Hopefully you got through lambing without too many problems and now have a fine batch of healthy lambs to grow on to your intended market. What this is will vary a little depending upon your enterprise. For some it will be the show circuit and autumn pedigree sales, but for most it will be someone's dinner table! Either way, to achieve a satisfactory end result, proper feeding and care is needed.
SLEETY snow has been falling all day and now turns to rain, hammering down on all ready saturated fields and blotting out the far hedges with clinging mist that looks as if it’s escaped from a Dickensian graveyard.
THE key to any profitable business is being able to sell what you produce for more than your production costs. Not an easy option for most farming businesses which typically operate on very narrow profit margins. Michael Bell, of Home Farm Organics, says the main way to tackle this problem is to sell all produce through retail outlets.
HAVING survived the rigours of lambing, many flock owners feel a justifiable sense of pride in watching their lambs blossom on the new spring grass and will quite naturally start to consider the possibility of showing one or two of their better progeny.
ALTHOUGH lambing is probably the most demanding part of the shepherd's calendar, the succeeding few weeks still require a high degree of vigilance to ensure a successful enterprise.
THOSE few hectic weeks of lambing see the culmination of a year's shepherding. Unfortunately, no matter how well founded your efforts during the proceeding months, things can go disastrously wrong unless you familiarise yourself with the typical signs of impending birth.
IT might still be the depths of winter, but pedigree breeders and some commercial breeders will all ready be bracing themselves for the new season's lamb crop, so being prepared is essential if losses are to be kept to a minimum.
THERE'S no doubt about it, the easiest way to get any animal pregnant is to introduce it to a member of the opposite sex! Unfortunately, as far as cattle are concerned, this isn't always an option.
ANYONE who has ever kept sheep will know that the list of ills and afflictions that they are subject to seems never ending with each new disease more horrifying than the last! In spite of this, the biggest threat to sheep health is lameness with the consequences effecting fertility, milk yield, predisposition of twin lamb disease, delayed finishing and of course welfare issues.
