No. 7. DEPARTMENT OE AGRICULTURE. 605 



men have the extra herd on their hands until the earliest lambs are 

 old enough to go to market. The}' have to see that they do not 

 get into the alfalfa fields, or the corn fields, and these little fellows 

 slip through very easily. Once they get in it is very easy to see 

 where a sheep has stood. The Eastern market for the Western 

 farmer begins in August or September, but the heaviest market 

 comes in October, November and December. We used to buy tiny 

 little bits of fellows and take them home and feed them on alfalfa 

 and raise them, but it is getting harder and harder to get them. 

 I remember not so many years ago buying very nice ones at $2.75 

 per hundred pounds, live weight; this year I paid |6.3o, and I had 

 1,400 of them. It took some faith, and I almost thought ^'I can't 

 do it." 



Now, the men of Pennsjivania have more sense than to try to 

 compete with the Western ranchmen. They can't do it very well. 

 You have your grain here on your land, and you run the danger 

 of stomach worms. You may get in in time if you have alfalfa, 

 but the corn growers can't do it. So the thing for the Eastern 

 farmer to do is to raise his lambs earlier, and get into the market 

 before the western lambs are ready to be marketed. Then he will 

 have no competition from the West, and can get a good market and 

 good prices. 



Now, I think it will pay the Pennsylvania farmer to have one 

 hundred ewes. That is a nice little lot to take care of. He need 

 not learn to know them all by name, but he can know them all by 

 sight. 



I am not talking to you about the winter lamb business now; I 

 am going to talk to you how the ordinary farmer can manage to 

 make money on sheep in Pennsylvania. 



He should begin in February or March, and first I want to talk to 

 you a little about taking care of the ewes in pregnancy. That is 

 the thing most people know little about. I love to talk about it, 

 because I have had so much experience with it. I had the benefit 

 of that when I was a young man and had a young wife, and a nice lot 

 of sheep, and I was as happy as I could be.' I kept my sheep very care- 

 fully housed and protected from the weather, and led them out 

 to water, and took all the care of them that I knew how. I had 

 read a great deal about the value of protein in the feed and bone 

 meal, and of wheat bran and clover hay, and oats sometimes, and 

 I never saw anything prettier than that bunch of sheep. But when 

 the lambs came then the clouds came over my sun. Feeding so much 

 prO'tein had developed too much bone, and the lambs could hardly 

 be born at all. I remember one weighing seventeen pounds, but 

 the mother died and the lamb died. I took it into the house and 

 nursed it and fed it, but it died. The lamb died because I did 

 not know how to feed. Well, an old man who had raised sheep for 

 many years said to me, "You take too good care of your sheep, let 

 them hustle, and give them oat straw. You have wasted your feed 

 by giving them too much." So I gave them oat straw and a little 

 corn fodder, and they looked fine and well rounded out, but there 

 was something not quite right. You can learn to tell that in your 

 sheep just as a man learns to know when his wife is mad. At first 

 he needs a diagram to show him, but after while he learns it 



