Bottle Babies

My farm is in the middle of lambing. Yes this is when the ewes (girl sheep) have their lambs. My favourite part of lambing? I know its not the best thing for a farm but it still is my favourite. Bottle Lambs! It is usually rare that we have bottle lambs. Out of 450 that are born we usually have about 6 (that's really good). There is usually only a couple reasons why we keep bottle lambs; 1 the lamb is born too early and the only way we can keep them alive is to feed them by hand and warm them up inside the house, 2 the baby is born in the freezing cold and they need to be inside to warm up, 3 the mother doesn't have enough milk to feed her lambs and we don't get a chance to foster them. We try to do this the least amount possible because it is expensive and can be difficult to bring the lambs up to weight when they don't get milk whenever they want from their mother. We usually use three different types of milk to feed these special babies. The first one is milk replacer. This is a powder that you can buy at any Peavey Mart or UFA. It is kind of like powdered milk that us people use but it has special vitamins and nutrients that lamb, kids (like goat babies) and calves need. The second kind is cow milk. We use this for a simple reason, it is much cheaper!!! Milk replacer powder is VERY expensive and can go bad quite easily once it is mixed with water, whereas cow milk is readily available from our dairy farm neighbors (Thanks again Andrews!) and can be kept good for much longer. The third kind our farm uses in goats milk or colostrum. This is because it is very close to sheep's milk and again it can be less expensive. As you can see in the picture above lambs in the house do wear diapers! to be frank I really don't want to clean up after them that often. This is much easier. Do you have any other questions about lambs? Bottle lambs? Or anything else on the farm?