Katahdin Hair Sheep For Sale In Parksley, VA
View Pictures of Our 2024 Lambs
Reserving/Purchasing Our Lambs
If you are considering buying a sheep to add to your family or homestead, you’ve come to the right place! While we do not sell adult animals often, we have lambs available for sale every year. We have Katahdin Sheep for sale. Our lambs are born in February and March most years, and typically sell out very quickly. So if you want to grab some, please let us know prior to lambing season so we can let you know when they are born.
Reserving/Purchasing Our Lambs
Email is the best way to reserve lambs or to find out what is currently available. You can email us at Victoria(at)snowdropfarm.com. We normally answer every email within 24hrs of receiving it. While we try to keep our website up to date spring is a very busy time on a farm, and the information on this page might not be accurate.
Our farm is in Parksley, VA. Please make sure you are able to pick up lambs from this location prior to purchasing them.
Our Katahdin lambs (mainly a meat breed, but also can be used for milking) are typically only available in the early spring. You can learn more about our sheep here.
We offer two options when purchasing our lambs. These options are:
1. Purchasing them as bottle babies
2. Holding them with a $100/head deposit until weaning.
If you intend to take home bottle lambs
While it is typically considered better for the lambs to leave them with their mother until weaning, we offer people the option to raise them as bottle babies. There are a couple reasons we offer this option.
Some people do not have extensive sheep handling facilities set up to catch wild sheep. Bottle raised lambs become pets almost like dogs. They are typically very friendly, and extremely easy to catch and easy to handle. They can be trained to lead and tie. This may be an ideal situation for people with limited space and facilities. Additionally, if you are hoping to milk your sheep, bottle raised lambs will be much more amenable to being milked. Particularly if you handled them a lot and spent the time to train them to lead and tie as lambs.
Having very tame ewes can also make them safer to have around.
They are much less likely to panic and run or thrash if they are unfazed by you walking up to them. They won’t try to jump through you or your fence in their panic to get away. Additionally, some people with children or those who want them exclusively as pets may wish to have the experience of raising bottle lambs.
If you purchase bottle babies they will need to be fed milk replacer several times a day until the have a functional rumen and are able to eat enough solid food to sustain them. You can typically start weaning bottle lambs at about 6 weeks of age. At this point they should be chewing their cud, eating good quantities of hay and feed, and should be about 2.5x their birth weight.
You will need to feed bottle lambs 4-6 times a day. Every 2-3 hours (4-5 hours overnight) for the first few days is best, then you can gradually increase the feeding volume and decrease the number of feedings down to 2x a day. By the time they are a week old, you should also be offering them access to lamb creep feed and leafy hay or pasture. Once they are eating solid food well you can wean them. You will know they have a functional rumen and are close to being ready to wean when you start to see them chewing their cud.
We do have a few rules regarding bottle babies though. This is to ensure their well-being. We want them to thrive for you.
1. Bottle babies have to be taken within a week of them being born. This is to ensure that they will still take the bottle. Older lambs do not accept a bottle readily, but are also not ready to eat solid foods exclusively. So if they are more than a week old, you have to wait until weaning to take them home. Weaning is typically at 8 weeks of age.
2. If you have no other sheep or goats to keep them company you must purchase 2 lambs. Sheep are herd/flock animals. They CANNOT live alone and must have another sheep to keep them company.
3. PLEASE NOTE: We do not recommend raising ram lambs as bottle babies unless they will be castrated and kept as pets/for their wool. Raising ram lambs as bottle babies removes the innate respect/fear they have of humans and can make them very dangerous to be around as they get older. Unless castrated before leaving ram lambs will not be sold as bottle babies. We can castrate ram lambs prior to them leaving upon request.
If you intend to take home weaned lambs
Our lambs are typically weaned at about 8 weeks old. By that time their rumens are functional, they are chewing their cuds, and have learned how to eat from mom. They are ready to eat a diet exclusively of solid food. At this point you may offer them creep feed and hay, or good quality pasture if that is available.
If you wish to reserve lambs for pick up at weaning, we require a $100/head deposit. Our lambs typically sell very quickly in the spring and this is the only way to guarantee they will be available for you at weaning. You are welcome to set up an an appointment to come meet your lambs any time between when they are born and their pick up date.
We do not hold lambs without a deposit.
They are considered available for anyone to purchase until a deposit is received. We are sorry, but we cannot hold lambs based upon someone simply telling us they want one. This is unfair to our other customers because the unfortunate truth is that without committing to a deposit, too many people say they want a lamb and then do not follow through with the purchase later.
When we take your deposit on a lamb, it is not refundable if you change your mind about wanting the lamb. However, we will refund your entire deposit if something unexpected happens to the lamb and we cannot provide the agreed upon lamb (or a suitable substitute) as planned.
When we take the deposit, we will set up a tentative pick up date with you. If you cannot meet that date, please contact us as soon as possible and let us know so that we can reschedule. We expect lambs to be picked up promptly around the 8 week mark.
If lambs are not picked up within 2 weeks of the scheduled pick up date we will charge board for keeping the lamb(s). If they are not picked up within 1 month of the scheduled pick up date, we will offer them for sale to someone else, and you will forfeit your deposit.
Katahdin Lambs For Sale
Lambs will be available again beginning in February-March 2025.
Virtually every single one of our Katahdin lambs is born a spotted individual. Our flock has many black and white ewes and a few brown and white ewes. Every single ewe is carrying spotting genes. This means that we rarely have solid white lambs born. If you purchase lambs from us you can rest assured that each and every sheep in your small flock will be a unique looking individual. Spotting can range from just a face stripe and socks to looking like a Holstein cow.
As each lamb comes with a unique spotting pattern, we typically take photos and offer them for sale as soon as they are born. This allows you the option of selecting which lambs you would prefer.
Please contact us if you have any questions regarding purchasing any of our lambs!
