We lamb late compared to many Ryeland flocks, why? The days are longer, the weather’s warmer and the grass is lush and growing.. err not in 2018 it wasn’t, even in March we still had snow. It was a harsh Winter by our standards with snow in November and more again at the start of 2018. On average we had about a foot of snow but in places where it had drifted we had over 2 feet.
We always feed ad hoc hay and some concentrates for 4 weeks each side of lambing. This season we started feeding the ewes concentrate in November and didn’t stop until late April.
The ewes come in overnight mainly for our convenience, spend 1-2 days when they lamb other than that they are out on the grass. This year everyone was in, and in for days and days. Fortunately we replaced one of our old sheds with a steel framed barn, without it we’d have struggled. I don’t know where we could have sheltered the newborn lambs. The snow was so light and fluffy it was blowing in through the air vents in the roof of the barn, crazy let’s hope 2019 is back to normal.
Having said all of that lambing went well with no mortalities, however the lambing percentage was down. Initially we had nothing but twins and then it switched over and we had nothing but singles. We have no idea why, we used 3 tups, all sheep had the same diet and management regime. The only difference seems to be lambing date, that’s farming I guess!
Dumblehole 