By: Dave Pratt
The biggest mistake people make in grazing management is providing too short a recovery period for plants after grazing. Of course too much rest isn’t good either. In drier environments excluding animals from a pasture long after it has recovered will lead to reduced productivity, dead grass and bare soil. In wetter environments it can lead to brush encroachment.
The legislation is the strongest in decades for the American sheep industry with wool and cotton textile provisions and mandatory funding provided for minor species animal drug development. These were two key requests of the American Sheep Industry Association. Additional risk management is reauthorized with crop insurance and a wool marketing loan. ASI also actively supported the vaccine development program for disease preparedness, which is newly funded in the Farm Bill, as well.
Scrapie in goats is a deadly infectious disease that can shut down an entire operation with a single diagnosis. But scientists have concluded that two naturally occurring goat alleles in the prion gene each confer resistance to classical scrapie. You may already have these genetics in your herd.
By: Carolina Fernandez, Dermot Hutchinson, Randi Shaw, Jake Parkinson, Caitlyn McCaulley, OSU Animal Science Undergraduate Students, Brady Campbell, Program Coordinator, OSU Sheep Team
At a basic level, producers have two options when it comes to feeding strategies, ad libitum or controlled feed intake. Ad libitum feeding, more commonly referred to as “having animals on full feed”, is when animals are provided feed at all times and allowed to eat as much as they want, whenever they want. On the other hand, controlled feed intake is a management strategy in which animals are fed controlled amounts of feed at regular intervals (for example, a group of animals are fed on the basis of lbs./hd./day).
By: Sara Beth Routh
In the small ruminant industry, there is a disease that is often the hot topic of discussion. Often thought of as the “hush hush” disease, it is called Caseous Lymphadenitis (CL).
By: Janet Garman
Today, most of the sheep milk products are imported. Mediterranean countries are the biggest exporters of sheep dairy products. The sheep dairy demand is growing and a dairy farmer incorporating dairy sheep is in the right place at the right time. United States residents are realizing that sheep milk products can be a healthy alternative to cow milk.
By: Susan Schoenian
Researchers at the Gluck Equine Research Center at the University of Kentucky have developed Smartphone technology for doing fecal egg counts. The technology has been licensed by Zoetis, which is focusing on small animals, while the University of Kentucky continues to fine-tune the technology for the equine industry. According to one of the researchers, a 2018 product launch is possible.
By: Matt Reese
“Worldwide, producers are losing billions of dollars to parasites through production losses and actual animal losses. They are more of an issue in the Eastern U.S. because our grazing areas are more concentrated than in the West. Issues with parasites increase this time of year when temperatures are 50 to 104 degrees F. Beyond this range, their survivability decreases significantly,” said Brady Campbell, program coordinator of the Ohio State University sheep team.
By: Bruce Anderson
Grasses have more fiber than legumes but grass fiber usually is more digestible than legume fiber.
Bellwether (note the -wether spelling) is a term that pops up frequently in writing about politics
sheepngoats 