Coming around the bend...
DSANA's Special Online Symposium
Week of January 11, 2021
Day/time to be announced
In place of the annual DSANA Dairy Sheep Symposium--always held in-person at a North American location during non-Covid times--DSANA will be hosting an online, day-long gathering of speakers on dairy sheep topics in early January. Stay tuned for details and how to register.
Meanwhile, scroll down for an article about using shipping containers to house a sheep milking facility, and check out sample content from the Flock Management Forum - a new online community message board on the DSANA website.
As always, feel free to drop us a line, especially if you'd like to learn more about DSANA or to volunteer with one of our committees.
The DSANA volunteer Board of Directors: Bee, Sarah, TomC, Debbie, Terry, Lesa, TomP, Carrie, Lynn, Becca, Kyle, Bill |
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To our Western friends...
Our thoughts are with sheep dairies throughout the Western U.S. and Canada that are being affected - directly or indirectly - by the recent surge in forest fires. If any farm, ranch, or related sheep dairy business is in need of support or assistance at this time, please reach out to DSANA directly or post a notice on the DSANA Facebook page.
For producers in the Western US: Dairy Sheep Genetic & Production Improvement project
DSANA is seeking Western U.S. dairy sheep producers who would like to join us in a three-year genetic improvement project starting in the 2021 production season. As part of a Western SARE grant, participating producers would measure or meter the milk production of their individual dairy sheep, send the milk production data to be analyzed for estimated breeding values, then learn how to use the information to improve the genetics and milk/component production in their dairy sheep flocks.
Any commercial dairy sheep producer, large or small, in any Western U.S. state highlighted in this box is eligible to participate. Participants do not need any previous experience with metering or milk recording. If interested, please contact Rebecca King, DSANA’s Production Improvement Program coordinator and Northern California dairy sheep producer, by October 15: 831-406-0213 or rebeccajaneking@gmail.com
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USDA is implementing Coronavirus Food Assistance Program 2 for agricultural producers who continue to face market disruptions and associated costs because of COVID-19. CFAP 2 will provide producers with financial assistance that gives them the ability to absorb some of the increased marketing costs associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Coverage is available for sheep and lambs used for meat sales:
The producer’s highest owned inventory of eligible sheep and lambs, excluding breeding stock, on a date selected by the producer from April 16, 2020, through August 31, 2020, multiplied by $27.00 per head.
Visit this link for information and select "Sheep and Lambs" under the Eligible Commodities Finder; or contact your local Farm Service Agency office.
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Thinking Inside the Box
By Becca Matthews
Hidden Hollow Ranch, DSANA board
“If our daughter hadn’t shown an interest in showing sheep, we wouldn’t have a sheep dairy,” says Shanley Mansour of Lambs Hill Dairy in Sonoma County, California.
Sound familiar? Maybe it wasn’t a daughter, or son, but a niece or nephew, or cousin, or wife or husband, that decided they wanted sheep for showing, or wool, or milk, or just to eat the weeds in the yard. Whatever the reason, the answer is usually along the same lines; and from there come the dairy sheep.
But with dairy sheep comes the need for a dairy barn. Most people repurpose an old building or build one from scratch. At Lambs Hill, however, they use shipping containers – three repurposed, refrigerated shipping containers that house a 12-straight pipeline milking system and related equipment. It’s an out of the ordinary but practical choice for Andre and Shanley Mansour, who have been selling milk for three years to a local creamery and are presently milking 103 East Friesian, Lacaune, and Icelandic crosses.
The Mansours bought their dairy flock before building their dairy and were pressed to complete their buildings prior to lambing. “We thought that containers would be a faster build process than a conventional barn,” Shanley says. “We decided to do containers, as we had seen a couple of creameries using containers, though not for dairies.”
The dairy is made up of three shipping containers, (1) 8’x20’ and (2) 8’x40’; and they are 9’ tall, rather than most that are 8’. The Mansours use one container as the parlor, one as the mechanical room, and one as the tank room. The sheep walk up low-rise stairs (instead of a ramp) over a bridge to enter the parlor. Once they finish milking, they walk down another set of low-rise stairs to ground level. The Mansours are currently milking 12 head at a time on an aluminum diamond plate milking stand, but have room to expand to a 20-head stanchion if/when they decide to do so.
The containers are set up in a U shape and Shanley says that "the tank room is large enough to add creamery equipment if we ever decided to expand into a creamery.” The containers are refrigeration containers which are harder to find than a regular shipping container and typically cost more. Shanley says this is because “they are fully insulated and are completely stainless steel inside with aluminum ceilings. Our cost was $5,000 each, not including delivery.”
As with anything, there are pros and cons to using shipping containers for a dairy. Shanley was kind enough to explain what she likes and doesn’t like about them and how she and her family have overcome some of the cons.
She says the biggest pro of the containers is that they are completely insulated, with stainless steel interiors. “The stainless steel is the best part because the walls can be hosed down.” They added windows and doors, concrete floors and coving, which was needed to complete the inside prior to dairy install.
“We chose to put our containers on concrete pillars raised four feet off the ground to make it easier to get to plumbing,” Shanley says. “To do this, our containers needed to be lifted by crane onto the supports.” Another pro is the flexibility of the containers being movable. “If we wanted to move our dairy, we could move our containers pretty easily and reinstall them on another site.”
Shanley told me that the cons are not necessarily the containers themselves, but how theirs were configured. “Once the sheep come into the milking parlor and put their heads into the stanchions, we cannot see them. This makes it impossible to check the front of your sheep.” They also have incorporated ankle tags to track production since they are unable to see ear tags on the sheep. “It would be so much easier if we could get to the front of them, but then we couldn’t have the auger feeding system so we can’t complain.”
Shanley says if they had to do it all over again they would still opt for the shipping containers but make it so they could walk all the way around the sheep when they are in the stanchions. “Another consideration with containers to note: decommissioned containers often have leaks and large dents that may not be suitable for all projects. We inspected ours prior to having them delivered. We would not purchase sight unseen."
More photos of the Mansours' containers can be found on the DSANA Flock Management Forum. If you have any questions for the Mansours you can post them there.
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The Flock Management Forum
Post your questions... share your expertise
As a member of DSANA, you can gain instant access to fellow dairy sheep producers around North America who can answer any questions you might have about flock health, flock management, milk handling, or dairy marketing. Or share your own expertise with producers just starting out. The Flock Management Forum functions like an online message board. It's easy to use, with messages delivered right to your inbox.
Here are some recent topics of discussion on the Forum:
- Whether to feed baleage or silage to lactating ewes
- The benefits/drawbacks of vaccinating for soremouth
- Is bad platform behavior a heritable trait?
- Estimating the milk consumption of lambs in their first 30 days
Join DSANA today and enjoy this key benefit of membership.
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Time to renew your DSANA membership?
If you're not sure whether your membership has expired,
please log onto the membership page
Here are some benefits of a $75 annual DSANA membership:
- Symposium proceedings: More than 20 years of proceedings from DSANA's annual Symposia are now collected on the website. Membership in DSANA is required to access the proceedings.
- Flock Management Forum: For DSANA members, this is a new online message board where you can post questions or float ideas and receive responses from fellow dairy sheep producers.
- DSANA membership directory: The most popular page on the website, this list of DSANA members across North America is accessible to the public. Membership offers you a listing in this directory.
- Production Improvement Program : Farms that are members of DSANA can use analyzed production data to make flock management decisions that can boost milk production. DSANA members can also order imported semen.
- Annual Symposium: DSANA members receive a discount on the annual 4-day Dairy Sheep Symposium, which draws speakers on various topics of interest to dairy sheep producers.
JOIN or RENEW today!
Also note that up to 5 members of your farm, family, organization, or business can be included under your membership umbrella and be able to access all of the above benefits.
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** Last chance to participate! **
Please fill out our 6-minute producer survey - it's quick and easy. All you need is this information at hand: # of ewes you milked in 2019, total volume/weight of milk you produced in 2019, and average days in milk for ewes milking in 2019. DSANA is trying to gauge how many of us are measuring our ewes' production, and whether our producers would like assistance in this area.
Please complete the survey here
Survey closes October 15th. Thanks again to Christen Waddell of Blackberry Farm in Tennessee for compiling the results. We'll post the results in a future newsletter.
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