Except for a few, all breeding sheep have tipped over.
We’re keeping a close eye on replays to see if there’s more coming from a particular group than expected; the different radle colors are helpful.
We gave some rams a break and replaced them with others. We will soon be taking on the Bluefaced Leicester rams and putting in their place a Lanark ram or ram lamb.
Lanark-type blackface rams are kept with the ewes for later iterations, but only stay with the ewes for a few weeks.
We don’t want to delay lambing for too long and ewes who don’t have lambs at this point are likely to have fertility problems, so surrogates of them could have the same problem.
We recently gave all the spare lambs a cobalt bolus and saw how they were doing. Some tended to chafe. We outperformed these, blaming the rich grass.
These lambs get soaked with flukes in early December. We’ll see how the weed supply is at this stage. Perhaps some of the lighter ewes will be accommodated when grass supplies become scarce.
We have also selected some Bluefaced Pedigreed Leicester lambs to sell at the annual Carrick-on-Shannon Female Sale on 28th December. We also have a select few In Lamb Sheep Hoggets for our new stock rams for this sale.
We have a batch of lambs for fattening in house and hope to have half of them soon. They do well on a diet of flour, silage and some straw to keep their tripe working properly.
I weighed them and divided them by size. The smaller lambs have developed well in a short time. If they had been mixed with the stronger lambs, they would not have grown half as well.
I will raise lambs from 45 kg. Anything below that will wait a few more weeks.
The last batch of Lanark Blackface lambs to be killed did, as did some of the Mule lambs, all of which were rated R and U.
The decision to house these lambs seems to have been a wise one – it hasn’t stopped raining here since they went indoors and I’m sure they’ll do better than they would have done outdoors, especially as I do the best Grass had reserved the breeding sheep.
Grass growth has been fairly good this fall and good reserves have been built up. But the soil conditions in these fields have gotten much worse and some grass is wasted.
We’ve started closing off the fields for spring. The best protected ones are used for ewes and lambs first in spring.
We implement plans for housing, scanning and feeding.
We are examining various options to reduce feed costs. Some ewes are released back up the hill and brought back down for scanning in the new year, then divided into singles/twins/triplets and fed accordingly.
The later lambing ewes do not start feeding as early in the spring – this is determined by their red chalk colour.
At the moment the priority is for the ewes to take lambs, perch without disturbance and keep the body condition as good as possible until they are soaked for leeches, and then sorted at the time of scanning.
Tom Staunton farms in Tourmakeady, Co. Mayo
https://www.independent.ie/business/farming/sheep/advice/tom-staunton-any-ewes-not-in-lamb-yet-probably-have-fertility-issues-and-arent-worth-keeping-42162551.html Tom Staunton: Any ewes that have not yet had lambs are likely to have fertility problems and are not worth keeping