“In 2022 with the drought and food shortage, we were expecting the worst, but we had a phenomenal year with fertility” says Warwick Gill.
Running 1,500 Suffolk Mules and Texel Mule ewes in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire the first 250 lamb early in February and the remainder 1,250 lamb outdoors in April. The area as a whole is generally low in Iodine.
If your lambs are struggling with low-quality forage or limited grazing options, you should consider creep feeding your lambs. Creep feeding provides supplemental nutrition to lambs while they are still nursing.
For those with well-managed grazing systems and access to plentiful grass, creep feeding may not be required. However, to hit daily live weight gain (DLWG) targets and meet market requirements, reliance on low-quality forage or limited grazing won’t deliver the desired results, and it will pay to feed creep feed to bolster performance.
Elevated energy demands placed on pregnant ewes in late gestation mean sheep can lose condition and suffer from twin lamb disease. This produces ketones as fat reserves are used as an energy source as opposed to glucose in the bloodstream.
Body condition scoring (BCS) is a simple, cheap highly effective important management tool to assess a ewe’s body reserves. Monitoring the flocks BCS at key points in the reproductive cycle will help maximise lamb survival, reduce metabolic disease risk and produce high quality and plentiful colostrum and milk
Beef and Sheep manager, Bryn Hughes advises farmers to make informed adjustments to their ewe management practices for greater success during the lambing season.
Wynnstay customer Rob Powell has found wintering ewes at home, on grass and root crops, a cost-effective option.
For sheep, constant management of fluke is necessary because there is often no break in the grazing cycle. So, with no product persistent against fluke, a sheep treated one day can pick up infection the next if they are grazing infected pasture.
Early scanning data shows rates are 20 to 30% lower than normal following grass shortages due to the drought, meaning it is important to pay particular attention to ewe nutrition to ensure as many healthy lambs as possible are born in the spring.
Although the high fertiliser and fuel prices are scary to think about, all is not lost when it comes to managing grassland this spring.
Home-grown forage remains the cheapest form of feed available, and we need to keep this front of mind when making decisions to see the full value of the investment. Here are my top tips to maximising your investment.
Meet Dyfrig Bowen, and his partner Lyndsey, at Pengelli Farm in Cardigan. Their system comprises 40 head of Pedigree Aberdeen-Angus cows and 900 Aberfield-Cross ewes. They also buy in a further 1,500 store lambs and sell their finished lambs direct to slaughter. Around 180 ewes are lambed indoors early on and then the rest are lambed outside in April.
