Counting sheep, but not to sleep

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/09/2017 (2916 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It arrived without fanfare on one of those gloriously warm, sunny days in late August. 

It looked to be the typical size for a newborn Rideau Arcott lamb — three-and-a-half to four kilograms. While some Rideau lambs are white or dark brown when they’re born, this one was light brown, with the cutest little face.

For the first few minutes, the lamb lay quivering on the straw-covered concrete floor as its mother gently licked the afterbirth from its face and head. Then almost as if on cue, it suddenly tried heaving itself onto its feet. It took a few minutes and a few tries, but eventually it made it. It stood there, teetering on its spindly legs for a few seconds.

Then it staggered over to its mother’s side, found her udder, and with its tail vigorously wagging, began gulping down the nutrient-rich milk.

That tender farming moment has played out for generations. But at this southeastern Manitoba farm, it symbolizes a rapidly changing future for the industry.

The lamb’s instinct to be on its feet and nursing within 15 minutes of birth is one of the reasons Pat Smith chose the Rideau Arcott breed for his family’s sheep operation — formerly called Sarto Sheep Farm — located about 13 kilometres southwest of Steinbach near the village of Sarto. The mortality rate among Rideau lambs is also very low, and they’re fast growers; Smith says they usually double in size within the first week of life. 

All of the lambs on Smith’s farm, now called Canada Sheep & Lamb Farms, are born inside a barn, rather than in an outdoor corral or pasture. That’s because Canada Sheep & Lamb Farms, which is jointly owned by Smith’s Sarto Sheep Farm and New Zealand’s Integrated Foods Ltd., is a year-round lambing operation. Its Rideau ewes are able to lamb three times in two years, instead of the traditional once a year.

But the fact it’s an accelerated, or continuous, lambing operation is not what makes this farm unique. Canadian Sheep Federation chairman Phil Kolodychuk says there are other accelerated lambing farms in Canada, although “it’s by far not the norm.”

What makes it stand out is the sheer size of the operation. In a span of three years, Canada Sheep & Lamb Farms has grown to become not just the biggest sheep farming operation in Canada, but in all of North America, Smith says.

 

Just how big is it?

Kate Basford, treasurer of the Manitoba Sheep Association, says the average sheep farm in Canada has 50 to 80 ewes, although there are some with several thousand ewes. Canada Sheep & Lamb Farms, by comparison, has 30,000 of them, and it’s just getting warmed up. Its goal is to have 50,000 ewes by October of next year, and 100,000 by 2022. 

That’s more ewes than Manitoba has sheep. According to the latest Statistics Canada figures, there were were 66,000 sheep in the province as of July 1. That’s not only ewes, but rams and lambs as well. 

Smith says Canada Sheep & Lamb Farms is also North America’s largest sheep farm in terms of the number of lambs it produces yearly. This year, its ewes are expected to give birth to about 90,000 lambs. By the time the flock reaches 50,000 ewes, it will be about 150,000 lambs per year, and by the time it reaches 100,000 ewes, it will be about 300,000.

Smith says if the company reaches its target of 100,000 ewes by 2022, Manitoba will go from being the fifth-largest sheep-producing province after Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and Saskatchewan, to the largest.

One of main the reasons Smith is so intent on expanding his operation is that there is a growing demand for lamb meat in Canada, as consumers seek out more variety in their diets and a growing number of immigrants arrive who grew up eating lamb and want to continue that tradition. But Canada’s sheep farmers don’t produce anywhere near enough to satisfy the demand.

“Sixty per cent of the lamb consumed in Canada is imported,” he notes, “so that’s the fundamental opportunity.”

● ● ●

In many ways, Smith seems like an unlikely candidate to become North America’s sheep king. For starters, he’s 71 years old, which is a time in life when most people are already comfortably settled into retirement.

Also, while he’s been raising sheep since 1972, for the first 35 years it was just a sideline for him. First and foremost, he was a computer guy. A computer guy who moved to Manitoba from Guelph, Ont., in 1970 to start up the computer science faculty at the University of Manitoba. He remained at the U of M until 1983, when he left to become a computer-technology consultant.

In 1986, his life took another big turn when he landed a government contract in the United States, moved his family to California, and for the next 21 years lived and worked in different parts of the country, including Illinois and Kansas City. It wasn’t until 2007, after his wife died, that he returned to Manitoba and threw himself into sheep farming on a full-time basis. His three grown children, however, all remained behind in the United States.

While he was living in the States, Smith had workers who kept the Sarto sheep farm operating — and growing — with some long-distance help from him.

“The great thing about technology is you’re able to manage the operation remotely,” he says.

By the time he returned to Manitoba, the farm had grown to about 1,500 ewes, the main business supplying high-quality breeding ewes and rams to other sheep farms. But he knew there was an opportunity for further growth.

By 2014, the flock had reached about 2,700 ewes, with a good chunk of the farm’s business still in selling breeding stock to other farms. That was also the year Smith caught the attention of Integrated Foods officials.

It wasn’t so much the size of his operation that piqued the company’s interest, because Integrated Foods had an even bigger sheep-farming operation in New Zealand. Rather, it was the fact his Rideau Arcott ewes were lambing three times every two years, compared to just once a year for its own pasture-raised ewes. 

So in 2014, Integrated Farms officials visited Smith to learn more about what he was doing and how he was doing it. One thing led to another, and later that year the two joined forces to launch Canada Sheep & Lamb Farms.

Smith says they make a good combination. Sarto Sheep Farm has the strong sheep-genetics program and extensive experience at running an accelerated-lambing operation. So it could run the day-to-day operations, and Integrated Foods could provide the capital to finance the operation’s rapid growth, which requires a considerable investment in new technology and infrastructure (things such as lambing and feeder barns and outdoor sheds and corrals).

The Sarto farm, for example, includes a large, insulated and heated lambing barn, a big feeder barn, almost a dozen shelter barns, and 23 outdoor corrals. A second farm it has in Lundar is roughly the same size, with the same number of ewes (about 5,000). The company also has a feed lot for ewe lambs in Stony Mountain.

With hundreds of ewes and lambs of various sizes in the lambing and feeder barns at Sartos, you’d expect the smell of manure to be strong. But it’s not, thanks in part to a good ventilation system. What’s even more surprising, is there are very few flies. That’s because the farm uses tiny parasite wasps that eat the fly larvae. And they pose no threat to sheep or humans.

The newborn lambs are kept indoors for the first month, then they and their moms move into the outdoor corrals and barns for another month. After that, the lambs and ewes are separated.

Because they often have three or four lambs at a time, which is a lot of hungry mouths to feed, they’re allowed to nurse only two of them. The other one or two are bottle fed in a self-feeding nursery within the lambing barn.

Smith says because of their thick, wooly coats, the lambs and adult sheep actually prefer being outside, even during the winter. What they don’t like is high humidity or getting wet, which is why the outdoor barns have a roof and roll-up tarp walls to provide protection from the wind, rain and snow.

The adult sheep and lambs are fed specially formulated feed. With the adults, it’s usually a mixture of corn silage, alfalfa hay and barley or barley screenings. Being outdoors makes them more susceptible to predators, which in southern Manitoba means coyotes and domestic dogs mainly, although in some parts of the province it can also be wolves and the occasional cougar or bear.

To protect its outdoor flocks, the Sarto farm has five big Akbash and Pyrenese Mountain dogs patrolling the outdoor corrals at night, on the lookout for trouble. Smith says they are all fiercely protective of their flocks.

Two years ago, the farm lost 20 ewes due to a particularly wily and aggressive mother coyote. She’d send one member of the pack to one end of the farmyard to start yelping, and when the dogs ran there, she and some of the other pack members would snatch some ewes from the corrals at the other end of the yard. But the dogs eventually got wise to that and there have been no losses in the past year.

To help it hit its aggressive growth targets, since late 2015 Canada Sheep & Lamb Farms has contracted other local sheep farmers to supplement its lamb production. It supplies these “multiplier farms” with pregnant ewes and breeding rams from its elite flock to ensure its genetics and breeding standards are maintained. Once the lambs are born, the multiplier farms keep some of them to grow their ewe flock, and the rest go to Canada Sheep & Lamb Farms. It finishes raising them until they reach the right weight for processing or are ready to be become breeding stock.

The company is currently working with four multiplier farms, and has plans to add two more in 2018. Although their flocks vary in size, the plan is for them all to eventually have about 5,000 ewes, which Smith said is the minimum number required to make an accelerated-lambing system work efficiently.

One of the big reasons Canada Sheep & Lamb Farms wants to expand its ewe flock to 50,000 by next fall is because it also plans to build a new sheep-and-lamb processing plant in southeastern Manitoba. That’s where Integrated Foods, which has processing plants in New Zealand, can bring its expertise to the table.

Canada Sheep & Lamb Farms currently ships all of its market lambs to Alberta for processing because there aren’t any federally inspected lamb-processing plants in Manitoba. But if it can boost its flock to 50,000 ewes, that will be enough lambs to keep the Alberta plant and the new Manitoba plant both running efficiently.

Smith says they’ve already received approval from the RM of Stuartburn to build the new plant near the town of Vita. It will process only sheep and lambs, and will be modelled after one of Integrated Foods’ sheep-processing facilities in New Zealand, which produces a minimum amount of odour and waste byproducts.

The plant will have the capacity to process at least 150,000 animals per year, and will employ about 100 people when fully operational. Smith said it will produce primary processing products such as lamb chops, roasts and hamburger, but may also produce secondary products such as hamburger patties and pre-packaged meals.

The plan is to not only design it to Canadian processing standards, but ultimately to U.S. and European Union standards as well. That way its products can be exported south and overseas.

Smith says the United States represents a huge export opportunity because the demand for sheep and lamb is roughly 10 times bigger than in Canada, and is even more underserved than the Canadian market.

“They have the same growing demand we have, but they don’t have the same growing supply,” he explains, adding the largest sheep producers in the United States are some pasture-based operations with about 10,000-plus ewes.

The Manitoba Sheep Association, the Canadian Sheep Federation and Manitoba Agriculture all say another federally inspected processing plant would be a big benefit to both the Manitoba and Canadian sheep industries.

The CSF’s Kolodychuk and the MSA’s Basford said Canada needs to be producing a lot more sheep and lamb meat because more than half of what’s now consumed in Canada has to be imported. The country also doesn’t have enough federally inspected processing plants, either.

Smith says they eventually hope to not only export processed meat products to the United States, but also sheep embryos. Canada Sheep & Lamb Farms currently doesn’t sell embryos to any outside firms because it needs them to keep aggressively growing its own flock. Integrated Foods is also taking some of the embryos for its sheep-farming operations in New Zealand.

“But longer term, (exporting embryos to the United States) would certainly seem like a likely option,” Smith says. “We’ve already had lots of (outside) requests for our embryos. We had one large animal producer from Russia who wanted to buy 100,000 embryos from us.”

Basford says Manitoba has never had a large, federally inspected sheep and lamb-processing facility, “so to have this… would be huge,” she adds. “It becomes another avenue to market our lambs, and would also alleviate some of our transportation costs.”

She notes Manitoba producers now ship most of their market lambs to Alberta or Ontario to be processed, which costs more and is harder on the animals.

“I think for the industry, the more options the better,” Kolodychuk says. “Especially with the numbers (Smith) is increasing (production) by. The need (for additional processing capacity) will be there.”

Basford and Miles Beaudin, director of primary agricultural crops and livestock with Manitoba Agriculture, say having a plant here may also encourage more farmers to start raising sheep, and give existing producers the confidence to expand their production.

They all predict the demand for sheep and lamb meat will continue to grow with the arrival of more immigrants, who prefer eating lamb or sheep meat to eating beef or pork, and as more consumers seek more variety in their diets. 

There is also a growing consumer demand for food that is produced in a humane and environmentally sustainable manner, Basford says.

“There is a big movement all around… where people really want to know where the sheep are produced and who is producing it. They want some connectivity to the meat on their table.” 

Also working in the industry’s favour, Beaudin says, is that the gap between lamb and beef prices has narrowed considerably.

“It’s an even better value than beef in some cases, and it tastes good.”

He says the new processing plant will also provide jobs for area residents, as well as a host of spinoff benefits for other businesses, including farmers, trucking companies, restaurants and gas stations.

He and Basford say that, thanks in large part to Canada Sheep & Lamb Farms, Manitoba is the only province with an expanding sheep herd. Basford said the MSA wants to help keep it growing, and is drawing up a new strategic plan that envisions growing the province’s sheep inventory to 200,000 ewes by 2020. It also plans to provide local sheep producers with the additional information and tools they need to grow their flocks. That could even include establishing a voluntary marketing board, if that’s what local producers want. 

She says while it’s great to see Smith and Canada Sheep & Lamb Farms aggressively ramping up their production, Manitoba also needs to get its smaller and mid-sized producers thinking expansion.

She realizes not all of Manitoba’s 400 sheep producers will want to expand, and that there will always be room in the market for smaller, hobby farm-type operations.

“So are we moving to a system that is solely Pat Smith? I don’t think so,” she adds. “But what Pat has done is made us on the association sit up and realize we all need to be pulling up our socks… and providing the tools so we (as an industry) can produce more.”

murray.mcneill@freepress.mb.ca