Lambing time is on our minds. As we are quite focused on our sheep at the moment, I thought I’d tell you a little about their year.
We are not typical sheep farmers. The family farm is actually predominantly a diary farm but Iain and I have a flock of 150 pedigree Dorset breeding ewes. We have some Polled Dorsets and also some Dorset Horns. Unlike most sheep farmers we don’t have our main lambing time in the Spring but we lamb our main flock in October and November. This works well for us as it fits in nicely with the cows for winter grazing when the milking ladies are housed. We sometimes also lamb a few youngsters that we have kept on to join our breeding flock in January. Least said about the ‘inadvertent’ summer lambing the better but suffice to say that the ram/s do manage to get out for a day visit occasionally, hence having 15 just lambed now with beautiful summer babies!
To lamb in October, we are already starting our breeding year now. We try to condense our lambing period into about 4 weeks so we want to know that our ewes are ready for breeding when the rams arrive. To do this we send in some harmless testosterone for at least a fortnight before introducing the rams as this helps them to begin ‘cycling’. Obviously, we don’t actually want them to get in lamb at this stage so the visiting testosterone is in the form of our Lucky ram who has had a vasectomy, commonly know as a ‘Teaser’ ram. A ewe’s gestation period is approximately 145 days which I tend to think of it as 5 months less 1 week. This year our rams went in on 19th May so we will be expecting lambs from the 12th October (although you often get one or two a little early).
When the rams go in with the ewes we put a special harness on them which carries a coloured crayon (you can also use a paste painted directly on to the rams chest). This is called raddle and when the ram serves a ewe the crayon will mark her back so when we check the sheep we can see which ewes have been mated. We change the colour part way through so we then know whether the ewe was mated early or late and have a rough idea when she should lamb. On arrival in the field the rams quickly have a swarm of ewes checking them out!
After their month with the rams the ladies will have a quiet time when we will only do essential management and we’ll keep our fingers crossed. After the rams have been out for at least 6 weeks we will have the scanner come to visit. He will see how many lambs each ewe is carrying so we can make sure they get the right feeding rations to stay fit and healthy in the run up to lambing when the fun really starts! I’ll tell you all about that another day. 😊