
Lambing
Our Practices
We avoid winter lambing. We aim to lamb in Spring.
We prefer April lambing.
March worked really well for us. Not too cold, having a few lamb sweaters on hand is still nice. It gave the lambs time to get used to the barnyard perimeter fencing before needing to get used to daily moves and being in the barn we can get to everyone easily if needed and jug.
May also went well, but didn’t enjoy lambing on pasture as much and it delayed us being to move them fully out to pasture some.