This is a lamb born in May

This is a lamb born in May, looking quite grown up now. Lambs (and piglets) grow extremely fast. By the time a lamb reaches market weight, the average person would not even know it’s a young animal because it no longer looks like a baby lamb.

This is the best our lambs have ever looked, as our first few years raising sheep on this land we slowly figured out our soil has a cobalt deficiency. We have always provided mineral to our animals, but when starting from a deficiency it just wasn’t quite enough for optimal health. Now all the ewes receive a cobalt bolus, which is like a big pill that they swallow and hangs out in their rumen, slowly releasing the essential vitamin b12 over the course of a few years.

And with a larger flock now (60 sheep this year as opposed to the 20 we started with) we are also able to rotationally graze all our land while keeping our grass in a vegetative state, which means the animals are eating it when it’s providing optimal nutrition. Without so many animals we couldn’t always get to certain pastures before the grass got stemmy and went to seed. But this difference in grazing in combination with the ewes getting enough cobalt has resulted in big, healthy lambs like we’ve never seen before!