In the nick of time: Winter Lambing 2025
Winter lambing 2025 commenced a bit earlier than normal due to careful planning in the summer. In an effort to have lambs ready by Easter 2026, the rams were let loose to the ewes in June this year and removed by July 4th. This meant that the first little fluff balls to grace the barn came in mid November with perfect weather.
Over the next month and a half, triplets, twins, a few singles, and even more triplets were born. This round we ended up with 11 set of triplets! That is 33 lambs just right there! The final count of lambs soared to 73 with an average litter size of 2.1% (meaning each ewe had a little more than 2 lambs to raise)
Through Thanksgiving we had our first bottle lamb in the house and a week later he had a friend. Because of the large number of triplets, we ended up with 4 lambs rejected by their moms who were saved through the tremendous effort of bottle feeding. Three times a day for several weeks and then down to just morning and night for a few more weeks. It is certainly exhausting having so many bottle babies. Usually there are enough single lambs born to balance out the triplets. We take a healthy, thriving triplet and rub it all over a freshly born single and the new mom doesn’t know the difference. In this way we are able to avoid bottle feeding and both moms are better off in the end for having raised twins each. But this year, it was triplet after triplet after triplet and then only twins!!!
Luckily, the last lamb was born in the very end of December 2025 and we were able to avoid the crazy cold weather of January! Many barn fires this year on other farms took the lives of countless pregnant ewes. It is extremely tragic, but in most of these cases, the farmers were using heat lamps to try and keep their animals warm. This year was a good lesson that we will remember for a long time in both the danger of adding heat to a barn and the joy of finishing wither lambing “early”.
These lambs are bound for the easter market and now, in mid-February, almost ready for weaning. If you are interested in a whole or half lamb, please reach out sooner than later so we can reserve a lamb for you!