General sheep thread

Talking to a farmer from Armagh today. He was saying Scottish farmers are coming over buying lambs. There's a lack of lamb in the UK due to poor weather at lambing time.

Hopefully will take from Northern lambs being slaughtered in the Republic

Got mine back Monday,along with a letter stating I'm getting a 50% penalty for not doing the genotyped ram task for last year,I bought the ram but didn't see the section in the book to submit the info.I explained what happened and re submitted the book with all the paperwork to the sis department in the offices in Portlaoise,so hopefully they will see it as a genuine mistake

Really can't wait till all the ewes and everything with them is gone out of here in the next month

Yea get out in August,No won't have to pay it according to scheme rules

That would be a disaster IMHO,.would want 6 weeks away from there lambs at least and decent grass

You can download that from the Dept website.

Hi lads have a 4.5 acre field reseeded and added 1kg of fodder rape to the acre. I will be getting sheep to graze it over the winter I have never had sheep but was thinking of buying store lambs and grazing them on it or either lease it out to a sheep farmer. Field is fully sheep fenced so hoping they do a good job in thickening up the sward. Has anyone ever done this before would 30 lambs be enough?

I got it from our vet , but it is scarce, they had it ordered for us even though we didn't ask them to.

I didn't think it was so scarce,

Lambs are doing very well this year.

Main difference is:

1. I vaccinated for Orf
2. I made a plan for worm dosing and mineral dosing and stuck to it!
3. Bought my own topper and have kept up a good rotation. Grass is in great condition for them

Normally I'd have a good few runts after weaning but very few now. I havnt needed to buy any nuts.

Worm dose, 2 weeks, mineral dose, 2 weeks and then cobalt dose. Then back to the worm dose 2 weeks later.

Not sure what height the topper is at but it does cut fairly tight.

I mowed all the paddocks in june and none since, I think I should've kept topping after every grazing, grass quality is deteriorating even though the ewes are grazing the paddocks after the lambs.

used to pool, but based on advise from a vet now provide individual samples and let the vet/lab pool them. Find the results bit more consistent I think

It's vital to take the same size sample from each lamb alright. My OH uses a little plastic spoon, maybe 2ml.

We had a stupid one during the week, two samples came from a farmer, one from ram lambs and another from ewe lambs.

Ram lambs were 920 and ewe lambs were 320. I was talking to the owner today and asked what the history was.

They were in the same group, they went out and put the samples from each gender in separate bags as they were picking them up.

I think someone needs a lesson on how to do a sample, you really couldn't make it up

Anyone else's lambs very scuttery at the moment - it's literally running out of them at the minute. Charolais cross lambs.

There on nice fresh grass that was topped about a month ago.

I dosed them with Cydectin this evening so hopefully that will dry them up.

Would have been dosed with Zerofen up to now.

We regularily test scoury lambs seperately when we're testing the lambs for worms and they're no different than clean lambs.

They seem to dry up themselves after a few days .

We got 158 today for lambs, unfortunately only averaged 7.38/kg in the group

Ram has to be scheme eligible on day of purchase to qualify and won’t be accepted if SIS is done.

We're doing an interesting trial here, when we're weighing we divide the lambs into two groups according to thrive,

Under 200gm/day and over 200gms a day since the last weighing.

The lower thrivers have a lot higher worm counts and require dosing, and the faster thrivers haven't required dosing.

about half the lambs haven't required dosing since the nemo dose

We're weighing every fortnight now so we test then. most of the slow thrivers improve for the next weighing. some do very well, probably due to compensatory growth

These guys have been preaching it for the last few years

https://www.cotteragritech.com/

thanks for that. We’re they easy lambed on strong ewe lambs say 60-70kg. That I don’t want to burst either. I was just trying to get some return and a few nice type replacements. Is there any other cross that I should consider?