Three Strikes and You Are Out!!!
Spring is my favorite time of the year. Green grass, newborns frolicking in the pasture, and baseball. As a youngster, baseball was easily my favorite sport. Now I am blessed to have a son that loves the game and I have the honor to be the head coach of his little league team. Naturally, our team name is the “Yard Goats.”
Springtime is also when many of our sheep flocks and goat herds are at their highest risk of predation. If you have been reading my column for long, you know that I am a big advocate for livestock guardian dogs.
If you are “still on the fence,” we are hosting a livestock guardian dog field day in Menard on April 12. The field day will include two ranch tours and various presentations from Texas A&M AgriLife employees and allied industry professionals. For more information visit our webpage: http://sanangelo.tamu.edu/events. Call the Menard County Extension office at 325-396-4787 to register for the event.
I am a big fan of statistics and numbers. Maybe it is because math was my favorite subject in school or maybe it is a carry over from baseball. Specifically, I like the rule of 3.
The third time a female fails to raise twins, she is either culled or bred to terminal sires so her progeny are not kept as replacements. Unless she doesn’t lamb until she is a two-year-old, then she starts her at bat with 1 strike, so to speak. If you pasture lamb and don’t know which lambs belong to which ewes, you could pregnancy scan the ewes before lambing and use this information to employ the rule of 3.
The third time that a sheep or goat requires deworming based on bottle jaw, FAMACHA score, or fecal egg count, the animal is likely to be culled. However, it must be noted that if all animals within a similar management group are heavily infested with worms, then I don’t apply this rule. It was more of a management or environmental effect and not necessarily genetic inferiority of the animal.
The third time a goat gets its head stuck in the fence, a range ewe needs her feet trimmed or a ram hits me in the back; they are on the chopping block. A simple way of keeping track of how many “strikes” an animal has is to notch their ear or place a “black’ tag every time they swing and miss. If you are like me, some consistent way of keeping track is vital.
The rules of 3 are easy to understand and implement by commercial producers. But science has proven that estimated breeding values produced via the National Sheep Improvement Program are much more reliable sources of genetic predictions for traits such as twinning rate or resistance to parasites. For me, I will not buy breeding animals without EBVs, unless an overwhelming amount of data has been used to make within flock decisions.
Many of you may be familiar with Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s general manager, and his reliance on statistics or you have seen the movie “Moneyball.” He has made a famous career for himself by analyzing players by their statistics over traditional methods. Some years his teams are more successful than others, but indisputably he makes the most of his roster with a smaller payroll than most other successful programs.
Hope you all have a great spring and lets “play ball!”
To provide feedback on this article or request topics for future articles, contact me at reid.redden@ag.tamu.edu or 325-653-4576. For general questions about sheep and goats, contact your local Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service county office. If they can’t answer your question, they have access to someone who can.