We have reached the end of the breeding sales for another year. I won’t pretend I’m not delighted to see this milestone as I was beginning to oil ram’s horns in my sleep.

All in all, we had a reasonably successful sale season with a good clearance rate which makes the hard work worthwhile.

Farming on the whole has a cyclical nature; you finish one job only to be looking straight ahead to the next. For us, the next task on the agenda is Embryo Transfer (ET) and Artificial Insemination (AI). No rest for the wicked.

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Everyone has their own opinions as to whether or not we should be employing the use of these man-made breeding techniques but for us, it suits our system and allows us to maximise the potential of the flock.

There's no doubt, in an ideal world we would be able to buy all of our rams to cover ewes naturally as this would be a much simpler task.

However, the reality is, in order to buy the rams we need to be able to produce the saleable progeny required to keep the business afloat, we have to bid well beyond our means as a sole bidder. If we can team together with another farmer or in some cases, a consortium of other farmers, we are much better equipped to buy the genetics we require.

As well as that, through the use of AI, a ram can cover far more ewes in a year than he would be able to naturally, which makes all of this possible.

Timing

For two of the most unpunctual humans on this earth, the AI programme is a nightmare. It requires sheep to be handled at specific times daily for a course of chronogest sponges and injections, which cause all of the ewes to cycle on the same day.

I’ve had a permanently nervous disposition since the first sponges went in, waiting on tenterhooks for the next command and continuously panicking that we’ve missed something.

This coupled with the threat of the invasion of eager rams there’s been a few sleepless nights.

I did question my life choices when I tried to head off to the gym the other night and bumped into three rams trotting down the road straight to where our best ewes were wagging their tails at the fence.

All they needed was a spray of “Lynx Africa,” a blue striped shirt and a pair of brown boots and it would have been an exact replica of a scene from a young farmers dance back in the day.

Thankfully, the first AI day was on Saturday and all seemed to go to plan.