With huge scope to maximise productivity from forage, Wynnstay has launched a new Forage4Profit campaign, which is designed to support farmers to improve meat or milk from forage.
The 2022 Kingshay report indicates that the average milk from forage on UK dairy farms is 2,900 litres, showcasing that there is huge scope for improvement, with some of the best farms reaching over 5,000 litres.
Sheep show season is well and truly on us, and many of us will be starting to get our sheep show ready. Not only do you want your prize ewe to look its best, you also want to highlight its best qualities.
Preparing the wool for sheep showing is an art and can be perfected through trial and error. Everybody has their preferred way of preparing their show sheep but here are some tips we have found.
Practical management at tupping has a beneficial impact on both the profitability and practicalities at lambing. Effective and reliable marking lets you know which ewes have been tupped, by which ram and when!
The nutrition of the ewe is key in achieving an optimum body condition score (BCS) at tupping, ensuring high levels of fertility, and a maximum lamb crop next season. It can take up to 6 weeks to increase a ewes BCS by one point, therefore it is important to act sooner rather than later.
“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.
One in five sheep producers are still cross fostering triplet lambs onto single-bearing ewes and about 30% are continuing to bottle feed orphans. This is despite the significant extra labour required to carry out both traditional rearing practices.
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
The importance of balancing energy and protein requirements in lamb diets throughout growth cannot be understated. The same principles should be applied to ensure vitamins and minerals are balanced responsibly, enabling optimum utilisation of the total diet.
Each trace mineral has a different role to play in the body, and although the requirements may seem small in quantity, they are vital to the health and performance of all animals.
