Cottonwood Connection

Sheep Ranching

Season 4 Episode 8 | 25m 13sVideo has Closed Captions

Explore Cottonwood Ranch’s livestock history and importance of sheep ranching in the area.

Aired 05/05/2024

Cottonwood Connection

Sheep Ranching

Season 4 Episode 8 | 25m 13sVideo has Closed Captions

Explore Cottonwood Ranch’s livestock history and importance of sheep ranching in the area.

We explore Cottonwood Ranch’s outbuildings, discuss their role in the ranch’s livestock history and the greater prevalence of sheep ranching in the settlement era, including a visit with a current-day operation that has carried on for generations.

Aired 05/05/2024

Cottonwood Connection

Sheep Ranching

Season 4 Episode 8 | 25m 13sVideo has Closed Captions

Aired 05/05/2024

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Culture

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[Music] The Cottonwood Ranch Historic Site includes a collection of stone outbuildings. Pratt family, who immigrated to this area from England, used these structures in the raising and shearing of thousands of sheep each year. [Music] [Music] (gentle music) So the sheep came in Kansas early on, in 1542, when Father Padilla and his party, he had mules, he had one horse and a band of sheep. You never knew what you were gonna find in a new land, so you took your commissary or your meat with ya. But sheep had gone through here. There were sheep trails coming out of New Mexico, through New Mexico, in a Texas panhandle, and up through western Kansas, on through. In the 1850s, sheep were even driven to California, from, say, Santa Fe, New Mexico, to California to feed the miners, and to provide wool for them. So sheep drives were very common. That's always forgotten. We always see the cattle drives, but there were sheep trails established coming through Kansas and pamphlets put out to do that. The Pratt's were sheep people. They started out that way, especially John Fenton Prat, who is the owner and builder of Cottonwood Ranch. His father had sheep and also his brother, but this was the basis of the sheep operation. Now, in England, they came from England. Abraham Pratt came in 1878, to the Studley vacinity and settled here, bought land and homesteaded. In 1880, two years later, his eldest son, John Fenton Pratt, came over and started the Cottonwood Ranch. And then in 1882, Tom Prat came over. And they all had sheep at one time. They could make a lot of money on the sheep. The range was open. It wasn't owned by anyone. So there was no rent. There was no leasing. You herd him on foot with dogs. So you didn't have to put up fencing. And you got two crops up from a year. Pratt would call it the lamb crop, and the wool crop of shearing the sheep, but that was actually called the wool clip. Now, the breed that was here at Cottonwood Ranch, the dominant breed was Merino. John Fenton Pratt, at his peak, had about 3,500 sheep. So the three types of sheep, with the domesticated sheep, you had the ram or bucks that's used interchangeably. Usually, sometimes a buck is a young ram. And then the other male sheep you have are the weathers, which have been neutered. And then you have the ewes. In the background, you can see stone buildings that were placed here in the Yorkshire pattern, because that was a pattern in England.

In 1891 and 1892, is when all these buildings were built and finished. And although he only had 3,500 sheep, the relatives said that in the shearing barn, six or seven thousand sheep were sheared in there a year. And the shearing is a very labor intensive. Everything was hand sheared. And he gave the shearers, according to his ledgers, a nickel per head, or a nickel apiece, for shearing the sheep. He also has an entry in his ledgers that in one day, one man sheared 117 sheep. So the guy made five dollars and change. And you compare that with the shepherds out on the range, depending on their experience, they were making 30 to 40 cents per day. The shepherds were on the open range. And whether, if they were lambing out there, they may have had little kind of pup tents, because that was common in Wyoming and Montana. They say during lambing season, you look across the hills where there's a flock of sheep, and you see little tents like little soldiers, thousands of little soldiers are around. And that was just to put the ewe if they could catch her and the lamb in there so they can pair up, or mother up. He was building shepherds wagons, we'd call them now, so a lot of people call them the sheep wagons. So he could take them out on the range, and the shepherds would live in there. There were containers, a bunk in there, there was a stove, and there was a lot of storage. And so the shepherds would be there, and every week or 10 days usually, Pratt would go out and tend to the shepherds, in as much as he he'd take them groceries and see if they had any problems. And while they were there, he would probably have a team of horses for a buggy or something, he'd hook the team on the wagon and move it to a new range, because that was kind of the hub before you were grazing the sheep, and the sheep got used to coming. If you were gathering out in the open range for the night, they went towards the wagon. - John Fenton Pratt had sheep at various times as late as 1904, in 1904 he wrapped up the sheep. He sold all of his livestock at that time, except for a team of horses and milk cow and poultry, he sold all of his sheep. - Around 16 years after Fenton Pratt wrapped up his sheep operation, another family was starting their's some 20 miles south. It continues generations later. - We're in Gove County, in Northern Gove County, near Quinter, with a Simon & Simon Incorporated sheep operation, basically, one of the largest ewe operations in the state of Kansas. And so they've been in it for, it's been a family affair for quite a while. This is Deb Simon, who grew up actually on this place, and her son, Stephen, and Stephen was gone for a while, and kind of like a lot of us that left Western Kansas, we came back. A little bit about the history, Deb, when did your ancestors start out here with the sheep? - My great grandparents bought the place in 1920, for my grandparents when they got married. My grandparents started with the sheep here, and then my dad grew it. He got up to like 400 head of sheep or so, and had just a few cattle, but then he finally phased them out. I don't remember ever having any cattle on the place. And then we grew it with my husband, we got married, but he grew up raising cattle and hogs, and he just really enjoyed the sheep too. Said he wouldn't go back, and then we had probably around 800 head when Stephen came back. And we've put up a lot of barns, I don't know what we have, eight or 10, 12 barns on the place. Grandpa always said, you've got to have enough barns for every animal that you have to give them protection. So said, you might not need it every year, but you'll be glad you had it. And we've found that true several times. We've had several storms that we were glad that we had barns to put everything in. There used to be a lot more sheep just locally. There was like four other farmers that were close within a couple miles of here that always had two or 300 head of sheep. And my dad worked with them quite a bit. They did stuff together as far as when they would shear together the first hydraulic wool sacker that we got. They bought it together, the four of them. And then we still have it, still use it, but they eventually faded out and sold their sheep. And so then we were the remaining ones in this area. - And so Stephen, when did you, I knew you grew up here, but you came back. - Yeah, I did, I came back in 2013. And since then I've been really putting up a lot of buildings. I've put up a new lambing facility that's right up here on the edge of the property. And I've put up my feeding facility. We've put up another hoop barn that sits in the middle of the place that we do all of our lambing in. Now we lamb everything under a roof. So nothing's getting snowed on or rained on while they're having lambs and they also stay out of the wind, which out here in Western Kansas, the wind can drain a lot of energy on an animal pretty quick. So this building here is just a fabric hoop building. All the lambing happens in here. So all these sheep that you see in here, they're all bred and they'll have lambs in the next two or three weeks. And now you can actually see over the side, we do have a brand new one this afternoon. So we break them into smaller groups in here, groups of about 45 to 50. That way you don't have all of them having babies all together all in one great big bunch. It kind of breaks them up and you're hoping to only have a couple, maybe in each pen, you know, maybe overnight. But the main purpose is just to break them into smaller groups so that it makes the lambing a little bit easier. We lamb pretty steady. This is actually, we're starting to actually slow down a little bit, but what do we have since you guys have been here, four or five? But like I said, at the peak season, we'll be having one every 15, 20 minutes maybe and get a lot of twins in the first part of the season, get into the later part of the season, I get into more of my ewe lambs so it's the first time that they'll have a baby. Typically it means they're gonna have a single. You'll get some twins with this breed of sheep the first year, but they're more likely to have a single typically. - What is your percentage of having twins? - I'd say we have about 150% lamb crop. So, you know, that we would actually sell. - Yeah. - So after, you know, death loss and everything, it would be about 150% that we try to market. - So compared with cattle, you could only get one calf a year. - Yep, so you're getting about one and a half lambs, at least with our breed of sheep. This here is our new lambing facility. We put this building up about a year and a half ago. By going to more of an indoor lambing type facility, we've really improved the quality of life for the animal. So it doesn't get near that temperature swing that you would get as if you were just out in the open, but also you're not gonna get wet. You're not gonna get the freezing snow stuck to you. There's a lot of things about bringing them inside that has really improved the quality of life for the animals. They perform a lot better. They actually gain faster because they don't have to fight the wind and whatnot. So they are not burning energy just out there fighting the elements. So by bringing them to this environment in here, I've really cut down on a lot of different pnemonias and different types of things that we'd see very typically just in an open environment type lambing. The little pens that you see off to the side here, this is what we call lambing jugs or maybe even lambing pens. As soon as the mom has her baby over in my other building, the mom and the baby are brought into here and they're put into a pen for anywhere from one day to three days. Basically so the mom can really get to know the smell of the baby. And really bond with the baby so they know who belongs to who in their own way. And then after that, they'll go out into a group pen. Until these lambs are at least 30 days, maybe 40 days of age, they're all inside. And so they are able to get a lot better start to life by going to this style of lambing. - When you change from having the sheep outside or the lambs outside, did your death rate go down? Or did you notice that? - Yeah, that helps a lot. Not exposed to the elements. And of course we don't have anything out in the pastures because of predators, any of the small lambs. The ewes go out there in the summertime. And then we also graze some crop residue when we have it available. - And you have guard animals with the sheep. - Yeah, we have. But yeah, we've got four different pastures that we'll go to throughout the summertime. And with as many sheep as we have, we usually have several hundred in each pasture at least at minimum. I know they used to say for grazing, five sheep would eat about the equivalent of one cow. And so there were a lot more sheep than there were cattle in northwestern Kansas, a lot, because most people don't consider northwest Kansas sheep country. But in the 1880s, up through the basically 1930s at least, I know there was a whole lot more sheep than there were cattle. And the sheep and cattle, I know the old cattle herds and the flocks, you always see on the movies and stuff where the sheep guy didn't get along with the cattle guy or vice versa. But they actually complement each other. Because I know in northwestern Kansas, a lot of the big cattlemen also had sheep too. At that time, the resources they were overgrazing so much that the weeds were coming in. The sheep would eat the weeds, so they were complementing each other. The sheep were the cleanup guys. They've done quite a bit of research there at K-State with adding sheep to a cattle operation. They said you don't need any more land to add them to it because they prefer different things. The cattle prefer the grass, the sheep prefer the weeds, and even goats, they prefer the brush. So you can have a combination out of all of them and not necessarily need that much more land. We'll raise all summer long and then when we roll into fall, we'll harvest milo and we'll typically turn out the sheep on either corn or milo stocks. So we'll end up, we do lamb in the fall, so around September we'll start bringing them home and sort them every couple weeks. We'll bring them in and sort through and find out who's bred and who's not bred. And then the rest will go back out to pasture. From April all the way through December, typically we can keep sheep out on pasture on the field. And then we start with the big spring lambing, usually about the first part of February. And what is a gestation for a... It's five months on a sheep. So technically you could get two lamb crops out of a ewe in a year if you wanted to, but it's pretty hard on them. As I say, it's a lot of work and you might need some rest. We've done the accelerated lambing, which is to get three lamb crops in two years. And we do some of that because the fall lambs, the ones that lamb the fall typically won't have as many twins as the ones that will lamb in the spring. And so if we lamb some of them in the fall, if we lamb them again in June or May, that helps bring our lambing percentage up with some. And the wool market, is it easily sold? Well, I mean, it always sells, but it doesn't always sell for a very good price. The wool just isn't as popular as it used to be. Right now the wool pays for the shearing plus just a little bit more, but it just barely does that. Barely pays for itself. And it used to be that the wool was a great big percentage with the sheep and stuff. But part of that is, I mean, now they're sheared with electric clippers, I suppose. Where it used to be hand shears. The fleeces are still bagged, although they aren't burlap bags anymore. No. They're plastic bags. So some things have been modified, but they're still the same. You still have to shear the sheep. And you have to do that at least annually, don't you? Yes. We do shearing probably four or five times a year, but they're all different sheep. We'll do the ewes one time. We'll do the rams in the springtime. We'll do ewe lambs soon before they lamb and then feeder lambs through the summer. I was a network engineer for about a dozen years or so out in Colorado. And I kind of traveled the US and whatnot doing networking. And then basically got stuck behind the desk for too many hours and decided it was time to get outside again. Yeah. And so you came back with other ideas other than kind of what we'd consider the traditional raising of sheep and lambs. And so you've been very innovative on what you're doing. So implementing more buildings and more pens and doing some inside work. But you're very innovative about the feed you're feeding. Can you tell us about your little operation there, which is really unique and I'm super impressed with that. As far as feeding, one thing that we do is we raise barley out here. And so along with that, I raise barley sprouts. So I have a feeding system in a building that I designed. So basically it's a six day process. So we spread the seed on day one and then six days later we pull it out as a tall grass. So you'll have one, two, three, four, five, six different spots. And so every day I'll come in and I'll harvest out a green patch of grass. So this one right here in particular, this will be about 3000 pounds of fresh barley sprouts that we'll harvest in the morning. And we'll mix this in with our feed, basically just a dry hay. And this has all the protein and energy that an animal needs to be basically on maintenance. I might add a little bit of grain every once in a while if I need to kick up the energy just a little bit. But it's pretty well balanced. But it's pretty well balanced, yes. And this will grow from where it is today, which is about, looks maybe about three inches. Tomorrow it'll be... Yep, tomorrow it'll probably add another inch or two and then it'll probably be up about this tall. When you're in such a short six day process, it's amazing just 12 hour difference what you'll see in the grass. Like I said, this is just a day difference than this. So once it starts to take off, it really just takes off. And so to harvest it, if we use that term, you don't bring a machine in and cut off like people think of combines or mowers or stuff. Nope. I actually will come in with, I'll use my forklift that I have right over there and just set the forks just a little bit closer together. I can just come in and this stuff will roll up just like a carpet. And it looks kind of tear where it wants to tear, but it basically, all the roots grow together and it just... And it's about to dust your matting. And it makes a mat. On the bare floor. And, but what it does is it changes the digestibility. You're taking a seed that's in grain form, you know, which is about 40, 45% digestible and you're changing the properties of it so that it's more digestible. So now it's sits at like 80 to 85% digestibility in this form. So... And quick digestion. Yep. Quick digestion. Very, very good on the stomach. This is actually really good for horses. Horses get a lot of colic, and what not. This is also really good for horses, but ruminants and everything will do very well on this. One interesting point I always like to make is anytime that you increase digestibility, you're reducing greenhouse gas, right? Because you're getting... The animal's using more of what it's eating, so it will actually have less manure, so you'll have less greenhouse gas. The whole building was built around the idea of having 2,000 ewes eventually. So right now I'm only about 1,700, but I'm still in construction. So hopefully over the next few years, I'll build out as my flock grows. When this whole building's up and running, this building will use less water than the average American uses on their yard. And that's the whole building. And that'll be the whole building. And that will feed my 2,000, 2,100 ewes and the 3,000 lambs that they will produce. So that'll be about 40% of their diet. Yeah, so you're really conserving the water by not irrigating out in the open and stuff, because none of the water here is wasted. Right, right. There's very little water that actually leaves the pad and actually goes down the drain. In fact, it doesn't even hardly make it outside. The idea is to set the sprinkler so that you don't overuse water and you use exactly what you need. Like one of these whole racks, it would be about 10,000 pounds of feed. It would be the equivalent of if you went up to your faucet and you turned it on halfway and let it run for about 15 minutes. That's about how much water that one of these 10,000 pounds of feed racks would produce, would use. The neat thing is that I can take a quarter section of ground and I can grow the barley for that theoretical for this building and for an entire section. So I'm saving an entire three-fourths section of ground by going to this model. That much land doesn't have to be used now because of that. And that cuts down on all the expenses and also the fuel, compaction of the soil, erosion of the soil and all that sort of thing. So being all enclosed, you get no erosion, you're very short on water and you aren't burning enough fuel to make any difference. One of the things that excites me about this too is that if a kid comes out of high school and he wants to go be a farmer, that's a very tough thing to do to go raise livestock and whatnot because that costs a lot of money and whatnot because you got to buy your tractor, you got to buy your plow, your swather, your baler and you have to have all that equipment. Then you better pray for rain. But with this, it would allow a kid to have to not make such a big investment to be able to raise livestock. It's a very efficient way to feed an animal and I guess you want to talk costs a little bit. A good ton of alpha alpha is going to run you about $250, $300 if you're going to go with a dairy quality alpha alpha per ton. This stuff cost me so I only have half the building going here but this would be at about $70 a ton. When I get the whole building up and going, obviously my payment and everything is already figured into so it cuts that in half. So then I'm sitting around $35 a ton for all the feed that's produced out of here and that includes labor, electric, insurance, payment on the building and everything. So it's been a good addition. It's a very labor intensive job.

It's very hands-on.

You don't get to just drive out and check things and leave.

You don't get to ride a horse and rope do you? No, no, no, but it's, and especially during lambing time, it's 24 hours a day for several weeks that someone needs to be there at least every half hour. Management and process.

We're up to, this year we will be pushing a little over 1,700 use.

So, and it's just me in a hired hand and then my folks. So process has become a real big piece of what we do and how we do things to make sure that just a few of us can can manage it. But you kind of have plans to expand a little bit. Yeah, I'm planning to get up to about 2,000 2,100 head of ewes and I'm not planning to go any more than that.

But once I get up to that, then that's kind of where I'd like to sit for a while and work at that size of flock for a while.

So, but that's been a big learning experience going just from six to eight hundred ewes up to two thousand's quite the jump. So... W ell I know you might have quantity but this quantity just has quality to it.

So you're still maintaining the quality. Right.

And just expanding.

And that's a lot of what's built into the process.

One other note is that 75% of the lamb that's ate in this country is all import.

So we only produce 25% of the lamb that we actually eat in this country. So there's room for growth. Yes.

So there's room for growth. [MUSIC] [BLANK-_AUDIO]