Colt Knight: 00:02
Welcome to the Maine Farmcast. I am one of your co-hosts today, Dr. Colt Knight, associate extension professor and state livestock specialist for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. And I am joined by
Glenda Pereira: 00:14
I thought you were gonna introduce me. Who am I, Colt? Tell me my title.
Colt Knight: 00:18
I’m a dairy cow person.
Glenda Pereira: 00:20
I’m an
Colt Knight: 00:21
assistant title is, like, six miles in
Glenda Pereira: 00:25
I’m an assistant professor of animal science and then the dairy specialist, School of Food and Ag. So you can’t put your whole title. And the University of Maine. So I have that title because I have a dual appointment. Yes. And see, Colt is now trying to veer me off task, but I’m really good at keeping on task.
Glenda Pereira: 00:44
And we have an awesome guest because one of the topics that have been requested over and over is more small ruminant topics and features. So we we
Colt Knight: 00:55
one of the best small
Tom Hodgman: 00:56
Yeah.
Colt Knight: 00:56
People in the state
Glenda Pereira: 00:57
of Maine.
Colt Knight: 00:58
Maybe the Northeast with us today.
Glenda Pereira: 01:00
And so we reached out to Tom Hodgman, and we’re here at Waldoview Farm. But Tom
Colt Knight: 01:06
On the verge of a hurricane force windstorm.
Glenda Pereira: 01:10
The best day to record. And, Tom offered to provide us with his expertise today. Tom has been a sheep farmer for over thirty years? Twenty. Twenty.
Glenda Pereira: 01:24
And he’s gonna tell us more about his business and some of what you do here at Waldoview Farm. And then we’re gonna talk about lambing considerations because as I was talking to Tom recently, he he’s got so much expertise, and I know some folks would love to learn from somebody who’s done how many seasons of lambing?
Tom Hodgman: 01:51
You know? 20-ish. Yeah.
Glenda Pereira: 01:53
Yeah. Yeah. So awesome. Tom, welcome to the Maine Farmcast.
Tom Hodgman: 01:57
Thanks. Thanks so much for inviting me. As Glenda mentioned, my wife and I, together with Abby Slater, our shepherd, run Waldoview Farm in Winterport, Maine. We’re about halfway between Bangor and Belfast if you wanna get an idea where we are geographically. We’ve been we’ve been quite taken with the Katahdin breed for a long time, and my daughter showed in 4-H for many years.
Tom Hodgman: 02:28
And now she’s off to, you know, been through college, and she’s out in in the working world. So the old folks are here, and we have a much younger person helping us get getting us through our our season, especially lambing season and grazing season. We run about 70 Katahdin ewes right now. I think we expose 69 this year, but we’re inching up a little bit every year. We’re keeping back.
Tom Hodgman: 02:53
We have 19 open ewe lambs right now that we’ll breed next year. We are primarily a seed stock producer, meaning that we sell breeding stock to other farms. We sell a lot of sheep to homesteaders, especially, but also to commercial flocks looking to up their game, especially with breeding breeding quality rams, high quality rams. But also folks that wanna start off right right from the beginning, and they they they are able to buy six to 10 high quality ewe lambs and an unrelated ram. That’s the sort of thing we do primarily.
Tom Hodgman: 03:32
There’s a lot that goes into that. We collect a significant amount of of production data. We do fecal egg counts. We do birth weight. We do weaning weight.
Tom Hodgman: 03:44
We do post-weaning weight. We for a while, we were doing ultrasound scans on carcass on on our lambs. We have been dabbling in a lot of genetics. Specifically, we’ve been genotyping a significant number of our our entire ewe flock is genotyped, but our lamb crop, we genotype a portion of them just because it’s so expensive. But we get a ton of information back, including seven different genetic conditions, one of which is the myostatin muscling gene, the the double muscling Texel gene.
Tom Hodgman: 04:18
And we’ve exploring that and and really seeing some some cool benefits of having that gene in in our in our population here. We also our market also includes a number of direct to consumer direct to consumer lambs each fall. They are essentially grass fed lambs. We they do get a little bit of creep early on in the year. But once they go to pasture in mid May, they don’t they don’t get any more feed.
Tom Hodgman: 04:45
It’s just essentially daily moves on grass, on fresh grass all summer, and and we’ve got a pretty good system going here. We are moving more towards a hopefully to a more of a wholesaler selling lambs, finished lambs at wholesale, which is gonna change up a few things, but the the income should be about the same without some of the expenses. So we’re looking forward to that. We started to do at another revenue stream a couple years ago by offering educational programs, workshops on lambing particularly, and we have one coming up here in February. And the there’s just a as Glenda may have mentioned, there’s just always been a need for more information on small ruminant stuff.
Tom Hodgman: 05:34
And I have a teaching experience from the University of Maine from several years ago when I was a TA in college, so I’m not afraid to stand up in front of a group of people and and speak my piece. So I’m enjoy doing that, and I I like to I probably should have been in Cooperative Extension. I grew up in the Extension family, and and that’s really what I should have done because now that I’m I’m, you know, of retirement age, I’m seems like I’m doing on farm extension, bringing people into my farm.
Glenda Pereira: 06:02
They’re probably making more money. So you’re doing the right thing,
Tom Hodgman: 06:04
I don’t
Colt Knight: 06:04
know. I don’t know.
Tom Hodgman: 06:06
But anyway, so that’s become fun. And we we hope to do hope to do others, not just lambing, but a a basics one probably in the future as well as breeding, a breeding one and sort of genetic selection and breeding, that sort of thing.
Glenda Pereira: 06:22
And when is your lambing course gonna run? So can you give us the details on that?
Tom Hodgman: 06:27
Yeah. It’s the it’s gonna be the second weekend in February. I believe it’s the fourteenth. Yeah. Fourteen to fifteenth.
Tom Hodgman: 06:36
Yeah. It’s Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day. It’s Valentine’s Day weekend. Yeah.
Tom Hodgman: 06:39
Monday is and Yep. And Monday is the is President’s Day. So it’s a sort of a long weekend. Last year, we had a number of people from out of state, from Connecticut and Massachusetts that came up. So it’s a two day program.
Tom Hodgman: 06:51
This year, we’re gonna arrange it so you can attend one day or the other or both. And so we’ll fit it together that way to make it more convenient for people. We’ve done it a couple years now, and it’s super fun, and people love it. And we’ve had a lamb born every year. We almost lost one the first year.
Tom Hodgman: 07:09
And so we went through the whole lamb saving procedures in front of everybody. It was pretty amazing. And we did save the lamb, and it it it made it all the way through and went to slaughter in the fall. So Nice.
Colt Knight: 07:20
Yeah. Yeah. There’s a lot to learn in a lambing shed. Oh, yeah. I remember when I was in graduate school in Texas, our range had five, six hundred Yeah.
Colt Knight: 07:28
Sheep and, you know, some more goats, and we had about a two to three week lambing season. And that’s what we did every morning
Tom Hodgman: 07:38
Oh, yeah.
Colt Knight: 07:38
Was go do that. Yeah. I usually got most of the weekend duties because most of the students were local, and they wanted to go home for the weekend Sure.
Colt Knight: 07:52
Holidays and stuff. And I wasn’t gonna fly back to West Virginia for business for two or three day weekends.
Colt Knight: 07:52
There’s a lot of that.
Glenda Pereira: 07:53
The We’ll we’ll attach the show we’ll we’ll attach the link to find out more information about this workshop in the show notes so folks are interested. They can sign up for that.
Tom Hodgman: 08:03
That’s great. Yeah. We also just help to say finally that we the latest our latest gig that we’re doing related to sheep, we try to make money any way you possibly can with sheep. I mean, that’s like that’s what drives this whole place, is we’ve started to graze some solar developments recently, and that’s a big thing in the sheep industry right now. It’s It’s really a game changer for a industry that has been pretty stagnant for decades.
Tom Hodgman: 08:31
And it’s really taken off at a national scale, and now we’re seeing it as a as a major thing abroad as well, Australia, New Zealand, that sort of thing. So we’re small players in that piece, but we’re we just had one year with it, and we made money. And we’re happy with it, and we are pretty good grazers to begin with, so we knew what to do. Right. It was just a different different place, and and the needs were slightly different.
Tom Hodgman: 08:59
So you had to be adaptable, and and and we we I think we figured it out pretty well. So but that’s that’s basically what we what we do and and where we’re located. And yeah.
Glenda Pereira: 09:11
So just a just a quick follow-up about the solar grazing aspect, and I’d love to do a future episode on that. Yeah. But what was the just quickly go describe us what your grazing rotation was. Did you do two full grazings through that or one? What?
Tom Hodgman: 09:31
The the contract specifies two.
Glenda Pereira: 09:32
Oh, okay.
Tom Hodgman: 09:33
Yeah. And we did two, and it is possible to even squeeze in three if you depending on how you laid out this Yeah. Situation. But we we only have 90 ewes Yep. When we when we went to the field this summer.
Tom Hodgman: 09:49
So that’s that sounds like a lot, but that’s really not. Right. And we do we do high density short duration grazing. So we hit it hard with a large number, and then we move. Yep.
Tom Hodgman: 10:02
And then we leave it alone for a long time.
Glenda Pereira: 10:04
And Forty eight days. What’s your
Tom Hodgman: 10:07
Totally depends.
Glenda Pereira: 10:08
This summer was also a different summer, and you can irrigate, obviously, under solar panels. And and there’s just not much irrigation here in Maine as well. But so this summer was different.
Tom Hodgman: 10:23
I’ll tell you the best grass we had this summer was at one of our solar sites. I’m not kidding. It was it was it was orchard grass like we saw in 2024 Yeah. Which was leaves that you could pick up and be above your knee. Okay.
Tom Hodgman: 10:38
The leaf is literally two feet long.
Glenda Pereira: 10:40
And I wonder if it was just that that cover That’s exactly what it sort of this really micro climate underneath there.
Tom Hodgman: 10:48
Exactly what it was because out beyond it where it wasn’t Yes. Was was still good, but not not great.
Glenda Pereira: 10:54
Yeah. So maybe that soil maintained a little bit more moisture.
Tom Hodgman: 10:58
Yeah. Kept it. Exactly. Yep.
Colt Knight: 10:59
I don’t it’s exactly when we grazed in Texas that mesquite trees were a real problem and juniper trees. And one of the ways that they control those is they’ll take mini excavators and just rip them out of the ground. It’s called grubbing. Yep. And it leaves a big hole in the grass.
Colt Knight: 11:14
Sure. And, you know, as someone that drives a four wheeler through there, you curse people that leave the big hole in the ground. But as a grazer, you appreciate it because in a drought year, those lower spots will hold a little moisture, and they will produce forage. Sure. So it’ll be like little holes forage all through Yeah.
Colt Knight: 11:29
There. So they can actually save you through a drought situation. So we did do we did do two passes.
Tom Hodgman: 11:36
We I can’t remember the actual rest time between them, but it was well more than we would have normally done here. These were one site was formerly a hay field. And so it was an agriculture to begin with. But now it’s now it’s a sheep pasture and producing power. So the other site was a was a forest that was removed and planted to clover, and it was clover two feet deep through a lot of it.
Tom Hodgman: 12:05
And it’s gonna just grow more because the sheep just flattened it. Yeah. But they would flatten it. We moved them on, And there was lots of little clover seedlings coming in this year. So that was a good site as well.
Tom Hodgman: 12:19
So we had a variety of sites and they’re new, so we didn’t wanna hit them too hard too quickly. We wanted to give them plenty of time to recover and we did. So but, yeah, there was it was a a good season. And but we were we were basically packing ninety ninety ewes into between an acre and a half to three acres for two to three days. Yep.
Tom Hodgman: 12:45
That’s pretty much that’s about the range that we did. Towards the end of the summer, we had smaller groups, but that was the first pass was large number, small area, short amount of time, and then, jeez, I don’t know, at least six weeks before we got back to it.
Colt Knight: 13:00
Are are you using their perimeter security fencing and you’re you’re not stringing any hot wire?
Tom Hodgman: 13:05
Oh, no. We’re we’re putting we’re putting electric netting right down the lanes. So we would we would identify two we select two rows or three rows or four rows depending how long they were and just run them right down between the panels. And then we just put them in there and just move them for the next and the next and the next. And when we’re all done, we just bring the trailer into the site when we could and and load them up, or we would set up a little runway and run them back out to the gate and load them from the trailer and then move them to another site.
Tom Hodgman: 13:35
One site has three units, so there was three sets of fences. So but we we broke every one of them up into into smaller parcels, so smaller paddocks within the within the perimeter fence. But we do use the perimeter fence for for predator protection Yep. Basically. So we have to watch that because some of them in places are a little it’s a little high and there’s culverts and ditches.
Tom Hodgman: 13:57
And so we have to really pay attention. But
Colt Knight: 13:59
And how do you get water to those animals?
Tom Hodgman: 14:00
We truck water anyway. Mhmm. We graze we graze about about 60 acres of land here on the farm and in neighboring properties anyway. So we have a 250 gallon water tank that we is in the back of the back of the the farm truck all summer. So it’s nothing for us to when we’re going to check them and we check sheep every day, we just you know, the we never go to solar with a full tank of water just in case you need it.
Tom Hodgman: 14:29
Yeah. So you don’t have to go twice. Yep. We learned that a few times this summer. So but yeah.
Tom Hodgman: 14:34
So we do a lot of grazing here as well, and we try and clear that off early in this as early in the season as we possibly can. We race across it, flatten it, and then get on to get on to solar and and do the same thing there and get to that second that second growth as soon as we can. And we we mow behind our we mow behind ourselves here at home, and we mow behind ourselves on solar. So we basically do the same exact thing there as we do here. It’s just a little bit different structure.
Tom Hodgman: 15:05
It’s not as easy in some places to position our electric fencing because of the the way the panels are structured and some of them really long runs. So, you know, it’s a long way down there. So Abby and my wife do a lot of the netting in 99% of the netting, and that’s that’s a lot of lot of steps for them. Yeah. We we kid like, we I kid them about the CrossFit training that they go through every year.
Glenda Pereira: 15:33
It’s a requirement to work here.
Tom Hodgman: 15:35
Some of those sites are hilly, and there’s some pretty good climbs. And we have a solar site we want to take on that’s hilly. And so that’s gonna be interesting.
Glenda Pereira: 15:44
Yeah. And do you always use a back fence? I’m just curious.
Tom Hodgman: 15:50
We that’s another topic for a discussion.
Glenda Pereira: 15:54
Let’s let’s save that. I’m just curious because
Tom Hodgman: 15:57
With the adult ewes Right. We generally use a back fence. Yeah. But we have a we have a technique where we use we use dividers in a large paddock and then we pull dividers. So essentially no back fence, but only for two or three days.
Tom Hodgman: 16:16
And then we’re onto the next full paddock. So it’s a modification of of allowing backgrazing, but only for a very brief period.
Glenda Pereira: 16:25
Yep. Yeah.
Tom Hodgman: 16:26
Before we get the next new leaf coming out. So we’re trying to avoid that second bite, the whole second bite.
Glenda Pereira: 16:32
Yeah. And it works for you.
Tom Hodgman: 16:33
Yeah. That technique right there Yep. Is our number one way of finishing lambs on pasture. And we we the last two years, we’ve have had the best lambs we’ve ever had. And and and I didn’t think we were going through this year.
Tom Hodgman: 16:50
But in the end, they really can that technique really and Abby’s, you know, blood, sweat, and tears that went into it. And it it that procedure really puts muscle on lambs, I have to say. And these ewes are super fat right now, and we do a little bit of it with them, but mostly they’re they’re just given a block for a day or two and then the next the next day, the next day, the next day. Yep.
Glenda Pereira: 17:16
Awesome. Yeah. Good tip. So for the remainder of the episode, I think I’d like to focus on because I I wanna have Tom back to talk about all these things just because Tom’s a wealth of knowledge in. But I wanna give a taste of what your lambing workshop will look like and, just some considerations as folks start getting prepared for the lambing season here.
Glenda Pereira: 17:46
What are you and your team doing to be prepared? What are obviously, you already have a structure for your lambing workshop, but there’s there’s so much to do in in the, you know, two, maybe, you know, even the last couple of weeks leading up to lambing. So I wanted to just kind of briefly talk about that.
Tom Hodgman: 18:08
So yeah. I mean, we’re we’re thinking it right now too. I mean, we need to place our orders for vaccines. We need to get our our med cabinet stocked. We we have to get I have to get that grain bin filled.
Tom Hodgman: 18:23
You know, I’ve got a number of things we have to do. You know, gotta be sure you have all all your supplies, all your tools, all your anything you’re gonna need, you better have it in advance because you can’t just run to Walmart and get a, you know, a puller or what you know? And even Tractor Supply doesn’t have a lot of this stuff. And even if they did, it’d probably be out. You know?
Tom Hodgman: 18:41
You’d have to go to some other place. It’s not a reliable way to deal with it. So just do all your shopping early.
Glenda Pereira: 18:47
Because like Colt said, I don’t know what your time frame is, but a lot of people are two to three weeks of straight lambing, and then that’s it. So there’s not the, you know, oh, the, I guess, the lag time, you know, in between when this ewe lambs to the next one that you’re you’re like, you’re saying, you know, I can just go get everything tomorrow or tomorrow or whatever. So you wanna do some prepared
Tom Hodgman: 19:13
Well, ewe estrus cycle ewe estrus cycle is seventeen days. So you technically can get everything in in seventeen days if everything settled. Last year, we had one of our tightest windows wait. Last year. Year before last, we had one of the tightest windows ever.
Tom Hodgman: 19:29
No. Last year.
Glenda Pereira: 19:30
I was saying, yeah.
Tom Hodgman: 19:30
Yeah. And we got everything in, like, thirty one days or something like that, which was excellent. We typically and I suspect it will be the case this year. We typically have a group of stragglers. Yeah.
Tom Hodgman: 19:43
So which we would call a second contemporary group because that’s how we collect our data is by animals within a within about a thirty day window. But but we, yeah, we we try to to do that, but this year, we used three ram lambs. We’re heavily interested in g in genetic improvement, and we had the opportunity to use a really hot ram a year ago, and we kept three sons. And we used all three sons, and each of them got, a dozen ewe lambs or a dozen ewes. And they’re not that experienced.
Tom Hodgman: 20:20
And they may have trouble breeding. They may not understand how to multitask, which is you have three ewes that come in heat at once and a ram lamb will often just spend his time with one of
Glenda Pereira: 20:31
them. Right.
Tom Hodgman: 20:32
And so
Glenda Pereira: 20:33
He’s not efficient.
Tom Hodgman: 20:34
They’re not efficient. Yeah. So we’re we’re gonna have a bunch of stragglers this We use a cleanup ram and we we had, I think, 10 or 11 marked by the cleanup ram. So we’re and we just sent off some some blood for preg checks earlier this week. That’s another thing.
Tom Hodgman: 20:54
So if you have any concerns about ewes being bred or not, for $6.50, you can get a preg check done on that. You just need a little bit of blood. And
Glenda Pereira: 21:03
Do you recommend doing that? How far ahead of time do before your first like, you know when your first ewe is gonna lamb. But for the ones that you’re maybe not sure about, those stragglers, when do you recommend sort of the what’s your cutoff
Tom Hodgman: 21:20
for it? So the pregnancy specific protein is detectable after, I think, three weeks. So basically three weeks after the ram comes out, you should be able to get a positive. So it’s not like ultrasound where you’re really timing it. And we’re not getting litter size.
Tom Hodgman: 21:38
We’re just getting, are you pregnant or not? Right. Because if you’re not pregnant, I don’t want to feed you. Because if I feed you, you’re costing me money. And I don’t need to spend any more money than is necessary.
Tom Hodgman: 21:48
Right. So again, it’s like this is a working commercial operation. So we have to really be careful about what’s coming in and going out. So and the other thing is is that they’ll get too fat. So if we just ignore it and we just leave them in there assuming they’re they’re bred and they’re not, and they’re on the same diet.
Tom Hodgman: 22:06
Yeah. Basic diet, then they’ll be too fat. And in that case, Katahdins are so easy keeping that we can end up they may not even breed the following year. Or I’ll tell you what happens often, even if we don’t feed them and we we don’t even breed them, our first time lambers at two years of age will triple. So their first pregnancy is three.
Tom Hodgman: 22:29
And so they’re asked to raise three first time out of the gate. Right. That’s a big task. And some of them pull it off, but there are some that, you know, you end up with a bottle. But, I mean, that’s that is something that we have to watch for.
Tom Hodgman: 22:42
Yeah. So we have to keep those open ewes on a lower plane of nutrition where we can end up with. And we had 15 sets of triplets last year, and five of those sets were out of first time moms. Wow. Exactly.
Tom Hodgman: 22:56
Can do the Katahdins cross foster well? We don’t cross foster, but they do cross foster. Yeah. A lot of people do. We don’t do it.
Tom Hodgman: 23:08
We we rarely we do bottle feed every year, but we’ve only tried cross fostering a couple of times. It didn’t really work. We didn’t do much about it. We just let the ewe raise her raise the lambs. And if if there’s a lamb that’s struggling, we’ll bottle it, but we don’t pull it.
Tom Hodgman: 23:26
We don’t have an orphan pen. We leave them right in with the group. They are they are sheep. And if you if you don’t, they become like little pets. And they Mhmm.
Tom Hodgman: 23:36
Then they’re an annoyance down the road, and we just leave them where they are. And then
Colt Knight: 23:41
Yeah. Every time you walk to the fence, here they come.
Tom Hodgman: 23:43
Yeah. Exactly. So we don’t we don’t we don’t do that. We’ve never done that. It is it is a thing.
Tom Hodgman: 23:49
And we I mean, if you had a lot of them, it’d be handy to have, like, a lactation machine that would create the milk and just feed them, and you wouldn’t have to even worry about them. You’re also not bottle feeding, so they wouldn’t be pets anyway. But it’s a several thousand dollar tool, which I don’t have. Yeah. But Yep.
Tom Hodgman: 24:04
So
Glenda Pereira: 24:05
Yeah. So we’ve talked about some gestation management, which is just as important
Colt Knight: 24:11
I had a question about this. Are you using any grease markers on your rams? Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Tom Hodgman: 24:15
Yeah. We every ram is harnessed. We change colors every seventeen days, and then we we start light, go dark, and then we put in a cleanup ram, mature a mature ram to to clean up on everybody in case somebody loses their pregnancy for whatever reason. Yep. And like I said, we had some this year that we had 10, which is a large number for us.
Tom Hodgman: 24:41
We usually have one or two that the but it’s because we used ram, three ram lambs. So
Glenda Pereira: 24:47
Yeah. You knew that going into you knew there was gonna be a risk that they just weren’t as ready as a mature ram.
Tom Hodgman: 24:53
Of More than the ewes more than half of the the ewes were bred to ram lambs. So we knew there was a high risk. So so I I think in part, those ram lambs don’t bring those ewes into estrus as easily as effectively, and then they obviously can’t multitask like a like a mature ram can.
Glenda Pereira: 25:15
So if folks are coming out to your lambing workshop or what are what are some of the basics that you’re walking us through? So you talked about ordering everything and supplies ahead of time. Sure. That’s really critical. We
Tom Hodgman: 25:33
what to what to to expect at the workshop specifically.
Glenda Pereira: 25:39
And how it ties to what you’re doing for management as well.
Tom Hodgman: 25:42
Right? So one of the most important things we do, and we do it all the time, and I know you and I’ve talked about this, is body condition scoring. Now we are we are very interested in collecting as much data on our animals as possible, and we body condition score roughly three times a year on all the adult ewes. We’re constantly touching them anyway and checking, but we write it down. Put it that way.
Tom Hodgman: 26:04
We write it down three times a year. So we’ll do that once they lamb out and again at weaning and then again at breeding. So that’s something that is a really important thing to do as you’re getting either ready to to to have your lambs. I would bone up on that technique. There’s a lot of really good YouTube videos out there.
Tom Hodgman: 26:30
In our workshop, we spend a significant amount of time on the on one of the days going over that and giving everybody a chance to do it. And we we put together a set of a skinny one, a a middle one, and a fat one. And so everybody can see it and and feel the structures, and we go over everything pretty carefully. And we do a little quiz, you know, with it all and and see where everybody lands. So that’s that’s a lot of fun.
Tom Hodgman: 26:54
And it talking about it in terms of context, like, what’s the best body condition? Well, you can’t answer that because it’s where are we in the production cycle?
Colt Knight: 27:04
Right.
Tom Hodgman: 27:04
So but that’s one of the things where the lights start coming on in people’s heads. You know? It’s like, oh, now I get it. They need to be heavy before they’re gonna lamb, and then you can expect them to be skinny after weaning, but then regain And that condition breeding then the light comes on and they’re like, oh, I get this. And then they’re touching it and say, oh, yeah, this is what it should feel like if they were weaning.
Tom Hodgman: 27:29
This ewe’s thin. Like, yes. Exactly. And we can talk to them about why and what because we had some fall there’s some fall lambers last year that had just weaned. And so we use them at in demo, and they were a little thin.
Tom Hodgman: 27:42
And, obviously, they’re thin. People are like, you need to feed this. I’m like, no. We don’t. She just she just weaned her lambs.
Tom Hodgman: 27:48
It’s okay. Right. And she has a full five months or so before she’s gonna before she’s going to be bred. So she got plenty of time to put condition on, and she’s in great condition today.
Glenda Pereira: 28:00
Yeah. So it’s a mix of hands on approach and the the theory or look the lecture side. Yep. Putting your concepts into practice.
Tom Hodgman: 28:08
Yep. Exactly. So we break it up into we break it up into a number of of modules, and some are more of a lecture format. And we take our tractor garage, our shop, and we turn it into a classroom. And we go through a lot of different, you know, a lot of different scenarios like, well, it’s in February for one.
Tom Hodgman: 28:32
So it’s good to get in and out of the cold. I tell everybody to dress like you’re going ice fishing because it can be really cold. But we have a warm space you can get into. And we, you know, I’ll go over like, odd positions for lambing and how to pull lambs and what you do in this scenario and that scenario. People always find that fascinating.
Tom Hodgman: 28:52
And we’ve seen pretty much you say this. You know, I’ve seen pretty much everything. And then I was on a wacko delivery that we’ve never seen before. We had a couple last year. And but yeah.
Tom Hodgman: 29:05
So it’s a combination of hands on stuff and and a little bit of lecture and demos and that sort of stuff. Yep. We’ve actually started to do some fecal egg count stuff where it’s just like an intro to fecal egg count. Like, here’s the microscope. Here’s the sample.
Tom Hodgman: 29:25
Here’s how you mix it up. Here’s how you load the slide. This is what we’re looking for. It’s just not the best time of year to do it because these Katahdins really don’t have much for worms.
Glenda Pereira: 29:33
And that is
Tom Hodgman: 29:34
They’re really relatively July. Yeah. Yeah. And then you get crazy stuff in there, you know? So you but but this is an intro.
Tom Hodgman: 29:41
So this is how you prepare it. So people went back to their hotel rooms that night and they they looked up you know, went on on Amazon, you know, to find out where they could get a a microscope. They all came back and they all shared amongst themselves. So it was like a it was a sort of like a little a friends group. You know?
Tom Hodgman: 29:58
They’re all sharing their their how about that one? What about this one? Oh, I like this one. Ask Tom what he thinks about that one. And so they they all came away from it.
Tom Hodgman: 30:06
Like, for $200, can get my own microscope. Yep. And for another, you know, $50, I can have all the supplies on hand. Why why aren’t I doing this? Yeah.
Tom Hodgman: 30:14
So and it’s not difficult. So people find out how difficult it is to load the slide, but that’s just all a matter of how shaky you are. You know? But so we do we do lots of lots of different lots of different things. We we walk through the medicine cabinet here too, which is something so, like, building a lambing kit.
Tom Hodgman: 30:32
I have a lambing room. Right? So we we we have a refrigerator and we have heat, and we have a we have a cold lamb. We can bring it into a heated space. We have, you know, all the all the meds that we need for any scenario.
Tom Hodgman: 30:45
I also have a vet that will return my texts and and calls and doesn’t have to come. So I have a really strong veterinary client relationship with a local vet. And so to access prescription drugs, which is basically everything now. So that’s something that something that you really need to have. If you don’t have a veterinary client relationship, get one.
Tom Hodgman: 31:06
It’ll cost you 90 to $100 to have somebody come at your farm and find out that you’re not a crazy wacko and that they they’ll you’ll be able to call them and talk to them and get advice. And my vet says the thing she appreciates about me is that she she knows that I know when I’m in over my head. And when I’m in over my head, I’ll call her, and I’ll bring her out to do whatever I need to do. And and she appreciates that. So she’s busy, and I don’t call her for hoof trimming.
Glenda Pereira: 31:36
Right.
Tom Hodgman: 31:36
But I I called her with a ewe last year that was pregnant, heavily pregnant, and had what we thought was a cracked pelvis. So that was that was a rough one.
Glenda Pereira: 31:48
Did it turn out to be a cracked pelvis?
Tom Hodgman: 31:50
We don’t know. We don’t know. We she kept limping, and then she would get better, and then it would get worse. And then once she got rid of the lambs, once she had gave birth to her lambs, then she recovered quite well. But she
Glenda Pereira: 32:04
still That extra weight. I tell you.
Tom Hodgman: 32:06
She still had she still had issues late this summer, and we we sent her to slaughter. But but, anyway, that that is that is one benefit of the client veterinary relationships. So Yeah.
Glenda Pereira: 32:21
And something you said. So you said that you have a lambing room. Now not everybody potentially is gonna have one. So what are the basics you want to kind of have some of that on hand ready for if you do need, you know, to bring in a lamb that just maybe it was a lambing difficulty, and now she just needs some extra care. So what what would you say when you were building your lambing room as you were starting out?
Glenda Pereira: 32:48
What were the critical things you needed in that?
Tom Hodgman: 32:51
Well, our ours is simply a heated space, but we we’ve we’ve acquired a large, basically a double sized milk crate. It’s vegetable crate actually. And we can place that relatively close to a space heater and it blows warm air on the lamb and it gets them dried off and gets them stabilized. You know, there’s there’s a lot to saving a hypothermic lamb, and there’s some pretty extreme pretty extreme procedures if you if you take it that far. I’ve been marginally successful with the intraperitoneal injection of dextrose, but that’s sort of the the biggest one if you need to do it.
Tom Hodgman: 33:36
But there’s all kinds of videos out there on how to do it, there’s it’s in a lot of the the old school books and stuff, and it does save it does save lambs. It’s just in many cases, a lamb’s hypothermic for not just because it’s hypothermic, but because it had other issues as well. Right. Like it has metabolic issues to begin with and then it became hypothermic. So if that lamb was born in May, it never would have gotten hypothermic.
Tom Hodgman: 33:58
Yeah. So misread those sometimes. But what I do is, you know, I always want to have certain things available at lambing season time. So I want to have you know, a bottle of calcium gluconate to treat milk fever. I wanna have some propylene glycol to treat anybody who’s sort of sluggish and slow and might suffer from pregnancy toxemia.
Tom Hodgman: 34:24
I wanna have a bottle of dextrose in case I do have to inject a a lamb. I want, you know, a a big syringe. I want in in case I have to do either calcium gluconate or or or dextrose. So like a 100, 50, 50 millimeter 60 millimeter milliliter syringe, those sorts of thing. We we we just have a a whole series of supplies.
Tom Hodgman: 34:50
We just have a supply room that we are able to to work in, And it gets us out of the cold and we’re able to treat things better if we’re not shivering, our fingers aren’t frozen, we can come in here. We keep two books in here. One is arguably the best small ruminant management guide there is. And another one is an old book from England, which is it’s a new book, but it’s quite old. And it’s got a lot of weird stuff in it, but occasionally you really need the weird stuff.
Glenda Pereira: 35:25
Right.
Tom Hodgman: 35:26
And it’s if you can get through the the language, you know, the way it’s written. Yeah. There’s a lot of good information there. So we use those. We use the one, the small ruminant book a lot.
Tom Hodgman: 35:40
I mean, we it’s got dosages for meds. It’s got, you know, when to use this withdrawal. It’s got all kinds of stuff in there. Tables after tables after tables after tables of information is super useful. So that’s we really we really use that one a lot.
Tom Hodgman: 35:55
So having a good reference is another another one. I would recommend this book called Managing Your Ewe and Her Newborn Lambs. It’s written by author Laura Lawson, and she has a whole series of books. It’s arguably the best lambing book out there. I do not own it.
Tom Hodgman: 36:12
I wish I did. It’s also, like, $200 used on Amazon. And there’s a couple on eBay right now. I checked this morning, and they’re, like, 150, 180 current bids. You can rent it for $46.
Tom Hodgman: 36:26
You if you think about one person I know took it out the library and photocopy, but that’s not cool. But but I have had the opportunity to buy it, and I passed it. And I shouldn’t have. It’s it’s like a, you know, five out of five stars And sort of she’s passed away. It’s out of print, and her family has no interest in reprinting the book.
Tom Hodgman: 36:48
So I don’t think they realize how
Glenda Pereira: 36:50
Critical the information is.
Tom Hodgman: 36:51
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And how little yeah.
Tom Hodgman: 36:53
It was I guess it was presented very well. And everybody told me years ago that it’s it’s the book. So I just never I should have bought it years ago before. It was out of print. It was only published in 2013, I think.
Tom Hodgman: 37:05
So it’s not that old. So vaccine is one thing that we that we wanna have available. We we vaccinate for clostridial disease in our ewes. We don’t do abortion vaccinations. That’s a common thing.
Tom Hodgman: 37:21
But we have never had any abortion waves in the flock. And so we just we haven’t had the need to. We were interested in vaccinating for mastitis, the I forget the name of the vaccine right now, but we were gonna vaccinate starting this year for for mastitis. It’s a it was a from a company out of Spain, but they they’re not shipping to The U they’re not selling to The US anymore. It was they they trialed it in The US, and then they got they got a bite on it, and people started to get interested in it, and then they backed away from The US market for whatever reason.
Tom Hodgman: 38:00
They said they’re focusing on their European customers. So so that’s a disappointment for us, but we are gonna do we’re gonna actually do California mastitis test on every ewe at right shortly after she lambs out this year to get a a jump on that. But
Glenda Pereira: 38:19
Has it been an issue in previous years? Oh, yeah.
Tom Hodgman: 38:21
Yeah. Oh, yeah. That’s her biggest issue is mastitis, especially sub subclinical mastitis, you know, where it’s not overtly detectable, but it’s there. It’s in about twenty percent of the ewes in every in every flock. I’ve seen data on it from different flocks.
Tom Hodgman: 38:39
It’s twenty percent every time. Yeah. Seriously, it’s it’s like a a fifth of your flock has has subclinical mastitis to some degree. It’s it takes out a lot of ewes, really good productive ewes. It takes them out.
Tom Hodgman: 38:51
So but one of the people that was involved with starting the Katahdin breed once said, a really good productive Katahdin ewe doesn’t get mastitis. So you have to sort of keep that in the back of your mind that you can’t keep those ewes around because you’re just you’re just spreading those genetics for lack of resistance to some of these bacteria. So so in terms of getting ready for it, those are mostly the things that we deal with. You know, we use we do use lamb jackets occasionally, like a really cold night, and we do we do the easiest way to do that is we just take an old fleece jacket, and we cut the sleeves off and cut the sleeve in half and then cut four leg holes in a pee hole. And eat you get four you get four out of each Yep.
Tom Hodgman: 39:44
Each set of arms. And that works great for us. And we have, like, super thick polar fleece, and we have thinner polar fleece, and we have, you know, we have one that’s like a looks like a piece of carpet. And we just have different sizes, big ones, little ones, everything in between. And then sometimes we’ve taken the body and just made a tube out of it and then done the same thing.
Tom Hodgman: 40:06
That’s we had a really, really cold winter several years back. I think we it was like the first time I’d ever heard the word polar vortex. And I remember spending my evenings making, like, hand stitching hand stitching and cutting holes out and and getting different sizes and stuff. And we ended up with a whole bunch
Colt Knight: 40:27
of them. Had three litter of pigs during that polar vortex. It was awful.
Tom Hodgman: 40:33
Yes. Yeah. Awful. Yep. So we we Did
Glenda Pereira: 40:37
you make calf? Did you make pig jackets?
Colt Knight: 40:39
Unfortunately, they didn’t survive
Tom Hodgman: 40:41
long Yeah. What’s amazing about these Katahdin lambs is that they have really high vigor, but they’re obviously they’re born soaking wet. And if it’s if it’s below I don’t know. If it’s in the single digits, if it’s gonna be below zero and single digits overnight, you might wanna do something even 20 sometimes. We just jacket them.
Tom Hodgman: 41:07
And and believe it or not, polar fleece does what it says it’ll do. It wicks the moisture away from the body, and you it it it puts it out on the edge. So it normally would just go on the edge of the hair and then evaporate. But what this does is it it it it takes it even further and out to the edge of the polar fleece. So you’re looking at you’re looking at a pen of lambs with their mom a few hours later, and the lambs are all covered with dew.
Tom Hodgman: 41:30
Yep. But you take the jacket off, and they’re all dry and warm inside. So it’s it works beautifully. The other thing that we do in that case, and something to keep in mind is having supplies ready for tube feeding. So tube feeding is an extremely important technique for winter lambing.
Tom Hodgman: 41:47
And it’s relatively easy to do, but it’s a bit freaky if you’ve never done it before. Yeah. And that’s one of the things we spend a session on in the workshop. And Abby sets up a lamb, and we’re able to demonstrate how to tube on a on a on a lamb carcass. And then and I do a live lamb so I so you can see how I do it.
Tom Hodgman: 42:15
And but we because we can’t actually have the, you know, it’s one of those things we don’t want to put milk down their lungs. So but we show them what you need to feed, feel for, and get the tube in correctly. And that was another one where people walk away from that skill and they say, wow, I can do this now. And that’s, to me as instructor and people saying that was worth the price of admission, I’m like, because the goal is, you know, we want to, you know, that the skills you learn are gonna save a lamb, and the value of the lamb is the price of admission. So, know You can
Colt Knight: 42:52
save a lot of lambs. You sure
Tom Hodgman: 42:54
can. And and I’ve had a set of I can think of a set of triplets born at, gosh, like 01:00 in the morning and it was gonna be like, I don’t know if Abby was here or not, five below or one below or very cold. And it was two before we’re done. And I’m like, okay. I can come back in the morning and tube them, or I can tube them all right now and put a jacket on them and send them send them home with two ounces of of milk in their belly, and I can go to bed and know that I’ve done everything I possibly can to keep those lambs alive and they lived.
Tom Hodgman: 43:33
Yeah. You know? And but it was that was a case where the mother’s milk was like melted vanilla ice cream, so it doesn’t flow very well. And it was also super cold. So that was that was a tricky one.
Tom Hodgman: 43:47
Yeah. But we I did it, and I got all three done. And but three tube three lambs at 3 AM. That’s that’s tricky stuff.
Colt Knight: 43:55
I’ve got a funny tubing story, and it’s just an adult goat. When they’re when they’re lambs or kids, you don’t you don’t need a speculum. You could just stick the tube straight down. Yeah. When you’re dealing with an adult goat, they’ll they’ll chew on it so bad.
Colt Knight: 44:08
Sure. And you can’t just stick your finger in there to
Tom Hodgman: 44:10
hold them over. Right.
Colt Knight: 44:11
I know. We were we were dosing them with specific treatments for a research trial, and one of the goats swallowed the speculum. Oh. And it got stuck in his throat. And it took about a day and a half for the vet to come out, and he just came out and reached reached down there with a long pair of forceps and just pulled it right out, and the goat never acted like anything was wrong.
Glenda Pereira: 44:33
Sounds like goat behavior.
Colt Knight: 44:35
Yeah. When that happened, we were like, oh, I want to die. There’s no way they could survive that.
Glenda Pereira: 44:40
Goats are incredible.
Tom Hodgman: 44:41
That’s yeah. That that is that and that that contributes to the the fear of the of doing it too because my wife, she she will not tube. She will not tube. And I and I resisted it for a long, long time. And then I I remember I remember losing lambs, and they just they basically starved to death because they didn’t latch on correctly or whatever.
Tom Hodgman: 45:06
I was inexperienced. But once I learned how to tube, it’s it’s amazing. And I and I will say I don’t need to tube very often. I have read some I read some research paper out of Quebec where they were they recommended this Ile De France breed where they said they could get eighty seven percent survival of their lambs if they tubed them at birth. And I’ve thought, I can get ninety seven percent without tubing at all.
Tom Hodgman: 45:41
So it’s like, this is this breed is different. And then I can get that to nearly a hundred if I tube a few a year because they they were struggling. Yeah. And so And
Glenda Pereira: 45:55
it just depends on your
Colt Knight: 45:56
have a lot of advantages over your traditional wool sheep that were single trait selected for wool production. Exactly. Generation.
Tom Hodgman: 46:03
Vigor. Vigor is the big vigor is the big one in lambs. Vigor vigor is the big thing in lambs. But I I would say having having your having a tube available and you know, you can buy a tubing kit from Premier One or whatever, or you can just you you can there’s various sources for those things, different vet catalogs, that sort of thing. But having that in a big syringe is all we use.
Tom Hodgman: 46:28
And then I just strip the ewe into a coffee cup because I have, you know, a death grip on my coffee cup, and I’m really good at not spilling it. So I can strip into the coffee cup. And then I and I’ll take the coffee cup out with a with hot water in it to keep it warm because you don’t, you know, chill So and then then dump it out and strip into it. And that’s often hard because the ewe doesn’t want you to touch her udder. And so sometimes I have to get forceful with my shoulder and hold her in place.
Tom Hodgman: 46:56
And but anyway, we get that done. And so having you may have to bottle feed. You may wanna buy colostrum. We do have some powder colostrum that we that we will use occasionally, but we prefer to use straight from the mother. And we do have some frozen colostrum, and we we don’t tube that much that we need a whole lot.
Tom Hodgman: 47:19
I did buy some last year because it had some powdered stuff, and we did use it. But it I’m not sure it it was any better than what we’d been using.
Glenda Pereira: 47:27
Yeah.
Tom Hodgman: 47:28
And having milk replacer on hand is another thing that’s handy. We’ll we usually bottle raise three to five. Sometimes they’re only on a bottle for a week, and other times they’re on the bottle for the whole time. Occasionally, you have a ewe that dies, and you only. Other times, you just had a triplet that was slow to figure it out.
Tom Hodgman: 47:49
And then once you gotta pick up, then pick me up with the with the bottle. It it takes off on it.
Colt Knight: 47:54
Do you have any mothering issues with your Katahdins?
Tom Hodgman: 47:57
And Not not generally. Every time I say we don’t we don’t have any mothers reject lambs, I’ll have one reject one. But when we started off, we had a lot. And then we started selecting for rams. Started selecting rams and and retaining ewes that have a high number of lambs weaned statistic.
Tom Hodgman: 48:18
And number of lambs weaned was related to lamb survival. So, I mean
Colt Knight: 48:23
Our Rambouillets were horrible. If you’re
Tom Hodgman: 48:26
crappy mother, then you you Yeah. We had
Colt Knight: 48:29
to halter them and jug and Yeah. For two or three days before they would mother up to their lamb.
Tom Hodgman: 48:34
Yeah. So we we sometimes threaten ewe with the head gate. Like, just put the headgate in there. And if you butt that lamb one more time, you’re going in the headgate, and that’ll be it. But a lot of it is understanding why the mother is rejecting the lamb.
Tom Hodgman: 48:49
Are you truly a bad mother, or are you is your udder sensitive?
Glenda Pereira: 48:54
Right. Do you have a lot of edema?
Tom Hodgman: 48:55
Right. Or are you do you just feel like crap? Are you in shock? Why are you being a bad mother? And if you can solve those other solve if you solve three of of those things, it only leaves bat you know, you’re a lousy mother.
Tom Hodgman: 49:09
And we don’t end up with that many lousy mothers. I mean, I have a head gate, and I will use it. But sometimes a ewe will say, I’ve had three, and I’m not taking that one because I don’t have enough fuel in the tank. And she’s she’s selecting which ones I’m gonna raise, and she’s just that’s I can’t do that. My resources have to go to these two, not to that one.
Tom Hodgman: 49:35
It’s not like, and this is a ewe that’s raised three, you know, multiple, multiple seasons. So why at age seven would she become a lousy mother? She’s a fantastic mother. She’s actually a good mother to those two, and she’s saying, I don’t have it. Yeah.
Tom Hodgman: 49:51
You bred me, and I wasn’t capable of of doing this.
Glenda Pereira: 49:54
Yeah. So Some of it’s just nutrient management, and I think about this. So as ewes and most dams become older, they become less efficient in everything that they’re doing. So for example, that’s why we tend to see milk fever highly associated with older dams because they just can’t pull calcium from their bone reserves. And so diet really or supplementation with a calcium bolus or whatever it is that you’re using is how they’re gonna get that calcium to then kick start their mobility so they’re able to just, you know, officially get through that lambing period.
Glenda Pereira: 50:34
And that’s just that’s just how it happens. It’s the body doing its thing. So I think we’ve talked so much about lambing considerations, and I think folks just need to get out here and take Tom’s course. Would you agree?
Tom Hodgman: 50:50
Oh, yeah. I totally agree. We try and keep it to we wanna keep it to to 20 people, and I’ve got a pretty good list right now, but I we’ll see. We’re about to advertise it here right between the holidays probably. I’ll get a announcement out on Facebook, But you keep an eye out on the Maine Sheep Breeders Association is one place.
Tom Hodgman: 51:14
New England sheep users, Vermont, New Hampshire, Sheep and Goat Resource. Those are Facebook pages. They are Facebook groups. Yep. Yep.
Tom Hodgman: 51:24
And I and Waldoview Farm is a Waldoview Farm. Waldoview Farm Katahdin Sheep is our Facebook page. You can also look at katahdinsforsale.com, which is my website, and that will have all the sign up information there too. And if anybody wants to reach out to me, you can reach out to tom@katahdinsforsale.com, and, I can forward all that information to you. We have links to everything you need to do that.
Tom Hodgman: 51:52
But, yeah, it’s a super fun weekend. It’s an exhausting weekend, but, boy, by by Sunday night, it’s a big family. It’s really, really cool.
Colt Knight: 52:04
So I remember I I went to work as a graduate student. I was doing weekend shifts, and I came in one Sunday morning, and I told everyone else not to worry about it because I was gonna be there anyway. I’ll just take care of that. And we had 29 sets of twins or triplets that morning. And I had to work up all of those by myself.
Colt Knight: 52:25
I was there till, like, two in the afternoon because we were docking tails, castrating Yeah. Ear tagging Yeah. All kinds of vaccines. Five to seven.
Tom Hodgman: 52:35
Five over anything over five lambing in a day is a lot, I think, for what we do where we’re where we’re weighing lambs and we’re we’re taking measurements on lambs. We’re taking measurements on the dam. You know, body condition scoring the ewe, doing a FAMACHA on the high. We’re doing, you know, just a lot of different stuff. It adds up.
Tom Hodgman: 52:56
It adds up. And then we have, like, tagging from the previous days. So sometimes, you know, we do, you know, five one day, three the next, four the next. You know? We always say when you go to the barn at at seven in the morning, you’re not sure when you’re gonna get back to the house.
Tom Hodgman: 53:13
So we stock the cabinet with some food, just like snacks and stuff and PB and J and that sort of thing. It doesn’t really get more than one or two sandwiches made a year, but it’s it’s you just don’t have time to get back to the house. So we’ve and I’ve slept on on the couch here in this room a number of times. Almost every year, I’ll spend at least one night in here in a relatively sleepless night, but it’s a super comfortable couch. So I have a sleeping bag so I can climb right in there.
Tom Hodgman: 53:41
I don’t have to get you know, don’t have to go to the house and disturb my wife and all that sort of stuff. I can just stay right here and it’s and I can we have cameras in the barns. We have four cameras so I can monitor while I’m sitting right here and, know, from my sleeping bag. And then if I do have to run over there, it’s just across the driveway. So it’s really easy.
Glenda Pereira: 53:59
Yeah. So Well, thank you so much, Tom. It’s my pleasure. I mentioned, folks are just gonna have to get out here and get their hands on in the future to learn more from you. But we are incredibly thankful for the time that you gave us today.
Glenda Pereira: 54:13
And for the listeners, we’ll be sure to add a ton of show notes so that you can reach out to Tom and have a ton more resources if you are going to be lambing this season. So with that, Colt, folks can, reach us by email if they have comments, questions, concerns, or future topic suggestions. And you can find us at extension.farmcast@maine.edu.
Colt Knight: 54:39
A very good email delivery time, doesn’t it?
Glenda Pereira: 54:42
Was that too long? When I’m not the one doing this, I forget.