For the Cal Poly’s Small Ruminant Operations student managers lamb season is equal parts gratification, exhaustion and grief. Throughout January and February, students work tirelessly to ensure the safety of the lambs born.
The Sheep Center is busiest during lamb season. Located at Cheda Ranch on Cal Poly’s campus, 100 ewes graze 140 acres of irrigated pasture and open rangeland and are cared for by four student managers.
The 100 ewes will turn into 250, as they expect 150 new lambs during this season. Matt Habib, a small ruminant operations manager and the other small ruminant operations managers have been preparing and eagerly awaiting this season, despite the potential of lamb mortality.
“It’s my favorite time of the year,” Habib, an agriculture systems senior, said. “Sometimes there’s a lot of death that can be hard to deal with, but altogether, it’s really rewarding to get to work with those animals and help get them started in the world.”
This is a common theme in the other managers, who also emphasize the joy that comes with seeing the results of weeks of preparation.
“This is probably my favorite time of the year in the season, because you get to see all these little babies running around,” said Mars Kiledjian, a small ruminant operations manager and animal science junior.
Through Cal Poly’s “Learn By Doing” ideology, the ASCI 290 Lambing Enterprise class works alongside these managers to get hands-on experience of the lambing season. The one unit class is open to all majors during the winter quarter. Students may sign up for either the 6:30 a.m. or 4:30 p.m. check to help record the new lambs and inspect the other ewes.
Kiledjian and Habib both decided to take ASCI 290 and from there, decided to stick with the program and become managers of the ranch.
“I feel like I’ve gotten to know the sheep. Some of them know us too, and they’ll come up to say hi,” Habib said.
One of the ACSI 290 students’ responsibilities is to record a new lamb, which starts with students finding the newborn lambs and recording its mother and weight. They ear tag them based on their sex, signifying it on the placement of the ear tag, using “righty for ram and lefty for lady”. Next, they perform an iodine dip on the umbilical cord, which will sterilize and dry it out to prevent infection. Finally, they color code the lambs based on how many were in the birth — single, twins or triplets — and write everything down in their records.
The managers and students try to be as hands-off as possible during lamb season.
Habib explains, “Our goal is for all of them to lamb totally unassisted, just on their own. And you know, deliver the lamb, clean it up, feed it and just get it started without us having to intervene.”
The program emphasizes holistic management. The lambs at the Sheep Center are pasture- raised, so the managers are not only focused on their animals but the environment they’re in.
According to Habib, their success depends on the effective and sustainable management of the land, and the ecological focused practices that will benefit their livestock will benefit the other animals on the landscape as well. They manage a part of an ecosystem at Cheda Ranch.
Kiledjian said that the systems of small ruminant operations gives students the experience of a holistic management that they can bring into future careers in animal science.
The Sheep Center will keep the newest flock for a few months as they reach market weight, Habib said.
They will then select about 15% of the best females to keep at the center as the other ewes get older. The Sheep Center will sell the remaining lambs around the community, and the proceeds will go back into the program. The center will use the flock for targeted grazing around campus for vegetation management and continue to live at Cheda Ranch after they reach market weight.