Marketing spring lambs:

The trade for spring lambs has started disappointingly, with base quotes of €6.00/kg. Demand should hopefully pick up next week, with butchers and factories starting to source lambs in greater quantities. The high numbers of hoggets in the system up to now haven’t helped the trade for spring lambs. It is important to go through your lambs and weigh up the best market outlet, as in the past demand has waned in the post-Easter period.

Heavier lambs that may deliver a carcase weight in excess of 20kg may be better traded in mart sales or directly to butchers, if this trade avenue exists locally. This will also be dependent on having well conformed, fleshed lambs that will generate good competition. Where this is not the case, the factory trade may be the best outlet.

Lambs that are consuming ad-lib meals will be thriving – and at the same time running up significant costs due to rising consumption levels. It is important therefore to handle lambs regularly and to use realistic kill-out percentages for drafting. Young intensively fed lambs will achieve a kill-out of 49% to 51%, while aged lambs that have performed poorly will kill 1% to 2% lower.

With demand likely to be strong for the Easter trade, it may also be a suitable time to go through ewe hoggets and draft any lots that have not performed as expected. Where hoggets have been stored with little feeding, Easter be a sale date that is coming too early, with a period of feeding or access to good-quality grass required to put a cover of flesh on hoggets before drafting.

Electronic tagging:

A few enquiries have been made on whether ewe hoggets traded in mart sales should now possess an electronic tag set. NCIS rules state that all sheep should receive an EID tag set by the time they reach 12 months of age. The measure used to determine this is when sheep set their first two permanent teeth. From a marketing point of view, ewe hoggets with breeding potential should be traded at this stage of the year with EID tags, as it may generate extra demand from farmers who are purchasing hoggets to meet Areas of Natural Constraint stocking rate requirements but do not want the hassle of having to upgrade tagging to electronic status.

For others who need to upgrade to electronic status, there are two options. Firstly, ordering a matching tag with an equivalent number to the one the animal already possesses. Secondly, the other more common option is removing the existing tag, replacing with a new tag set and correlating the change in the flock register.

Clover varieties:

This week’s Focus on reseeding covers aspects farmers should keep in mind before progressing with a reseeding job. With regard to clover inclusion, there is scope to improve animal and sward performance by incorporating clover into a reseed. For sheep systems, the advice is to select small- and medium-leaf varieties, while for mixed grazing medium-leaf varieties suit best. Where weeds – and in particular, docks – are an issue pre-reseeding, it may be best to delay clover incorporation, as many of the better performing sprays are not clover-safe.