Impacts of Hands-on Lambing and Kidding Workshops
ISSN 2158-9429
Volume 18, Issue 1 - June 2025
Editor: Linda Chalker-Scott
Abstract
The U.S. Sheep Industry has been on a steady decline in numbers since the early 2000’s by approximately 2% yearly. Furthermore, approximately 90% of producers who raise sheep are small operations, but those small operations only account for 12% of the sheep in Utah (Utah Ag Census, 2022). This means that the majority of sheep in the state are raised on large range operations that report having more than 1,000 sheep. Many of these operations have been in business for generations and find it difficult to continue with increased production costs, labor shortage, and predator losses. However, even with the decline of total sheep numbers, there has been an increasing number of new sheep producers nationally and statewide. National and state goat numbers have also been on the rise since the early 1990’s. Utah has seen an increase in new inexperienced producers, some of which reside in underserved and minority populations. We conducted three workshops in Utah. Surveys from our workshops show that many participants gained between 20% and 40% confidence in animal husbandry knowledge with 97% of participants plan to implement skills learned at these workshops. Future programming will be organized around needs discussed in these workshops such as parasite and prolapse control measures.
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