Start With Sheep, Not Goats, and Nobody Wants to Hear It

Start with sheep. Six Katahdin ewes, a rented ram in November, lambs on the ground in April. You'll learn everything you need to know about livestock without spending your first summer building a fence a goat respects.

That's the advice, and most people ignore it, because goats are funnier. Fair enough. But know what you're signing up for, because a goat is a four-legged escape artist with a grudge against your fencing budget. A friend of mine came home to a Nigerian Dwarf standing on the hood of his F-150, calm as a deacon, looking at him like he was the one in the wrong place.

The real split isn't cute versus boring. It's grazers versus browsers. Sheep eat grass with their heads down. Goats want leaves, bark, multiflora rose, honeysuckle, and anything at eye level. If you bought five acres that's mostly pasture, you want sheep. If you bought five acres of brush and brambles you'd like to turn back into pasture, goats earn their keep. Just don't expect them to clear it once and be finished. They'll knock it back, it'll come again, and you'll be rotating them through that same thicket for three years.

The fence is the whole decision

For sheep, a 48-inch woven wire with 4-inch spacing works, or four to five strands of high-tensile electric with the bottom wire around 6 to 8 inches off the ground. Sheep test a fence once, get popped, and mostly quit.

Goats don't quit. Goats consider your fence a suggestion.

Two things to know. First, don't use standard field fence with 6-by-6-inch openings if your goats have horns. They put their head through, can't get it back out, and you'll spend your Saturday cutting a goat free from a fence you just paid for. Use the 4-inch square net wire sold as sheep and goat fence. Second, whatever electric charger the box says will handle your footage, buy a bigger one. Weeds and wet grass steal voltage all summer, and a hot wire that's gone lukewarm is worse than no wire at all, because the animals learn it's fake.

Plan the fence before you buy the animals. This gets done backward constantly. Somebody brings home three doelings on a Sunday, then spends a month chasing them out of the neighbor's orchard while the woven wire sits on a pallet.

Buy from a producer, not the sale barn

The cheapest animals you'll ever find are at a livestock auction, and they're cheap because somebody smarter than you already decided they weren't worth keeping.

Buy from a small producer who actually culls. Ask three questions. How often do you deworm the whole flock? Does this ewe lamb unassisted without help? What have you tested for? For sheep that means OPP. For goats, CL, CAE and Johne's. If the answer is a blank stare, keep driving.

Then look at the animal. Wide, level back. Feet under her, not splayed. Teeth that meet the pad. A soft udder with two functional teats, not a lumpy one. Body condition you can feel over the spine and ribs, firm but not sharp.

And get hair sheep unless you have a real reason to want wool. Katahdin, Dorper, St. Croix and their crosses shed their coats. Wool sheep mean finding a shearer, and good shearers are booked solid in spring and don't drive out for eight head. You'll be the guy on hold in April with a flock that's miserable in 85-degree weather.

The thing that actually kills them

Not coyotes. Worms.

The barber pole worm, Haemonchus contortus, is a blood feeder. It thrives in warm, wet pasture, and it explodes in early summer. An animal with a heavy load goes anemic, gets pale gums and a bottle-jaw swelling under the chin, then goes down. Lambs and kids die from it. So do ewes and does right after birth, when their immunity dips.

Two habits make the difference.

Check eyelids, don't guess. Pull the lower lid down. Bright pink to red is good. Pale pink to white means anemia and trouble. The FAMACHA system trains you to score it on a 1-to-5 card, and your extension office or vet can point you to one. Check every animal every two or three weeks in summer. It takes four minutes for a small flock.

Deworm the animals that need it, not the whole flock on a calendar. Blanket deworming every eight weeks is how a farm ends up with worms that shrug at every product on the shelf. That's not theoretical. Resistance is widespread, and once it's on your ground, it's your problem permanently. Work out a protocol with a vet who sees small ruminants, use fecal egg counts to know whether your dewormer still works, and cull the animal that needs treatment three times a year. She's not unlucky. She's genetically a liability, and her lambs will be too.

Rotate pasture if you can. Moving the flock every week or two and letting a paddock rest 30 days or more starves the larvae out better than any drench.

Minerals, and the mistake that kills goats

Sheep and goats can't eat the same mineral. Goats need dietary copper. Sheep are highly sensitive to it, and copper accumulates in the liver until it dumps all at once and kills them. So if you run both species together, you can't put out goat mineral.

Buy loose mineral formulated for the species, free choice, in a covered feeder. Skip the pressed block. A goat's tongue isn't built to get enough off a block, and the block turns to gravel in the first rain anyway.

Hooves get trimmed every two to four months on soft ground, less on rock. Buy real hoof shears and a small stand. Trimming a struggling ewe bent over at the waist is how your back goes out.

Shelter, guardians, and the honest math

A three-sided shed facing away from the prevailing wind is enough. Wet and drafty is what kills lambs, not cold. Deep, dry bedding and a windbreak beat an expensive barn every time. And time your breeding so you're not delivering in a February ice storm. Sheep gestate about 147 days, goats about 150. Ram or buck in November means babies in April, when the grass is coming and you can sleep.

Predators are real. A livestock guardian dog works, and a Great Pyrenees will bark at the moon all night, which your neighbors will mention. Donkeys are hit or miss. Keeping a rifle you can actually shoot well at 100 yards is part of owning animals that something else wants to eat, and coyote rules vary by state, so know your local law on protecting livestock before you need it.

Now the math. Figure four to six head per acre of decent grass with rotation, less on thin ground. Round bales, a mineral program, fencing, a vet call and hoof shears add up faster than lamb sells for. Ten head isn't a business. It's a freezer full of the best meat you'll ever eat, a pasture that gets better every year instead of worse, and kids who learn where food comes from before somebody on a screen tells them.

The ewe you'll keep longest is the one you never think about. She lambs in the corner of the field on a Tuesday, raises twins, never goes pale, never gets caught in the fence. Find four more like her and quit buying anything else.