Research and on-farm experience has continually shown that addressing body condition and improving the liveweight of Scottish Blackface ewes delivers huge advantages in terms of increasing litter size, reducing barren rates and tightening the lambing spread. Experience from the Teagasc BETTER Farm sheep programme shows a difference in pregnancy rate of over 10% between ewes at a condition score of 2.0 at mating and those at the desired condition score of 3.0. It also resulted in a five-day shorter lambing spread with ewes falling below optimum body condition generally cycling later.

For ewes on semi-improved hills experience from the BETTER Farm programme points to a target liveweight of close to 50kg or higher for good-quality hills, while for ewes on harder hills this reduces to in the region of 45kg liveweight.

Getting it right

While not always easy to implement in a hill farm situation, ewes that are short of condition should, where possible, be given preferential access to better-quality grazing.

The ewes that are generally most at risk are first lambers and aged ewes, and particular attention should be given to these animals.

It is important to go through your ewes early, as it will take eight to 10 weeks on good-quality grazing to lift one condition score and longer on poorer-quality herbage.

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