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It has been great having the sunny weather for the last while. I managed to make some nice small square bales of hay for use during the spring in the individual lambing pens.
This is the second year in a row I have managed to get this done without the worry of rain. The silage requirement for the winter months has also been met with only a small amount of a buffer to be saved now.
This will be welcome news to a few local farmers who buy surplus bales off me once I have met my targets.
Although it pains me to say, a drop of rain wouldn’t go astray to maintaining grass growth around the drier fields (ideally for a few hours at night once or twice a week). At present, growth is about 64kg DM/ha per day and, with the ewes being weaned off now, demand for grass will drop off as they are dried off with access to bare paddocks for the next few weeks.
The CPT groups were weaned here last week and I am reasonably happy with their performance since their seven-week weight.
The average, liveweight gain has been 280g per day and average liveweight is 31kg. They have also weaned 1.8 lambs per ewe lambed. The natural service has been left until this week to be weaned as it looks like I will get a good draft of lambs for the factory off them. The yearlings will also be weaned in the coming weeks.
Now is the time of year that I tend to find out where the weak links are in the farm fencing and getting them brought up to scratch is a necessity.
How is it that sheep will escape from fields around the farm regardless of how well I think I have fenced them? You can be sure there is always one rogue ewe or lamb that will put my fencing to the test.
However, aside from the fencing issue, I find the stock from now on a lot easier as lambs are divided into four groups, with ewes and heifers following around behind cleaning out the paddocks once dried off. I divide the male and female lambs into two separate groups. These are then divided by their weight with a group of male lambs put on the Red Start while the other groups will be on grass.
As lambs are drafted from the Red Start, I will introduce other lambs into the group to maintain the stocking level on it. This year I have decided to sow some extra Red Start later so as to have a better balance between bulk and quality. I have found that if I sow it all at the one time the last section to be grazed has gone a little too bulky making it harder to manage.
I will pull out and cull any ewes with broken mouths, problem elders and those that have received a double management notch in their ear since last year. Any lame ewes will be removed and put into a separate group for treatment. Any that don’t respond favourably will also be culled.
Once these ewes are identified, I will then have a better idea of how many replacements are required for the coming season. The group of heavy ewe lambs will be where I select my replacements from.
Information such as litter size, birth weight and average daily gain from their lambing to weaning will be used to select these. Any ewe lambs suitable for breeding which are surplus to my requirements will be sold off farm to a number of repeat and new customers.
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