Detailed Explanation of Key Technical Points for Raising Goats in Confinement
Selecting Good Sheep Breeds
The breed of sheep is the primary condition for improving the economic benefits of sheep farming. The quality of the breed directly determines the sheep's production performance, feed consumption, feeding cycle, and feed-to-meat ratio. According to numerous scientific experiments, raising excellent crossbred sheep (such as crossbred sheep produced by crossing Boer goat rams with local ewes, or crossbred sheep produced by crossing Nubian goat rams with local ewes), the specific breed of white sheep, yellow sheep, or black sheep can be selected according to the customs and dietary habits of various regions in Guangxi. Overall, raising breeding sheep with obvious hybrid vigor can increase the number of weaned lambs per litter by 1~2, raise the weight gain of sheep during the same period by 10~25%, and increase feed utilization by more than 10~20%.
Scientific Matching and Reasonable Feed
Feed is the foundation of sheep farming and the key to success or failure. Usually, feed costs account for about 80% of the total cost of sheep farming, so how to reasonably select, use, and develop feed, appropriately add premix, improve feed conversion rate, and reduce feed consumption rate (that is, reasonably use local advantageous resources such as sugarcane tops, sweet potato vines, peanut vines, corn stalks, cassava stems, distillers' grains, and by-products such as tofu residue), while ensuring a balanced supply of feed to maintain the balance of intestinal flora in sheep and promote the digestion and absorption of nutrients, plays a decisive role in improving the economic benefits of sheep farming.
Scientific Prevention and Treatment of Sheep Diseases
Most sheep farmers always focus on the price of sheep, believing that the sheep price is the decisive factor in whether a sheep farm can be profitable, but this is actually incorrect. If we look at a sheep farm with 250 ewes on hand and an average monthly sale of 100 commercial sheep, one case of infectious pleurisy in winter causes a direct loss of 200,000; if the sheep price drops by 1 yuan per kilogram, the average monthly loss is 40,000 yuan, which is only one-fifth of the loss caused by infectious pleurisy. To solve this existing problem, it is necessary to invite veterinary epidemic prevention experts or full-time veterinary personnel to specifically formulate reasonable epidemic prevention measures, and regularly carry out preventive injections every year for foot-and-mouth disease, sheep pox, and the sheep triple quadruple vaccine. Deworming should be done once each in spring and autumn every year. Common drugs include avermectin and ivermectin. At the same time, attention should be paid to the environmental hygiene, ventilation, and moisture prevention of the sheep shed, and good prevention and treatment work should be done for parasitic diseases such as sheep scabies. Sheep flocks found to have epidemic diseases should be promptly prevented and treated.
Scientific Management of the Sheep Farm
The site design should be reasonable. On the basis of being simple, practical, scientific, and standardized, the sheep pen should achieve the goals of keeping out cold in winter, removing heat in summer, and meeting epidemic prevention requirements. Normally, the flock structure should be reasonably adjusted to improve the flock's breeding capacity. Sheep should be sold in a timely manner, and old sheep and sheep with poor production performance should be culled. A sheep farm with good daily management can save feed, avoid feed waste, maximize the conversion of invested feed into sheep weight gain, and also save manpower input; a sheep farm managed well according to epidemic prevention requirements gives the flock moderate exercise and improves the sheep's immune capacity, thereby reducing the probability of disease occurrence, which can save the cost of purchasing vaccines as well as the cost of conventional preventive medication and therapeutic medication. Scientific management from multiple aspects can improve the economic benefits of sheep farming.