Incases where your Ewe or Doe does not produce enough colostrum or has died,you have many options to keep your lambs and kids nursing and growing well. You can try any of these options.
1. You can go for cross-fostering with females having good mothering ability.
2. You can re-constitute skimmed milk and offer to kids at body temperature.
3. You can make your own liquid milk replacer like soya milk, daliya liquid, gruel extract, etc. of your choice.
4. You can mix egg white and gur with some milk, you can offer.
Generally lack of milk production / colostrum at parturition is because of inadequate nutrition during the last 8 weeks of pregnancy. Twin carrying ewes require a gradual increase in concentrate feed to supplement roughage going from 0.1kg/day up to 0.7/0.8kg per ewe per day (increased on a phased basis over this time period). Once the feed level goes above 0.5kg per day it needs to be split into 2 feeds. The main reason is that during late pregnancy unless they are on a high quality roughage, they cannot physically take in enough energy to meet demands and then milk / colostrum production gets compromised.In terms of choice of colostrum going from best to worst the following is how I would rank the substitution options (This ranking is based on passive immunity benefits as well as nutritional value):
i) Frozen ewe (or goat colostrum) – freeze surplus from ewes that have more than adequate supplies at lambing.
ii) Cow colostrum (ideally from cows that were pre-immunized against clostridial diseases relevant for sheep
iii) Proprietary powdered colostrum substitutes. The problem with these is that nutritionally they are good, but from an antibody perspective they are not.
iv) Cow colostrum from cows not pre-immunized.To be honest there is not much difference between (iii) and (iv). Cow colostrum should normally be frozen so that it is available when needed. Cow colostrum from lower yielding dairy or beef cows is probably better than that from very high yielding dairy cows, as the latter is quite often very dilute compared with other options. If you do have to revert to making something based on cows milk, stay away from purchased cows milk that has been homogenized as the fat globule size is radically changed reduced with homogenization.
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