Large-scale sheep operation underlines Saskatchewan advantage

Source: Saskatchewan Agriculture and Food

Inexpensive and plentiful land was the draw for Martin and Louise Catto to move their family from Scotland to Saskatchewan in 1999. The result of their efforts is now one of the largest sheep operations in the province.

The Cattos purchased a large farm in the Lipton area, and, after assessing the potential, decided that the right blend would be grain farming combined with large-scale sheep production.

Martin Catto feels that Saskatchewan should and could rival Australia for large sheep herds.

“In my opinion, we’ve got a better climate for raising sheep here,” Catto said. “We’ve got a winter that gets rid of all the bugs, and there’s no fly problem here like there is in Australia. We have to feed in winter, but it is relatively easy to do that.”

Saskatchewan Agriculture and Food Livestock Development Specialist Tara Jaboeuf echoes Catto’s thoughts about the province’s assets for sheep production.

“We have a large land base to farm and a smaller per capita population,” Jaboeuf said. “We have an abundance of feed grains and good pasture lands. Biosecurity is easier to maintain.”

She calls the Catto family innovators in the use of equipment, facilities and feed. The Catto flock presently numbers about 1,500 ewes, plus a further 1,800 to 2,000 lambs on pasture.

One of the biggest challenges Catto faced in assembling his herd was simply finding enough animals. “The hardest thing is to buy big flocks of sheep,” he said. “We were lucky to find 20 to 30 ewes at an auction sale, when we really wanted two to three hundred. We just went and bought complete flocks from people, and then we started breeding our own.”

One of the innovations that allows management of such large numbers is pasture lambing in May and June, to add to the lambing in the barns that is done in January and February.

“There are two ways of doing it,” according to Catto. “You either lamb through the barn or lamb on pasture. When you’re lambing through the barn, your numbers are limited by the size of your buildings, and it’s very labour-intensive. We were doing that twice a year with 500 animals, so that put us up to a thousand ewes, and we wanted to get more. The only way we could do that was to lamb on pasture, and the only restriction there is the amount of fences you build.”

With that large a flock comes some fairly steep bills for feed during the winter, but Catto is using a resource that exists on most farms and costs nothing: chaff.

“We grain farm just under 4,000 acres, and we collect barley chaff, pea chaff and oat chaff to supplement winter feeding,” he said. “It is half of our winter feed needs. Barley silage can cost $40 a tonne to make, while chaff is free.”

Catto states that his number one problem is predation by coyotes. His current answer is 12 guardian dogs to watch over the flock. He says the key to training the dogs is to make it clear where they belong.

“You just place a pup with some sheep, and once it’s an adult, it stays with those sheep. If there’s any trouble, the dog starts barking and the sheep all go in a tight group,” he said.

“If you have a guardian dog, it should never be sitting by the house, it should always be with the sheep. If you let it stay at the house one night, you’ll wreck that dog.”

Catto describes the market for lambs as strong, with significant profit margins available. He says the Saskatchewan advantage is starting to be noticed in Scotland and Britain, and expects to see more families staking their future here on the land in the coming years.

For more information, contact:
Martin Catto
Phone: (306) 675-4957

Tara Jaboeuf, Livestock Development Specialist
Saskatchewan Agriculture and Food
Phone: (306) 933-5099
E-mail: tjaboeuf@agr.gov.sk.ca
Website: www.agr.gov.sk.ca.