Store lambs: Marts have experienced a lift in store lamb entries, as expected for the time of year. The trade is holding relatively firm with extra customers, buoyed by strong grass supplies. Before purchasing, producers should decide on the type of lamb most suitable to their system.

Grass supplies will have the greatest bearing for most, with many producers at this stage of the season aiming to purchase a lamb that will consume surplus grass and be fit to draft without requiring concentrate feeding.

Lambs will gain in the region of 160g to 200g where grazing good-quality leafy grass in August and early September.

Lambs short of flesh may achieve compensatory growth for a period, while lambs that have been poorly managed with stunted growth will take a few weeks to start performing.

Performance targets on a grass-only diet should be eased back to 150g/day to 170g/day as you progress into late September, with performance dropping to 100g/day into late October and November. This depends on good levels of grass utilisation, with daily liveweight gain tested most in periods of poor weather.

Ram lamb management: At this stage of the year, ram lambs should be separated from ewe lambs and grazed in their own group.

While concentrates are costly and hard to justify when farm gate prices are poor, there is still a role for targeted feeding, particularly in well-grown ram lambs with poor cover of flesh, or where there is still a high percentage of lambs on the farm and competition for grass supplies is high.

Offering between 0.3kg to 0.5kg daily will boost performance, while also helping kill-out and achieving fat score specification.

Meal feeding can be front loaded at higher levels of 0.8kg to 1kg for short term feeding where lambs have been segregated on weight and targeted for a short feeding period of three to five weeks. Avoid this route where possible for light lambs, as long term feeding at high levels of supplementation can be expensive.

Breeding ram sales have kicked off. In an ideal world ram lambs could be purchased, brought home from sales and released to grass. Unfortunately, some ram lambs are coming off a very intensive high-concentrate or forage crop diet. To safeguard your investment, supplement where required for a short period to wean lambs gradually onto a grass-only diet.

SWS meal feeding: For hill sheep farmers who have chosenmeal feeding post-weaning, remember they need to continue for at least four weeks.

The recommended concentrate supplementation level follows a rising scale starting at 75g per head daily in week one, increasing to 125g in week two, 175g in week three and 250g in week four. This gives a minimum input per lamb of 4.4kg over a four week period.

Feed receipts must be made available in the case of an inspection. Note the date of purchase on receipts must coincide with recorded meal feeding timelines. This includes all lambs in the flock, but feeding dates can be split where there are more than one weaning date.