General sheep thread

Just a heads up, there was a lot of nematodirus in my lambs FEC today........ must've been another hatch in the last fortnight.

They're dosed about four weeks

midlands, westmeath

Treating a lamb here at the moment for swayback. Was with the vet today again and he told recommended that I start giving the ewes a bolus with copper. I've always only done the ewes with a 4 in 1 bolus as the ewes would have a good bit of texel breeding and the lambs the same. I'm going to give the lambs a bolus in the next few days but I see on sheep products.ie that you can also get a copper bolus for lambs, would this be suitable for texel Cross lambs? The vet did say that since a bolus is slow release you wouldn't have anything to worry about anyway. Just looking for other peoples thoughts/opinions. Will get him to blood test the ewes later on in the year to know exactly where I stand.

farm here is high in molybdenum which locks up animals using the copper..all cattle have get a copper bolus on turnout if not they stay as brown angus's..suffolk sheep dont thrive here, always scuttery even showing low FEGs..we are breeding out the suffolk blood and changing to texel and llyen sheep over the past few years and diffrence is night and day in thrive and cleaness..id put it down to the molybdenum anyway

We use animax copper boluses, I think that dosing isn't effective in high molybdemum area

tried bolus's,mineral drenches etc..all dried them up but only for a short period

a lot of vets , (excellent in other fields ) know sfa about sheep

mostly white face sheep here (texel and belclares) and we don't supplement with copper , we do give copper boluses to the cattle and cows however

there is a chelated mineral dose that mayo health care do..,Blast off..i think its called,i was the most effective mineral supplement we used so far,last year did a crude test here on it with store 50 store lambs..gave it to 40 and marked and left off 10 random lambs,the 40 did average over 50 grams dlwg than the 10 who didn't get it

few years previously we blooded tested ewes 4 weeks after giving boluses only to find 2 out of the 10 showed increased trace element in the lab report,..spent €450 on boluses that year..never again,..most vans calling in to the yard here pedalling mineral for cattle and sheep dont usally make return trips

When giving lambs second worm dose what type of product would you use?

Just tested my neighbowurs there now, very high stomach worm count, never saw them as bad this early, lambs are ten weeks old

It's your local DVO you need to send it to. What part of the country are you in ?

Have an annoying problem with sheep, probably going on for a couple of years now. Running them in well fenced fields, in a paddock system, try get the grazing period around the 3 days but sometimes stretches out to 6/7 days depending on field and grass at the time.

anyhow, they seem very unsettled, as in if you open a gate to drive into the field they come running to get out the gate, so much so it’s a struggle sometimes to get the gate closed behind the tractor. I also have to drive through some fields to get to others. I don’t know is it just spoilt they are or what. Anyone experience the same?

i don’t think grass is the problem, I don’t force them to graze too tight or to graze too strong of grass

Mine are the same. spoilt they are. To make it worse there's two paddocks they don't like and they roar at the neighbours when they go out into their own yard.

Our paddocks are in a circuit so we don't have to drive through a stocked paddock to get to any paddock. The sheep go clockwise around the paddocks normally and we had a lot of work this morning to get them to go anticlockwise to get them back into the yard for footbathing and vaccination.

They're only two or three days in every paddock so they're spoilt