Waiting for lambing ...

Since the end of May we have had a bit of sheep work.  That started by shearing the terminal ewes (B Flock) on the 30th May.  This was followed by scanning on 1st June (http://ultra-scan.co.nz/Default.aspx).  This flock is our old ewes and poorer type ewes that we mate to a suffolk ram.  All these lambs will be sold.  Our scanning for these ewes were up 10% but still not flash as it is still pretty much a development flock.

Sam Welch hard at work

The presser (from Canada) and the pile of wool

The terminals after being shorn

 Next was the Mixed Age Ewes (MA) which were shorn on 2nd and 3rd June and scanned on 5th June.  Pretty happy with the way the ewes scanned with overall 163%, with the older ewes doing 171%.  Our two-tooths were a bit disappointing but overall pleased.  The average condition score at scanning was 3.8 BCS.


MA Ewes just before clean/dirtying and bringing only the dirty ones home for crutching

2-tooths coming home for shearing

The scanning equipment

Raewyn hard at work (Alice is the photographer)

All our dry ewes were culled, with a small select few (22) two-tooths were kept.  From next year onwards this policy will cease and anything empty at scanning two-tooth and older will be culled.

Next was the shearing of hoggets 25th June and shearing 27th June.  Previously we had only ever mated a small portion of our hoggets, and this year all 475 went to the ram.  Although their weights were up this year, we still targeted 50% of the hoggets being in lamb.  Unfortunately we acheived 47% but 66% predicted lambing overall.

Bringing the hoggets home

All these hoggets are tagged with EID and will be monitored through Farm IQ.  We have tried to load the scanning, weight and BCS against the hoggets, but unfortunately we haven't been quite able to get our Prattley/Tru Test set up to work properly and still awaiting support from the techno people to sort this out.

The equipment arrives!

Using the Prattley 3-way drafter and Tru-test equipment

In the last 10 days we have been working to vaccinate all the ewes and set stock.  After shearing we hoped to lice treat all the ewes but this has been severley hindered by the wet weather.  With more recent stable weather we were able to catch up on this, plus 5 in 1 (clostridial disease) and Cydectin LA.  Last year we had great success from good ewe condition, reduced dags and good weaning weights that we have decided, at least in the interim that we can't afford to not do this.

2-tooths waiting to be vaccinated and drafted

All our flock has been split into singles and multiples and set stock accordingly. Lambing is due to start 1st August.  To date we had one lamb - single via a four-tooth came in with the mob on 9th July, and late 19th July another single was born.  Ewes are in good condition and all have good covers underfoot.

Our first lamb!