Why is raising sheep not profitable? The main reasons are these few
Sheep are herbivorous livestock, easy to graze and keep in pens, able to make extensive use of pasture grass, straw and various other grasses and leaves, and they have the characteristics of fast growth, strong disease resistance, high reproductive rate and clear economic benefits. However, how to raise sheep profitably requires consideration from many aspects. Let us take a look below at why raising sheep is not profitable!
Why is raising sheep not profitable?
1. Serious inbreeding: Many farms like to use a hereditary ram system, and when the ram gets old they pick one of its offspring as the breeding ram. As a result, the sheep end up with strange diseases. From a genetics standpoint, this is a major taboo in sheep raising.
2. Unwilling to feed feed: Many farms are completely unwilling to feed a single grain of feed during the sheep-raising process and prefer a purely grazing approach. Only when the lambs are born and there is no milk do they think of feeding grain. They completely fail to understand the relationship between giving and getting.
3. Poor awareness of disease prevention: Many farms dislike doing disease prevention, and as long as the sheep are not sick they never give injections or medicine. In fact, after sheep have completed vaccinations and deworming, there are very few deaths from disease, and herd-wide outbreaks are even rarer.
4. Chaotic flock structure: Normally one breeding ram is paired with 30 to 35 ewes, but many farms do not have many sheep to begin with; among just over twenty sheep there may be four or five rams, large and small, while fewer than ten are ewes that can actually reproduce.
How can raising sheep be made profitable?
1. Breed selection: Raising sheep well is not as good as choosing the breed well. With some breeds, no matter how well you feed them, the sheep simply do not gain weight quickly. This reason shows that breed plays a vital role in the growth rate of sheep, so sheep farmers must be careful when choosing sheep breeds.
2. Quality control: In sheep raising, the quality of breeding sheep must be well controlled. Introducing high-quality breeding sheep will reduce a great deal of risk for sheep farms just entering the industry. If quality selection is poor, not only will it fail to improve benefits, it will often cause the farm to lose its entire investment.
3. Feed formulation: There are many feeds for sheep, such as corn straw, wheat straw, soybean straw, rice straw, pasture grass, peanut vines, sweet potato vines and so on. After crushing, all of them can be used as sheep feed, and the cost is also very low; in some areas they do not even cost money.
4. Immunization and disinfection: Disinfection is extremely critical for sheep farms. Regular disinfection can effectively avoid the breeding of bacteria, thereby reducing the occurrence of disease in meat sheep. To prevent bacteria from developing resistance, the disinfectant must be changed regularly, and vaccines are even more of a top priority.
5. Selling price: The selling price and sheep-raising profit are inseparable, mainly depending on the sales region, breed, body condition, market conditions and so on. If the selling price is 0.5 yuan higher per jin, then for a 100-jin sheep that is 50 yuan, and for 100 sheep that is 5,000 yuan.
How can the cost of raising sheep be reduced?
1. Feed selection: Compared with roughage such as straw and seedlings, feed is after all relatively expensive. Providing nutritional supplementation at ordinary times and increasing concentrated supplement feed in stages can reduce costs as much as possible while also meeting the growth needs of the sheep, bringing them to market earlier and locking in profits and recovering funds.
2. Reasonable selection of breeding stock: What matters with breeding sheep is not how many there are but their quality. Poor breeding rams should be promptly culled, eliminated or sent to market so that the quality of the flock can be improved. When necessary, artificial insemination techniques can be learned, which can greatly increase the utilization rate of breeding rams and also reduce the number kept.
3. Reasonable fattening: It is best to fatten for 2 to 3 months, and at the same time the fattening time should be flexibly controlled according to the body condition of the fattening sheep. During the green grass period, in places with grassy slopes, adult sheep in poor condition can first be grazed to restore body condition with green grass, and then fattened, which can save feed and reduce costs.
4. Self-breeding and self-raising: If there are breeding rams and ewes of excellent breed, they can be bred and raised on your own. At the same time, make full use of heterosis. Common crossbreeding models include two-way crossbreeding, three-way crossbreeding, backcrossing, terminal crossbreeding and so on. Crossbred offspring can absorb the advantages of both the sire and the dam, and the method is simple and easy to carry out.
6. Improve techniques: It is better to rely on yourself than on others. Every day, watch more, learn more and ask for more advice, and learn more about common problems such as lamb delivery, basic identification of sheep diseases, and the harms of inbreeding. These are all closely related to actual benefits. Learning more can certainly do you no harm!