So, I have my lambs split into three batches. The heavy batch, the middle batch and the light batch.

For anyone not involved in sheep farming, you can see it’s very technical.

The heavy batch is obviously the nearest to being finished and are getting meal every day. It's important to say that my lambs are outside on grass and while they are being fed meal, it is at a much lower level that housed lambs would be on.

The middle batch gets meal most days. Most days means just that; there may be an odd day missed here and there, but nobody gets too worried. Again, my system of sheep farming is very technical.

Weekends

The light batch gets fed usually at weekends or maybe an odd day during the week if I’m feeling generous, mainly just so that they come to me when I call them and so they are easy to get in whenever one or 10 of them has a sore foot or sore eye or sore ear or is just feeling a little depressed and needs a hug. Which they often do!

So, this is the bones of my system until most of the heavy batch are gone.

Then the middle batch becomes the heavy batch and the light batch becomes the middle batch and so on and so forth, until, if things go according to plan, the light batch becomes the heavy batch and eventually I have no lambs left and it’s Easter and then we have an Easter egg hunt.

Factory

So, my heavy batch has dwindled down to 16 lambs and when I weighed them last week, 11 of them were ready for the factory.

So, this Saturday morning I gathered up all my unwilling helpers (namely my wife and three daughters) with the plan of housing the factory lambs so that they would be dry to go on the lorry on Sunday and to bring in and weigh the middle batch, to see how they had been performing weight-wise.

The last time this batch of lambs was handled was between Christmas and new year, but they were well off being ready for killing at that point. They had been on good grass and, as I said earlier, a small amount of meal most days.

My intention in weighing them was to pick out the heaviest to form a new heavy batch. But to my surprise, these lambs had performed extremely well and 16 of them were already fit for the factory.

A couple will be borderline on going over the 25kg deadweight limit, which means the factory will cut my price per kilo.

The price is so terrible at the minute

Not great management on my behalf, but I hadn’t expected them to be anywhere near the weight they were.

Thankfully, I managed to get all 27 away in the one batch - it's just a pity the price is so terrible at the minute.

I wait now with baited breath to see the kill sheet, in the hope that nothing is over 23kg. I don’t like giving things away for free.