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.
Not all lamb milk replacements are the same. Following colostrum feeding, the choice of a lamb milk replacer for artificially reared lambs is an important consideration. A digestible, carefully formulated milk replacer can help lambs to achieve their full growth potential to develop into strong, robust lambs which continue to perform.
Beef and Sheep manager, Bryn Hughes advises farmers to make informed adjustments to their ewe management practices for greater success during the lambing season.
Lambs are born with an immunological disadvantage due to immunoglobulins being unable to be passed through the placenta to the lamb during pregnancy, making them particularly vulnerable to diseases. During the first two hours of life the gut is 20-30% efficient at absorbing IgGs, but the capability of the gut declines to 0% after 24 hours. Consequently, it is crucial that lambs receive colostrum soon after birth in order to absorb sufficient antibodies to reduce the risk of disease and mortality.
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.
