2017 marks our 20th year raising White Dorpers and it’s been rewarding to see the growing success of the breed.
Despite a tough winter with record low temperatures and a stormy spring, our W. Dorpers have wintered well and have dropped an impressive 2017 lamb crop with lots of twins.
As far other ranch news, we did a fall lambing again this year resulting in over 100 lambs from A.I. sires and also some of our best home-bred sires. We’ve found our W. Dorpers very handy at producing a fall lamb crop. Also, for the last two years we have turned a top ram lamb into the fall lambing ewes to get another lamb crop in late spring. The majority will breed back and those that do can result in three or four lambs per ewe per year without dealing with triplets. However, this requires a quality feed source throughout summer through fall, which we are able to provide.
Our two A.I. sessions included offspring from Weebollabolla, high selling ram at the 2015 National Dorper Sale in Australia, and Gossimer Downs 110422. Both rams are trait leaders for Carcass Plus and MCP (Maternal Carcass Production) Indexes on LambPlan. Both rams are owned by Etiwanda White Dorpers. We feel these rams’ offspring are going to be valuable additions to our bloodlines. We plan to go back to Australia this fall.
Another improvement to our operation in 2017 was the purchase of a Shearwell FarmWorks system and EID tags. This will streamline record keeping for LambPlan and general management. Weights and ID are automatically recorded as sheep go across the scale for submission to LambPlan. For record keeping during lambing, it tracks sire, dam and other information on individual animals. The E.I.D tags contain our premises code so it also eliminates the need for scrapie tags for sale sheep.
We think we have a good group of sale sheep this year. See our sale sheep page for more specific information.
