Author: Ted Sartell
Date: 05-22-05 08:24
I thought about doing what you suggest and tried it once pretty much the way you describe, but instead of filling the bucket I used another narrower container inside the bucket to get the milk level up high where the nipples are. This method may work OK for some producers, but I did not like it for a couple of reasons. For us it wastes a lot of milk as we are only using the bucket feeders to feed supplement lambs when mothers have no milk for them or not enough milk for all their lambs. We never take the lambs totally away form the mother and many still get something from the mother. We don't have a lot of lambs that we need to we do this with, thus putting 3 or more gallonsof milk replacer in the bucket is a lot to do until they learn. Also I've seen some lambs that learn quickly and some that don't, especially those that are still getting some milk from their mother. My view is that I want to make it as easy as possible for the lambs to get going and keep going, and as easy as possible on me, so I don't want to make up lots of milk, some of which will go to waste, and I don't want to worry that some lamb hasn't gotten the hang of it and gets malnourished and falls behind. We also move our ewes and lambs into different management groups so the buckets need to be easily moved and setup in different areas. Having full buckets means they have to be more securely fastened to avoid spillage from handling by us and jostling by the lambs. The valves are so easy to use and to clean that we determined we don't even want to use the lamb bar without them. This year I did some experimentation, we had a bucket with two nipples without valves and two with valves and the lambs would only use the ones with the valves. At one point we had four lambs supplementing in that group and they knew which two had the valves and fought over them and would never use the other two no matter how hungry they seemed to be. After the lambs had gotten totally accustomed to the bucket I changed which nipples had the valves and the lambs quickly learned there'd been a change and then refused to use those nipples without the valves.
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