432 IOWA DEPARTMENT OP AGRICULTURE 



as the Corn Belt Meat Producers' Association can assist very materially 

 in making the movement a success by lending their continued interest 

 and counsel, for which we are already greatly indebted. 



EXPERIENCE WITH SHEEP. 

 BY STUART BAXTER, IDA COUNTY, IOWA. 



When I first thought of sheep feeding, about ten years ago, it was 

 with some hesitation that I w^ent at it. I had never had any experience 

 with sheep in all my life, and all the information I could get was that 

 it was a very risky proposition for a man with no experience to try to 

 feed a bunch of lambs. 



Old sheepmen told me how hard it was to feed lambs grain without 

 a great many of them dying; that if they got a little too much grain, 

 they would just lie down and die. One man told me that he turned 

 out 300 head into a corn field, and that they would not come in, and 

 that when he found them they had eaten off about four or five acres 

 of corn in the center of the field, and about forty of them had died. He 

 supposed they died of thirst and overeating. Perhaps there was some 

 truth in what these people told me. I will give thenii credit for one 

 thing at least, and that is that they caused me to be very caretul in 

 handling my first lot. 



I wanted to feed lambs, but everyone I talked to told me I had better 

 try some older sheep first; that they would be harder to kill, and I 

 probably would have a hard enough experience anyhow. I finally got 

 up nerve enough to tackle the proposition. So I sent an order down to a 

 commission firm in Omaha to buy me a load of choice yearlings, and to 

 have them dipped. In a w^eek or so, I got the yearlings, and took them 

 home. And a nice bunch of sheep they were, 399 head of Wyomings, 

 Cotswold and Merino cross— averaging 72 pounds each. 



I turned thenii onto some wild hay land that lay alongside of about 

 forty acres of corn. This was about the 20th of September. For about 

 three days, I w^atched them pretty close. I wanted to see how they 

 would act, whether they would get lost in the corn or not. It did not 

 take me long to find that they had not been raised alongside of a corn 

 field. Whenever a few of them would get into the corn a few rows, if 

 a stalk would snap or a leaf would rustle the least bit suddenly they 

 started for the prairie like a shot out of a gun. But little by little they 

 kept working into the corn, until, in the course of ten days or two 

 weeks, I noticed that they were beginning to nibble at the ends of the 

 ears. I kept very close watch of them, as we were running them into 

 the yard every night — and we would count them nearly every day, to 

 see if they were all there. We never found any dead ones. 



After a while we got busy picking corn, and did not have so much 

 time to look after them; but we would let them into the yard every 

 night, and out in the morning again. We saw that they had plenty of 

 good, clean water, and we salted them every two or three days, by tak- 

 ing a pail of salt and scattering it out on the pocket-gopher mounds. 



