Welcome to our blog, let's get up to speed: Pregnant ewe with Mastitis!

We have been leasing our pastures to a sheep rancher for the past two irrigation seasons. Last year we decided to begin to raise our own flock. We did some research and landed on St Croix hair sheep, known for their immunity to disease and worms, ability to forage in the snow and robust flavor. St. Croix ewes have a very good lambing survivability and these ewes are quite instinctive mothers compared to some other breeds.

In 2021 we started off with 3 wethers, castrated boy lambs, who we kept for 8 months and sent them to processing at the end of the season. We sold two halves and a whole to friends and kept one. Delicious! In January 2022 we bought 10 more St Croix sheep: a ram from Snake River, Idaho and 9 ewes from Klamath Falls. These will be our base flock. One of the ewes was already pregnant, Aloe, and one of age to be covered by the ram. The rest are younglings, we will wait for them to breed until they're a wee bit older. Meanwhile, they are cute as buttons.

Now that we are up to date, let's get into the nitty gritty. We discovered Aloe has an enflamed teat so we called in the vet who discovered she also has pneumonia. She was treated and her temp has gone down. We flip her over, express fluid from her teat, and inject mastitis medication into her twice a day. She is isolated for now. Gardenia, a ewe lamb, has a small, potentially contagious sore on her mouth, she's been isolated in her own stall until it subsides, hopefully in a couple weeks. Thankfully the two are keeping each other company so less stress to them. The ram, Snake, and Modoc, a mature ewe lamb are isolated together for procreation purposes, they will be isolated together for about a month.