The European Championships have kicked off and it’s a case of role reversal here compared with many other households, I’m sure, as Alison is the one who will be following how the different countries progress through the campaign. I have little or no interest in soccer but I will, however, take note of how our boys in green are doing.

Hopefully, it will be as good as their rugby counterparts last weekend with historic wins against South Africa and New Zealand. With a bit of luck the supporters are consuming plenty of lamb kebabs to keep their energy levels up while they are over in France, as it is one the main destinations for our lamb. I will be finding plenty of jobs to keep myself busy and I may in fact get Alison’s list of odd jobs that need doing around the place shortened for a period of time.

Faecal egg samples

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In my last article I mentioned that I was going to start sending off faecal egg samples to the lab at regular intervals for testing. The first results came back with a bit of a surprise. All the groups had a high count of nematodirus. Ironically, the group with the lowest count were in fact the dirtiest bunch in the place. This surprised me as I assumed that they would have had the highest burden.

So last week was spent dosing every lamb. This should clean out any worm burden present. With the early start to silage this summer I have been a bit late getting around to dagging the ewes. As a result, a few have had some blowfly strike. All the ewes have now been dagged and we have applied a pour-on dip to lambs as prevention. Any lambs that are close to slaughter have been left untreated as there is a withdrawal period of 40 days with the product used. They have been marked, so we know they haven’t been treated and we can keep a close eye on them.

With the bulk of the winter feed requirement saved, the arrival of the 60 dairy heifers during the week will help reduce the regular visits from my local contractor to make bales of silage now to a minimum. With this in mind, and grass still growing at close to 100kg DM/ha, I have decided to take out two fields for reseeding. These have been put on the long finger for a while as they are at the far end of the farm and need a good bit of work. I will hopefully burn them off with glyphosate this week, weather depending. Who knows – they could be the last fields I get to use it on!