Beth Phalp

As calving time is nearing an end, with around 15 cows left to calve we are now preparing to start drilling the spring barley and oats, following on from the stubble turnips and wintered stubble. 

We are also gearing up to make room in the sheds for the majority of the ewes to be housed in the next 10 days ready for their due date on the 1st April. We find the two/three weeks before due date to be the most nerve-wracking in many ways! It’s always a relief when you get the first few healthy lambs born. 

A very busy April approaches us, with 600 ewes hopefully set to lamb in a two week period, all being well! This year we aim to record our lambing data/figures in more detail with a new stock recording programme, such as tagging lambs at a couple of days old so they can be linked to their mother, the ease of lambing and any issues. Hopefully making for a more efficient flock in future years. 

This year we bought 50 in lamb cheviots which have caused a few problems in the last week when housed due to going down with hypocalcemia. Thankfully, so far, they have all responded quickly to treatment with calcium and glucose, but we have had to check them frequently for early intervention. We have kept them on a separate yard to the rest of the flock, to minimise any risks of abortion, fluke, iceberg diseases etc being passed to our main flock. Although we had been advised in our flock health plan and regular chats with our vet of precautions that should be taken buying ewes in, my knowledge of such problems was massively broadened during our recent first NSA meeting from Philippa Page’s talks.  

I found the first NSA Next Generation meeting very interesting, informative and enjoyable. I came back to the farm with lots of ideas of how to improve our system and tips for lambing time, including maximising productivity and flock health.  In addition to meeting a great group of like-minded young farmers! 

Away from the farm, In addition to the NSA meeting, I was also fortunate to attend the NFU conference in February as an NFU North East young farmer ambassador. This was very interesting and worrying at the same time, with speakers discussing some of the challenges the farming sector is facing in the coming years, but reaffirming the importance of making our businesses resilient. 

Lambing 2022 is nearing the end for us with around 35 ewes left to lamb. It has been a busy 3 weeks, lambing 600 ewes indoors.The shearlings have kept us on our toes this year and have been slightly disappointing compared to other years with several having one large lamb and one smaller lamb, leading to longer time in the pens and a few cases of mis-mothering when out in the field. Something we will be looking into with our flock health vet in the coming weeks. However, on the whole, we have had a successful lambing time and I am excited about the strong pure cheviot gimmers we have had born. We are also quite proud to be finishing lambing with only two pet lambs, a record for us, we have managed to adopt triplets on to singles successfully! Meaning the majority of ewes have turned out to grass with two lambs each.

We were slightly apprehensive this year with the absence of Spectam, although we have been wanting to cut down on our usage (after our vet informed us we were the third largest user's of spectam in the practice last year!!) the stop in production has forced our hand. We have been very conscious of keeping pens extra clean and ensuring all lambs had good quality colostrum as early as possible. After the last NSA meeting I ordered a BRIX refractometer after learning about the differences in colostrum quality and was pleasantly surprised all the ewes I tested had good quality colostrum. Thankfully our concerns were rectified with very few cases of watery mouth, proving we don't actually need Spectam!

Once I have caught up on a little sleep I will be looking into the data we have recorded from lambing time and continue to monitor the lambs progress as we move towards heptavacing in a few weeks time. I am very much looking forwards to the next NSA trip to Wales next month. 

It was nice to catch up on a little sleep and social life after a busy lambing time, when it is literally sheep, eat and a tiny bit of sleep! Shepherding duties every morning take a fair while longer in May checking all the fairly young lambs and trying to spot any that might not be thriving or issues with ewes, but it is lovely to see them skipping around in the sun and makes those long sleepless nights worth it!

Mid - May marked our second NSA next generation ambassador trip, this time in Welshpool. I found the Live to Dead sessions very interesting, having never been in an abattoir before or even done much grading of carcases previously, having always picked out prime lambs the way my dad and grandad have to send them to auction marts, I found the talks from ADHB incredibly useful, they took us to farmers fresh abattoir to follow the whole process. I now feel more confident picking out lambs and batching them into closer grades for live lamb pens. As well as looking into sending some of our lambs direct. Taking on board tips from these sessions I hope can make us maximise profit by sending our lambs to the correct place at the optimum time.

All lambs had their first dose of Ovivac, by the end of May. We also treated all the lambs for tick prevention, unfortunately, a couple of years ago we had a big problem with loosing lambs with ticks at around 1-2 months, therefore, we now treat them when they have their first vaccine to try to prevent that, keeping them off grazing which we know is high in tick risk until treated. Thankfully no losses to ticks this year so we are hoping we have found the optimum time to treat them for our farm. 

We were also getting ready to start silaging but unfortunately due to a big lack of rain the grass was very slow to grow, as well as having put a reduced amount of fertiliser on this year due to the soaring costs, therefore we were a little later starting than normal and had much smaller crops. Thankfully we had some silage left from last year so that will hopefully see us through until next year. 

Away from farming I  got my first little 'holiday' in a while at the end of June for a best friend's hen do in Spain - miles apart from my normal day to day farm life but great fun and nice to get away for a few days!

In the last month we have been fairly busy with sheep work, most of the batches have required worming from the faecal egg counts we carried out. We have also been footbathing the lambs when they come through the handling system to try to get on top of scald. Last year was the first year we have used footvax on the ewes which does seem to have helped the lameness in ewes a great deal so we are hoping over the next couple of years it will decrease lameness in lambs too.

The ewes have also all been in for shearing, we had a team of three shearers came and sped through them all in the day, I'm sure the sheep were very glad to get the fleeces off with the recent weather we have had. We will now wait a couple of weeks for some fleece growth before we dip the ewes and wean the lambs off. 

Apart from the sheep it has been an exciting month with the delivery of our new egg vending machine, we produce free range eggs on farm, having had to close our honestly box system in lockdown due to a small amount of not so honest customers! We were keen to look into other ways of selling direct off the farm after numerous customers were asking for this, so we did our research into vending machines and it arrived this month, it is now all set up in a shepherds hut that my dad has made from scratch, so fingers crossed for success with that, and hopefully it will develop in the future to sell other products produced on our farm!

We have the same complaint as nearly every farmer in England at the moment… we are desperate for rain, although as I write this we have just been rained off combining in our last field of corn with some very heavy rain, hopefully, it’s the start of a good few days of rain and for once we certainly aren’t complaining about being rained off!! 

Many of our fields are currently brown rather than green and we have had to start feeding cattle in the fields! We have managed not to have to feed sheep yet but it has got close!

In the last month, we have dipped the ewes, ewe lambs and longer stay store lambs. We have had a few more cases than normal with mastitis so we wanted to get them dipped before weaning them. At weaning time we also tried something new for us, suggested at our flock health meeting by our sheep vet. To Bolus all the longer stay lambs and ewe lambs, we have previously had issues with low Selenium, and our vet advised this could be made worse with the drought conditions this year, so we will see if this makes a difference throughout the rest of the year. I also weighed all the lambs at weaning time so it will be interesting to monitor weight gain. 

Now most of the cereal crops are safely in, we are getting ready to drill the stubble turnips and are looking into putting some new grass leys down for the sheep. I came back home from the last NSA session with lots of facts for my dad about grass! I am looking forward to seeing if we can reduce the amount of extra feed we normally use as profit margins tighten, I think such improvements to our system will prove vital.