when to breed

[dfarms11]

Well, I don't know if I've said but
we picked up 4 dorper ewes to breed
as a project for the kids. We bred
them to start at the end of april.
Now I'm just wondering do you all
just breed once a year or do you
rebreed soon after lambing to try and
get 2 lamb crops per year? I don't
know if that is too hard on the ewes
or not. I would think it would be but
I thought I had heard of guys
breeding that way. I will probably be
asking a lot of questions as if these
turn out good, I might just have to
get more!

[kato]

They call it accelerated lambing when you breed more than once. I haven't looked into it very far, so don't know what the economics of it are. For now, we're going to go with once a year lambing. In the future? Not sure. I guess we'll take it as it comes.

I do know that certain breeds are more suited to it than others, because they will breed "out of season". I'm not sure if Dorpers fit in that group or not.

[Bez]

We accelerate. We actually lamb out 3 times a year and are moving to four. Hard on them? Some would say so - but in fact we believe they work for us and not the other way around. We run three distinct families and always lamb in a big indoor pen.

We run a movable divider across the pen. As they lamb out we move them across the divider. As we get crowded we move the divider - that way we always know which girls have lambed out.

Just getting ready to move the Feb lambs and moms out of the barn as the other group has now started and we have a bunch of lambs in a covered outdoor pen.

Everyone does things differently - just do what works for YOU!

Best to all

Bez

[zincsulfate]

I have no idea.