Feeding for Daytime Births
My late grandfather was a large animal veterinarian that worked a lot with canines because there are often working dogs on farms and in the military (yes, he was also a veteran). He is the reason that I can hold an intelligent conversation with medical professionals and veterinarians. He taught me how to think and question, which he told me was more important than the other things one might learn in college. Understanding that his father was an inventor (we lost count at over 120 patents as the US government started admitting that my great grandfather was the inventor 75 years after the fact because he was a government man and every invention patented was owned by the US gov) and that I've been told by other veterinarians over the years who knew my grandfather or knew of him that he contributed substantially to what is known in veterinary medicine during his career, then the heritage of how to think and question can be perceived in a different light. As a family, learning is a lifelong passion and questioning is as natural as breathing.
Every time my siblings or I would start working with a new species, my grandfather would send us books on the species from lists he had access to as a vet. Later, when we bought land and started raising sheep and goats, my grandfather got to teach me hands on things that hadn't come up before in raising livestock for other people or other species and those years together were some of the best years we had as he passed on a heritage that I hope to pass on to my children and any who would like to understand how to think and question in raising animals. I don’t know the half of what he did, but it looks like even what little I know will be lost if people don’t deliberately pass it on.
My grandfather taught me how they managed parasites before there were anthelmintics in a bottle on a shelf. He taught me how to watch animals to read their body language. He taught me to jump in with confidence when I didn't feel any confidence. He taught me how to deworm with the moon, how to select breeding stock and what makes a well built meat animal. He passed on a way of looking at the animal world from what is natural to that animal to help them thrive and enjoy life. In other words, holistic animal care. He loved animals and he had a way with them. All the animals I ever saw interact with him 'knew' he was different. They treated him differently than other people. It wasn't until those last few years together that I realized that we shared this way with animals.
So with this wealthy background of knowledge, you’d think I would have lived on his every word. Unfortunately, learning to question everything, meant I questioned everything...even though he wasn’t one to lie or tell stories or be easily misled, nonetheless, when he said things that I had a hard time believing, I had to experiment with it to see it for myself. Fortunately, he also taught me how to set up controls and conduct experiments that would address and answer the questions I wanted answers to.
One of the things he said that raised questions for me was that when during a heat cycle that a cow is bred influences the gender of the offspring. He was convinced it applied to humans as well. Turns out now you can go look that up on the Internet. It’s been studied and there’s something to it.
Another thing he taught me was that when during the day that animals are fed influences when they give birth. I had a hard time believing this because if that were the case, why wouldn’t everyone do that so that lambing, kidding and calving would take place in the daylight hours? Well, like most things, I had to try it to believe it. As usual, he was right. We didn’t have so many animals that it was the highest priority at the time and when we changed how we were feeding, I pretty much forgot about it until an online discussion prompted the realization that we nearly always had labor start (and therefore most births) during daylight hours.
At the time, we were feeding huge round bales of either grass hay or alfalfa hay and keeping animals in a dry lot during the birthing season because we were lambing and kidding them out before the pasture came in. Animals never ran out of feed and they nearly always lambed and kidded at about noon. In analyzing this phenomenon, it occurred to me that noon was a good time for a wild animal to give birth because it’s the least active time for predation and newborns would have plenty of time to dry off before the sun went down and the temp dipped during the night hours. They would also have time to figure out how to work their legs to get moving if they needed to relocate to avoid predators. Other than appreciating that we weren’t disturbing our sleep with midnight births and passing on the information to the folks in the online discussion, I didn’t give it any further thought at the time.
Later, in talking with my grandfather, we discussed the theory that animals give birth when their digestive system is at it’s emptiest and it occurred to me that people usually do the same if we really thought about it and didn’t include induced labors in the observations. That’s when he told me that it seemed to take at least two weeks to see the impact of feeding time on the start of labor, but that a month or more was more certain and that farmers that wanted to control labor through feeding practices should strive to be very timely in when they feed the evening meal. He recommended 4-6pm (the earlier, the better, but a lot of farmers work off farm). He believed that farmers feeding twice a day should divide the portions so that a greater portion was fed in the evening meal.
Fast forward a few years later and I found some reason to pass this information on to someone who really needed to be present for a birth and preferred a daylight birthing. Some other person thought it would be a good idea to tell me that what I was advising was nonsense. That still makes me laugh because I went through the same thought process myself. Being the curious type and having only my personal experience and my grandfather’s, I went looking to see if anyone had ever conducted a study on the topic. Sure enough, lots of agriculture universities were on it and there is lots of information out there if ones wishes to look into it. Here's a good starting place for the curious (https://extension.sdstate.edu/feed-night-calve-during-day).
Over the years, we’ve changed how and what we feed, but for our own convenience, we usually do give some thought to feeding for daylight births whenever we are expecting does to kid or ewes to lamb. We like being around when animals give birth in case they need assistance (and who doesn’t want to be the first one to spot a new arrival?). We start evening chores in the spring, fall and winter months at 4pm, so it’s easy to make feeding expectant mothers the first task for evening chores. We still largely rely on the constant presence of the round bales to influence when ewes lamb since we don’t feed grain, but we try to check and replace round bales as necessary at around 4pm as much as possible. Does are usually offered alfalfa pellets at the time since we don’t generally feed them grain either. Most of our animals go into labor between 9:30-2:30pm on this feeding schedule. It’s very convenient to schedule errands for after 3pm and just double check to see if anything is in labor before going into clean up with the confidence that any signs of impending birth should have been visible by then. It’s definitely the exception for an animal to give birth outside of that window and it’s usually after a long labor that did begin during that window.
If feeding to influence birthing is a priority, there are ways to make it happen. Happy lambing and kidding season everyone!
