By the middle of October, there were 17 lambs left for slaughter.
They aren’t nice to look at. Some of them have had a rough upbringing, and none of them are what you’d call fast growers. If they had been, they would have been sold months ago.
The upshot of studying my lamb performance figures suggests that physical targets have been met and surpassed, which always makes discussion a lot more pleasant. Nonetheless, I constantly remind myself that it’s the bad years when I learn more about any system on this farm.
This is exactly where I want to be, as long as these figures haven’t been propped up by heavy use of the creep feeder
A broad-brush approach to figures means picking the halfway point during lambing and then working out a date when at least half of the lambs have been sold or transferred for breeding.
This non-electronic, crude, inefficient and outdated method tells me that average lamb growth rate is in the region of 300g/day. This is exactly where I want to be, as long as these figures haven’t been propped up by heavy use of the creep feeder.
For the record, some lambs do receive meal, but they must fall into the special-needs category. These include triplets, ewe lamb doubles, ewes with dodgy udders, and ancient crones that have been kept past their sell-by date and don’t have enough milk. And this feeding generally stops in early June.
Average
I am a staunch believer in this word “average”, because in my book, a lamb that has been putting on 400g per day during September (I had a few of them recently) isn’t worthy of mention, because that only points to some sort of compensatory growth after a long spell of gross underperformance.
I remain convinced that more days on farm nearly always equals lower profitability
I hear people all the time talking about great growth rates at this time of the year (and on into the winter) and I always wonder what was the problem with their management four months ago? I remain convinced that more days on farm nearly always equals lower profitability.
There would be a sizeable number of people who will strongly disagree with that sentiment, so I suppose it’s a case of each to their own. But I’ve been in the situation where there were over 100 lambs left here at the end of October, and I firmly believe that it was completely my fault. More than that, it boils down to a single word – milk.
Unlimited
When I look at all the fastest-growing lambs in this flock, I see lambs that had access to a virtually unlimited supply of milk.
By the same token, all my slow-growing lambs have been denied that luxury.
Furthermore, any time I’ve run into problems with worms, or trace element deficiencies, or anything associated with poor thrive, it happens exclusively to those vulnerable animals that received a limited supply of this vital ingredient.
Set-stocked
I often wonder (to prove a point) what would happen if a flock of ewes with lambs at foot were set-stocked on old sheep-only pasture, and no wormers were administered.
I reckon the way to side-step most of the anticipated problems would be to feed them a pile of meal.
I have sort of been in this situation at times, when workloads prevented me getting around to the necessary preventative dosing regime, and in order to buy myself a few weeks, I’ve just kept pouring the meal in.
Meal feeding is not necessarily a prerequisite to achieve good milk yields
However, I am not an advocate of this technique.
Instead, I consider milk supply to be the single biggest contributor to overall lifetime lamb growth on this farm, and meal feeding is not necessarily a prerequisite to achieve good milk yields. Clean grazing, fodder crops, breed of ewe and body condition at lambing are just some of the other factors involved.
Of course, one other ingredient has an enormous bearing on a ewe’s milk supply, and I have little control of it – the weather after lambing.