Tiredness and fatigue go hand in hand with lambing big numbers of ewes. The constant walking, feeding, checking and double-checking can be exhausting.

Anything that can ease the workload for the shepherd should be considered because it may mean a better overall lambing performance, with more time spent looking after the sheep and newborn lambs rather than carrying out more labour-intensive jobs.

One job that can be very labour intensive for larger flocks is feeding water to individual freshly lambed ewes in pens.

Some farmers use drainage pipes that run the length of the individual penning to cut out manual water feeding. One end of the drainage pipe holds the ball cock for monitoring the level of the water and the other end of the pipe is sealed off. Slots are cut at the top of the pipe to allow the ewe access to drink water in each individual pen.

The benefits are that the ewe has access to fresh water at all times – there is no need to fill and carry buckets to individual pens, taking up valuable time and effort, and you don’t have to go to the cost of buying a lot of individual water troughs for each pen.

In terms of safety, the farmer is not using up excess energy carrying buckets and has more time to rest and concentrate on minding the flock.