Kyle Farms All Natural Lamb

I'm trying to post an entry every Monday, and unfortunately the past week has been relatively uneventful.  Shearing of the ewes due to lamb in the next couple of weeks happened 2 weeks ago, and the rest of the flock is waiting patiently for the combination of nice weather and available shearers.  The late spring lambing ewes are starting to bag up and look closer to lambing, and everyone is starting to think about field and equipment preparation for planting and haying.  Its currently a waiting game.

 Since waiting games aren't very interesting to write about, or read for that matter, I thought I would introduce the backgrounds of the ewes at Kyle Farms.  

Dorset/Finn cross ewes are the basis of the flock with the ideal being a 3/4 Dorset, 1/4 Finn sheep.  The Dorset base is valued for producing a high quality meat lamb with good bone, muscling and growth rates.  They also are very good mothers and raise their lambs well with little assistance.  Crossing Dorset ewes with Finn sheep increases the number of lambs that a ewe has per lambing as the Finn sheep are renowned for their fertility and often have 4-5 lambs at a time.  Finn sheep are also smaller slighter sheep and this makes the ewes easier to handle and move (pick up) by one person.  

Suffolk rams may on occasion be used on ewes that did not lamb with their lambing group to produce meat lambs and occasionally a ewe lamb out of this cross is kept as a replacement.  Affectionately known as dirty faced ewes, there are a few black faced cross ewes in the flock.  

Our ram flock is made up of purebred Dorset, Finn, and Ile de France rams with some home bred cross rams kept every year to maximize the hybrid vigor provided by our Dorset/Finn crosses.  The Ile de France rams produce a lovely meat lamb with great hind quarter muscling and excellent growth on mother's milk and grass.  

Rare breeds at Kyle Farms

Kyle Farms was home for a time to a small flock of Romanov ewes and rams.  Romanov sheep are very fertile and are known for the large numbers of lambs they will have in litters.  Their crosses with traditional white faced sheep are generally very fertile, can lamb throughout the year and raise white, wooled lambs.  Unfortunately they are more susceptible to feet problems than the rest of our flock and require more attention at lambing than we expect to provide our ewes and so have been fazed out of the flock.