Milking profit from extra lambs

For Martin Catto of Lipton, Sask., the choice of when to put lambs on his automatic milk feeder is an easy one.

If he gets triplets, one of the set goes on the feeder. If human-fed lambs start eating up more time than daily mechanical maintenance and cleaning, it’s time for an automated option.

“What’ll happen is that, if you leave the three lambs on that ewe, you’re going to get three small lambs instead of two good ones or two good ones and one dead one,” Catto said.

“When we start having enough lambs on the bottle that it takes more than 15 minutes, that’s when we fire up the machine.”