Season of the Sheep Or: There Needs To Be A Manual For This

I realize the charts may be hard to read, so I’m going to offer a brief summary.

Test One

• Watch: 6 of 18 sheep

• Closely Watch: 1 of 18 sheep

Dags:

• Dags: 2 of 18

• No Dags: 16 of 18

FAMACHA Score, 1-5:

• 1 of 18 at 3

• 5 of 18 at 2

• 12 of 18 at 1

FEC:

• 3 of 18 no sample

• 6 of 18 at 0 eggs per sample

• 7 of 18 at 50

• 1 of 18 at 100

• 1 of 18 at 150

The Summer/Fall pasture is filled with Queen-Anne’s Lace, a wild carrot that acts as a natural vermifuge. This image was captured the first full day the flock had access to that field.

This month, I’d like to do something a little different - I’d like to share a scientific story, one of extensive research, accidental right choices, and clear, measurable changes. Mixed in with that is a heartfelt desire to ensure that what I’ve learned gets into the hands, and farms, of those who need such knowledge.

I’d like to tell you about our sheep.

Around fifteen years ago, the farm received three ewes and a ram, all St Croix-Barbados crosses. My parents had worked with wool breeds in some capacity for almost 20 years, and shearing had become too much. These were hair sheep, raised primarily for meat, and they shed their fleeces each Spring.

There’s a lot of backstory I could tell, about selenium deficiencies, bottle babies, sheep in the shower and learning how to deal with frostbitten ears (ignore them), but I’m going to skip to 2017, when the flock was hit with a wave of parasites. I was barely one year out of college and returning to a farm in need of serious help. It took me a month, two ewes and nineteen lambs to figure out we were dealing with barber pole worms. This was back before calling the vet became a more common occurrence for us - my father is big on survival of the fittest, and until I took over, there were a few sheep health “mysteries” left unsolved.

Since then, I began gradually learning how to improve and maintain flock health. As any shepherd will tell you, it’s no easy task, and there’s rarely a one-and-done cure. There’s much I still don’t know, but that I’ve spent, on-and-off, a decade striving to understand. I learned about sheep anemia and mineral needs. I observed how much the hair texture and physical stance of a sheep reveals about their health, and I became able to search for answers based on hunched backs and “I know my lamb is going to die but they haven’t actually lost any weight and don’t have an infection.” Memorably, I held an 8 pm phone call last February with a fellow farmer, crying while I held the underdeveloped heart of a yearling ram in my left hand and described it to him. I learned which vets in my area could be trusted, and which ones would bill you after they’d killed your animal out of neglect.

The thing is, I didn’t HAVE to do any of this. Anyone with financial sense would have thrown in the towel, slaughtered the flock and moved on. But the issues the sheep were facing had germinated from a thickly layered bed of exhaustion, slapped-on bandages, and the belief that “if they live, they live”. Nobody was suffering from an unnameable plague, or being eaten by coyotes as a result of off-farm habitat loss; they were struggling because of choices the farmers had made. And though there’s absolutely a time and place for said choices, if left unearthed, these deeply-rooted problems would spread to the rest of the farm. Unexamined, the same choices and mistakes would be repeated; the same problems would become a normalized routine.

Most importantly, the sheep are my family. We persist in life-long relationships of mutual care. I was there for their births. I help them become parents. They trust me to lead them to safety when the coyotes are near. I rely on Mei-Mei’s desire for snuggles, and on Joule’s steadiness. It is vital, as a farmer, to understand your duty in the cycle of life and death. You must learn, intimately, that to enter into relationship with livestock is to become responsible for not only their well-being, but the well-being of the land, your own health, and the consequences of your decisions, actions and inaction. Sometimes, that does mean slaughter - this was not one of those times. Besides, patching over problems is exhausting. Even if I’d doubled down on the “if they live, they live” philosophy, I was still feeding the flock, fixing fences and rubbing down lambs, all to watch them die of White Muscle Disease or barber pole worms. Healing, rather than ignoring or scrapping the whole thing, made sense.

So fast-forward to May of 2026, when I received a text from my small-ruminant vet. Would I like to participate in a free, statewide study on the efficacy of different antihelminthics?

Uh, yes. Obviously.

The vets arrived June 8. All 18 of my sheep - 16 ewes and 2 rams - were contained in a small laneway. The goal was to catch each animal, check their body condition, iron levels, whether or not their manure appeared healthy, and take stool samples that could later be examined for parasite eggs.

Here’s where the newsletter becomes more data- driven. For those unfamiliar with sheep care, I’m including a primer:

FAMACHA is a scoring system used to describe sheep or goat iron levels. Certain parasites are blood-suckers and can cause anemia, so knowing iron levels means you get a clue as to whether or not your animal is carrying them. It’s on a 1 to 5 scale, with 1 being the best:

Bottle Jaw is the name for the edema that occasionally forms under a ruminant’s chin when they are anemic. It’s relatively uncommon, which is why FAMACHA is an important test.

BC stands for Body Condition. It’s another scoring system that describes how much fat and muscle is on the animal. It’s a very generalized system, and so when your animals range from 3 years to 14 years, there’s going to be some nuance, but it’s a great jumping-off point. 1 is unhealthily thin, 5 is unhealthily large:

Dags, or dagging, is caused by diarrhea. Soft or liquid stools can collect on the wool, clumping up around the tail and hindquarters.

FEC, or fecal egg counts, are exactly what they sound like. The number of parasite eggs in the manure of each animal gives a good indication of their internal parasite load. Because each type of parasite produces a different number of eggs, your animal may not need worming, even if they’re carrying some worms.

Here are the results of the first tests:

Examining the chart, I wanted to worm anyone with a fecal egg count of 100 or more, but I didn’t know how. Part of the extensive process of restoring flock health had involved some hard-hitting methods, because learning in real time means you can’t always mess about with treatments where the efficacy is uncertain. Two years ago, Carly, Isaiah, Brian and I separated the rams and ewes to prevent anyone from getting pregnant. We spent a whole Summer dividing up pastures to improve rotational grazing. And for the third year in a row, we used Valbazen, a chemical dewormer that is unsafe during pregnancy, as a broad-spectrum treatment. Winter of 2026 found me purchasing two mineral licks that incidentally contained copper, another broad-spectrum dewormer. Despite my research, I was going at things rather blind, but we were trying.

The point is, I felt ready to return to organic worming methods. Two problems arose: one - I am solo farming. Single-handedly catching each sheep and dosing them with a bolus or a drench would’ve been hellish. I’ve done it before and I knew I could not do it again. Two - I could not find any instructions for organically worming sheep. Any.

Don’t get me wrong - there are tomes of information on herbal medicinal properties, including which plants kill or expel parasites. And there are organic products that one could purchase. But publicly available, step-by-step, DIY deworming instructions are, as best I can tell, impossible to find. Even my go-to vet book, Herbal Handbook for Farm and Stable, was lacking in prescriptive detail and inapplicable to my scale, financial status and abilities:

“Garlic is the great specific, aided by molasses…feed finely chopped and mixed with bran…or tablets of compressed garlic can be given, the average dosage for a sheep being two to three four-grain tablets once during treatment.”

I grappled for about a week with my instincts versus my lack of written directions. By that point, Icicle the ewe had developed serious diarrhea, and I needed to stop procrastinating. The work began.

I coated the holding laneway in an inch of sawdust, drying the mud and establishing a clean slate. The sheep were locked in, with the intention of immediately beginning a diet of cleansing herbs. Instead, I promptly fell asleep. They fasted for 14 hours. The next day, I began the cleansing program, harvesting for them nothing but burdock, buckthorn, and chicory, in a ratio of 50:30:20. I also filled a trough with walnut-hull tea and provided that as their only source of water. This lasted three days; I then, noticing they were ignoring the tea, soaked ten pounds of oats in it and fed that out. On day four, I began feeding wild parsnip, garlic, mustard, elecampane, and whatever garden weeds I gathered, while continuing their burdock-buckthorn-chicory diet. At this point, Icicle’s manure was back to normal, and I could no longer afford to spend up to two hours a day harvesting a specialized sheep diet. I released the flock to new pasture and emailed the vets.

The next visit was a week later. We repeated FAMACHA scoring, dags checks and fecal egg counts - body condition would not have changed enough to register, but we did all agree their coats seemed healthier. Even Mustard, who seems to have some chronic health issues, was holding herself with more confidence.

These were the results:

Overall, my methods were effective at improving the holistic health of the entire flock and contributing to the future welfare of the farm. FEC decreased, iron levels rose and diarrhea disappeared. The chosen herbs helped the sheep expel parasites and toxins, provided minerals and nutrients previously less available in their diet, and facilitated digestive recovery. The whole program was done on a zero-dollar budget, was easy on my body, and furthered nourishing relationships between myself and the plants with whom I worked.

Statistically, the FEC outlier that is Icicle is indicative of how quickly a healthy animal in the Summer can pick up an overload of common parasites, putting them at risk. Despite said overload, her iron levels still improved, meaning the treatment was at least partially effective even during a difficult time.

Some Thoughts:

What I did was appropriate for myself, my farm and my flock. It’s a blessing and a curse that within organic worming there’s never truly a “one size fits all” method. Your practice will depend on your environment, animals, the plants or grazing cycles available to you, and your own abilities. My sheep were locked in a small, outdoor pen for six days - perhaps your infrastructure is not that developed. And I was only working with 18 animals; they fit in a small pen, they didn’t fight or destroy the fence.

Comparing my methods to conventional methods is difficult, as I’m unfamiliar with their efficacy. When testing for parasitic resistance to synthetic dewormers, you want to see at least a 90 percent reduction in egg count. Given that my animals already had such low FEC, we weren’t looking for such a success rate. This was an experiment to see what worked, and now it can be tweaked to work better. A huge benefit is that the parasites are highly unlikely to become resistant to a regimen as flexible and plant-based as mine. Because every individual plant is unique in how many tannins or other worming chemicals they carry, they’re more effective at targeting each individual worm; a parasite that might survive Valbazen and reproduce is less able to survive six or seven herbs, each with their own abilities.

A bulk worming system was necessary to make it accessible to farmers like me - those without a crew to catch and inject or drench each animal. A bulk system is more replicable on a small scale, however - harvesting enough buckthorn for 200 sheep would be a daunting task. Rather, what my experiment demonstrates is a need to return to farm-wide holistic systems, whereby animals strategically rotationally graze in paddocks planted to or already growing herbal medicine. Steeping antihelminthic teas or making herbal juices that are given free choice is an additional option.

I took a chance on the walnut. All parts of the black walnut tree are potent wormers, but they ask for understanding and respect. In the time since worming, I’ve learned more about the potentially negative impacts of walnut hull on reproduction. What I did was ultimately safe, but I recommend primarily using walnut outside of pregnancy and breeding. Buckthorn is also a plant whose power should be respected, and quantity matters. I kept the buckthorn at 30 percent or less; the very, very few cases of buckthorn poisoning have occurred when animals were locked in a paddock with no food whatsoever, and the paddock was surrounded by only buckthorn. A 100 percent buckthorn diet is dangerous; including buckthorn as medicine is not.

Worms are not an overarching enemy - they’re just as important a part of their ecosystem as any other organism. Total annihilation of internal parasites should never be the goal; we should be developing healthy, dynamic relationships with our sheep, plants, environment and parasites. There are studies suggesting that small loads of certain parasites could help certain hosts. Additionally, an animal who, through whatever means, never experiences even a light load may eventually be unable to cope with a sudden infestation. ‘Tis better to have a balance in everything, rather than a scorched-earth policy.

My final thoughts are simply that understanding organic worming doesn’t need to be this hard. Synthetic wormers were only developed in the 1960s, meaning organic deworming practices have been the norm for all but the last 60 years of agriculture. It’s only very recently that overarching health maintenance was tossed in favor of immediate treatment methods that ignore the root causes, but instructions for holistic livestock care have been deliberately quashed. Just as we’ve seen with colonial oppression of indigenous farming, or peasant seed-keeping, the deep-seated knowledge of plant-based healing is increasingly less available. Practitioners are dying, or have already passed. For instance, I scoured books, internet articles, scientific studies, and called numerous organic organizations and found nothing on bulk walnut hull use and reproduction risks. In the end, I got my information through a chance meeting with a new friend at an area farmer’s market, who called his grandmother so she could explain her observations to us.

This means that the worming methods I used are not new - what seems to be new is that I’m writing them down and sharing them widely. Frankly, anyone with consistent, replicable experience organically worming livestock should receive massive support in recording and sharing what they know. This information should be made publicly available, with credit to those doing the work - please believe me when I say that neither a basic internet search nor AI is going to provide the answers. The answers lie with grandmothers, with old farmers, with citizen scientists, artists and ecologists. They’re found in our relationships with the land, and in cultures that haven’t been forced into the commercialization of health. They are based on our ability to trust ourselves, our connections, our ancestors and the non-humans around us.

I do hope learning about my experiences here is at least interesting for you, and I hope you or your flock can gain from it. I welcome any and all thoughts, comments and notes.

Best,

Kia-Beth

Recommended Resources:

Peterson Field Guide to Medicinal Plants and Herbs by Stephen Foster and James A. Duke

Herbal Handbook for Farm and Stable by Juliet de Baracli Levi

Minerals of the Genetic Code by Charles Walters

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