“We’re a small farm, so I need to maximise the output from the area that we do have. I want the farm to be resilient and not reliant on subsidies,” says Graham Lofthouse. It is this sentiment that underpins everything that he does on his 107ha farm in the Scottish Borders.

Graham, along with his parents, Bert and Wilma, own Bankhouse Farm. They run an Easy-Care flock of 420 ewes and 120 ewe lambs along with 92 suckler cows, 22 of which are maiden heifers, and 39 grazing cattle. Within the last 10 years there has been a major change in the animal breeds and the grazing system.

Rise of the Easy-Care ewe

The family has been at Bankhouse since 1968. It began as a small-scale dairy farm on 60ha, but eventually became a Texel-dominated sheep flock. However, in the last eight years they have changed to Easy-Care ewes.

The flock is divided into flock A and flock B. Flock A is the main herd, from which the 120 replacement lambs are selected, and flock B is made up of ewes that have had problems with teeth, udders or feet, etc. They will be bred to two Primera tups that were purchased from Innovis genetics. They are a New Zealand composite tup and are used to produce terminal progeny only.

For Graham, the main target for sheep is that they can produce their own body weight in lamb, come weaning time. His Texels used to average about 90kg and he found it next to impossible to achieve this. Since moving to his Easy-Care ewes, which are 63.5kg on average, ewes now regularly wean 100% of their body weight.

This feeds back into his overall philosophy for the farm, that the best way to achieve a profitable flock is to maximise the live kilos of lamb sold.

Scanning rates in the ewes are an average of 185% every year and, with only a 5% mortality figure from birth to slaughter, losses are kept to a minimum. To minimise those losses at lambing time, Graham lambs singles, triplets and ewe lambs indoors and mature doubles and gimmers outside, as they usually give less trouble.

To date, Graham’s 840 plus lambs have averaged 305g/day from birth to weaning, when they averaged 31kg. He hopes to sell them between 38kg and 40kg.

Monitoring to manage

One of the most important investments on the farm has been electronic identification (EID) tags. These allow Graham to link lambs to ewes and evaluate the performance of every animal as an individual, rather than as part of a group. This, along with the fact that the farm operates a closed-flock system, allows Graham to select the type of replacement ewe he wants in the flock.

“By choosing all my replacement tups and ewe lambs from my own flock, I have better control over my flock’s genetics. I know if a ewe had an easy lambing or not, so I can select that trait back into my flock.”

It also means he can identify lambs with traits for high growth rates and excellent maternal abilities. This has given him the type of ewe that has seen his farm turn a net profit for the last four consecutive years. Animal performance is not the only thing Graham tightly monitors, as cost of production is also closely watched.

“For lambs, our cost of production was £1.21/kg produced. When it comes to lambs, if we secure a price of £47/lamb then we’re at the very least breaking even. As primary producers we have no influence over the end price. What we do have control over is our costs of production. We have to focus on producing those lambs as cheaply as we can and with as many live kilos as we can.”

Influencing health with genetics

It’s not only the quality of replacements Graham breeds that he seeks to influence with the emphasis he places on genetics.

“Due to the fact that we operate a paddock grazing system, we generally have a very high worm burden. However, we don’t blanket-treat everything, only those that need it.”

There are two trains of thought behind this. Firstly, by not blanket-treating, the farm can seek to avoid a build-up of worms resistant to treatment. More importantly though, it means they can build up a collection of lambs that are resistant to worms and select those genes back into the flock.

“If we can identify those lambs that are not affected by the high worm burden it will be very beneficial to the farm. We also had a problem with coccidiosis, but we’ve noticed that there are lambs able to cope with the high burden.”

All these selection criteria feed back into what Graham is trying to do on his farm – identify the best performers within his system and inject those back into the flock and herd.

Grazing to grow

Along with producing more kilos of live meat the farm has also focused on growing more kilos of grass. To do so, they have transitioned from a set stocking pattern to a rotational method and now in the last seven years to paddock grazing. “We’ve gone from a baseline of 7450kg DM/ha to 11,000kg DM/ha. It’s made a huge difference to the farm. We’ve managed to cut out 60% of our bought-in feed costs. Now don’t get me wrong, it costs money to grow grass, but it’s a quarter of the cost of concentrates,” Graham points out.

The farm also focuses on making high-quality silage to feed lambs and ewes housed for the winter. This ensures lambs continue to put on condition, while ewes maintain their body condition score of 3.0-3.5 that’s necessary for high fertility and to hold their pregnancy. Silage made on the farm is regularly 11+ ME.

Mirrored in the cattle

Bankhouse farm applies the exact same principles to its suckler herd. Having been a Simmental cross herd with an average cow weight of 730kg, it has focused on lowering the mature weight.

To do this, the family introduced a Hereford sire from Australia and a Stabiliser bull. The target is to get to 650kg and to have cows producing 50% of their own body weight by 200 days after calving. The lighter cow will also have the added benefit of allowing the farm to carry an extra 15 cows. To summarise what it is that makes his farm what it is Graham says: “As far as I’m concerned, it’s very straightforward. It is all about health and nutrition, and you can achieve results in both of those through genetics and good management.”

“Before, we were too complicated,’ Graham says. “We were trying to do a bit of everything. Now we’ve decided to focus on the maternal line and let someone else do the terminal end of things for us, because maternal is what gives you live kilos on the ground.”

Fact box

  • Name: Graham Lofthouse.
  • Address: Bankhouse Farm, Stow.
  • Area: Scottish Borders.
  • Land type: Long, narrow farm, spread through a valley ranging from free-draining, gravel soils to heavy clay soils.
  • System: 450 ewes, 120 ewe lambs and 82 spring-calving suckler cows.
  • Herd and flock status: Closed herd and flock.
  • Tups: Breeds maternal sires internally, with some outside genes introduced every few years. Uses Primera tups from Innovis for terminal lines.
  • Sells livestock: Scotbeef.
  • Grazing system: Rotational grazing.
  • Labour: Graham and his parents, Bert and Wilma.
  • Strength: Achieving maximum efficiency by prioritising live kilos sold and grass kilos grown.
  • Latest achievement: Named Scottish Sheep Farmer of the Year 2016.