Catching up with the lambs

We are getting ready for our first draft of lambs which go the week of 18th November.  This will also correspond with weaning and shearing.

So Monday/Tuesday were late days doing the terminals ... not so good for the school girl.

Monday we mustered into the holding paddock in the morning one mob.  They had plenty of feed to occupy themselves whilst we shot off to the Nikau Coopworth (http://www.nikaucoopworth.co.nz/index.html) ram sale at Tuakau.  We had a shopping list for 5 rams, but only came away with 2.  We had short listed our rams down to about 8 that we were interested in, 2 weren't presented on sale day and one more not confident on their feet.  We tried to mix and mingle the sires up a bit, but the majority of our selected rams all came from the one sire.  We have a few other options up our sleeve, so hopefully we can get the other 3 on board without too much trouble.

Having got back on Monday, we waited for the school bus and then headed for the yards.  We drenched all the lambs with a pre-wean drench, and marked all the 'old ewes'.  These are the originals that came with the farm.  Our goal is to cull as many of them out this year, depending on replacement numbers.  I then drafted out any untagged lambs and any lamb close to works weight.

We ended up tagging 74 lambs, which was about 32 more than I had already estimated.  This has lifted our overall lambing percentage up about another 1%.  There are still a handful yet to do, either I missed them in the drafting race or they were missed in the muster.

Tuesday we walked the hills twice to muster two different mobs and do the same things again, in what was 2 hot days. 

We were interupted Tuesday afternoon with the vet visit to give the dogs their annual vaccination and to meet the school bus.

The end result we are pretty much on target for our first draft of 200 lambs to go, which equates to 26% of total terminal lambs off mum.  For us this is good.

Terminal and those without tags waiting to be weighed and tagged

Waiting to go up the race

 
On Wednesday we managed to dock our hogget lambs.  We docked 111% in the paddock and 51% to hoggets scanned.  Our scanning % was 66%, therefore our losses are 24%.  The hoggets themselves are looking in good condition and the lambs, whilst a month behind the maternals, docked probably slightly behind the weight of the maternal lambs.  The goal now is to keep the hoggets well feed up to weaning, which will be around 8th December, as ewes are a third more efficient in converting energy whilst lactating.   This gives us close to 2600 lambs which is above our target.


Hoggets and their lambs after docking

This coming week we plan to do the same to the Maternal lambs, so some long days ahead and in a busy week with lots of things on.