It's terrible to open the door on a Monday morning and the first thing you have to do is go back inside for a jacket. That sums up May around here.

Growth is pretty much non-existent. I haven't measured grass recently as the minute a blade of grass pops up its head here, an animal has it whipped. The biting wind coming down from the polar regions is unsettling stock but if the sun comes out at all, they are happy.

We haven't spread more fertiliser. I keep thinking the weather will pick up next week, or the week after, and then I was told yesterday it has been like this for “42 days” by a neighbour who keeps detailed records of the weather.

Thriving

But in saying all that, we are happy with the way stock are thriving at present. All the sheep were in over two days last week, while the majority of ewes are mud fat. Any lambs that needed attention got it, along with some dirty ewes.

We find that crutching ewes pre-lambing saves on days of work this time of year. The greatest pleasure in having them in was we only detected foot issues in three ewes out of 450 and I think we are starting to see the benefits of culling hard for lameness.

The footbath has not been used yet either this year. Lambs are closely monitored and faecal egg counts are done when appropriate. Only lambs in need of a dose will receive it. I think we have only dosed 50 lambs so far this year. We have not noticed any detrimental affect to lamb growth, but it is something we keep a sharp eye on.

We have started to slaughter the first of the lambs during the past few weeks and we are very happy so far with the results, especially considering grass has been tight and we only gave meal to five sets of triplets since turnout. Average deadweights have been around 20kg.

Pull on quotes

The 40c/kg pull on lamb quotes this weekend is just what the sheep industry didn’t need. The lamb processors are busy telling us they are very worried about the massive decline in the sheep flock - they act like they are concerned.

With the current forecast predicting cold weather again for the end of the week, we are going to wean a lot of the lambs this week.

We tend to wean early enough here most years. From a handling point of view, it makes getting in lambs a lot easier. It also means you can start dropping off lambs to the factory the night before as they wont be pining for their mothers. This is a big time saver as there is nothing worse than arriving to the tail end of a big queue in the morning.

I must go now and tally up lamb numbers for our producer group as I am co-ordinator and numbers have to be in every Monday. Hopefully the sun might come out too.