As I sit down to write this article, I am preparing to leave the country on a short study tour to Belgium with other members of the lamb producer group that I am a member of.

That’s if we even manage to take off in the first place as Hurricane Ophelia is due to hit about the same time.

Breeding is in full swing here on the farm. The first cycle has just finished with the natural service ewes; all going well, we won’t have many repeats.

We will be pulling the sponges from the first group of ewes for artificial insemination (AI) on Thursday with insemination taking place on Saturday.

We will divide up the ewes into three groups and remove the sponges at three different time periods during the day to coincide with approximate time to be artificially inseminated on the Saturday morning, middle of the day and afternoon.

This is to hopefully get the best possible chance of conception. We will then repeat this process next Monday with the second group for AI next Wednesday.

The teaser rams have been let out to the ewe lambs last week.

This should help to get them cycling together and help make the lambing period as compact as possible.

As I’ve mentioned before, ewe lambs for breeding the first year should be at least 60% of their mature body weight at mating. This year, the majority of the ewe lambs are averaging just over 48kg.

There are, however, 46 that I am not happy putting to the ram this year.

Six are bred from my own rams and will be put in with the finishing rams.

The remaining 40 are from CPT sires and I must retain a certain percentage from each ram used yearly for breeding over the next number of years in the programme to help gather information on each sire used.

This will leave me with 260 for breeding this season.

The weather has been mixed lately with some mild humid days followed by severe rain and has resulted in a number of clean ewes getting maggots on their backs.

At this stage of the year, it normally isn’t an issue that arises too often.

However, it is further evidence that we can never be too complacent when it comes to farming as there is always something unexpected around the corner.

Grass

The grass on the other hand is flying along with growth last week of 44kg DM/ha and a daily demand of 26kg DM/ha. There are 41 days grazing ahead currently which is bang on target also. A lot of the wetter fields have been grazed out this last week and I will now turn my attention to getting the fields grazed out for the first lambing groups next spring.

Thankfully, the fields with heavy covers are at the far end of the farm so by skipping them now and coming back later I can make sure I close enough fields early for ewes and their lambs as close to the farmyard as possible.