YARDS.
Experience has amply demonstrated that—in the climate of the Northern and Eastern States, where no grass grows from four to four and a half months in the winter, and where, therefore, all that can be obtained from the ground is the repeatedly frozen, unnutritious herbage left in the fall—it is better to keep sheep confined in yards, excepting where the ground is covered with snow. If suffered to roam over the fields at other times, they get enough grass to take away their appetite for dry hay, but not enough to sustain them; they fall away, and toward spring they become weak, and a large proportion of them frequently perish. Flocks of some size are here, of course, alluded to, and on properly stocked farms. A few sheep would do better with a boundless range.
Some let out their sheep occasionally for a single day, during a thaw; others keep them entirely from the ground until let out to grass in the spring. The former course is preferable where the sheep ordinarily get nothing but dry fodder. It affords a healthy laxative, and a single day’s grazing will not take off their appetite from more than one succeeding dry feed. It is necessary, in the North, to keep sheep in the yards until the feed has got a good start in the spring, or they will get off from their feed—particularly the breeding ewes—and get weak at the most critical time for them in the year.
Yards should be firm-bottomed, dry, and, in the northern climate, kept well littered with straw. The yarding system is not practised to any great extent in the South; nor should it be, where sheep can get their living from the fields.