Ed Brant

Firstly, I would like to thank NSA for such a brilliant opportunity to join the Next Generation Ambassador programme. The first session held in February was excellent, it is a great group of ambassadors which makes me feel very positive about the future of the industry. We saw some great farms and systems, and I learnt a lot from the sessions with Philippa Page from Flock Health Ltd.

So far it has been a month of ups and downs for the flock, as we have moved into spring and look ahead to lambing.

We scanned our 370ish ewes and 40 ewe lambs over the weekend. I was disappointed with our ewes that scanned at 153%, the main driver of this low scan was the high number of empties. Looking through the information, it is a problem across the majority of the groups. After discussion with the vet, this is likely to be either a disease issues or nutrition that we are going to investigate further to avoid the problem next year. The ewe lambs were slightly more pleasing with a scan of 86%. Fertility is such a key driver of flock output and profitability and something I really need to focus to improve.

We are pretty much at the end of our winter forage and all the ewes will be coming off within the week. The ewe lambs and ram lambs have been off their stubble turnips a couple of weeks, which is now being drilled with spring barley.

One of the most exciting updates over the past month, is the release of Signet’s new maternal evaluation, focused on efficient and productive ewes. This evaluation also contains new parasite resistance and carcase quality traits.  

We are now on the countdown to lambing, which I am looking forward to with some caution. I wish a successful lambing to all those that are currently lambing.

As I write this, we have nearly finished the first week of lambing and so far, the weather has been a great help. It has been a relatively slow start, but things are starting to pick up now. At scanning it looked like the majority of ewes will lamb in the first cycle, so things are going to get busier. We overwintered the ewes on fodder beet and stubble turnips, trying to get them off grass sooner in the autumn. This has really made a difference to the grass in the spring compared to previous years. We have drilled the fodder beet for next winter and the spring barley that was grown after the beet and stubble turnips looks to have established well.

All the sheep are lambed outside, so the main job at the moment is getting the information for performance recording. We collect a birth weight, ID, date of birth, and dam information (which links to the single sire groups of the ewes). Handling the lambs at this stage is a good opportunity to assess if they had a drink, their vigour and the ewes mothering ability, with problem animals recorded to be removed from the flock. I am a firm believer that genetics are the biggest thing we can control in our flock, nutrition, and disease being the others.

The results from the blood tests are in from the barren ewes. It looks like toxoplasmosis was the cause, we have sneaked away without vaccinating until now, but we will definitely be vaccinating the incoming ewes this year.

I have nominated a few more of our Hampshire rams to the RamCompare project, I am looking forward to the results webinar on the 18th May, to see how all the top terminal sire rams compare on commercial farms.

Our lambing came to an end at the end of May, I think this year has gone the best for us so far and our ewe lambs have been the stand out performers for us. Each year we are having to help less, while lamb survival is increasing, so it is good to see that our selection is working.

We planted our fodder beet and a herbal ley over lambing, both are now growing well and enjoying the sunshine and warm weather we are getting. I am really excited to see how the lambs perform on the ley, the aim is to keep the lambs growing well after weaning and take the pressure off the grass fields.

Now lambing is over, our thoughts are now turning to selling our shearling rams. The results for RamCompare were released in late May, with our Hampshire’s among the best of any breed for growth, days to slaughter and carcase weight. We are holding an open day on the 7^th July with the Hampshire society to talk about the results and breeding rams on a outdoor lambing forage system- if you would like anymore information or to head along please contact the society secretary (Gayle) gayle@hampshiredown.org.uk.

We have only got a few hectares of spring barley to harvest for 22. This will be one of our earliest harvests ever, and despite the lack of water yields have been okay and we have been able to harvest mainly dry grain.

When we vaccinated our lambs for the second time in July we weighed them and they were growing well, with grass getting really tight we weighed them again. They were standing still, so we weaned them. The ewe lambs went onto red clover and the ram lambs onto a mixture of chicory, plantain and clover. Both have continued to growth without rain and I am really pleased how the ram lambs look (we will weigh them this week so will see if it matches how they look). I would highly recommend these to anyone looking for an alternative to bagged feed.

We are ultrasound scanning our lambs next week which measures their muscle and fat depth. This along with their weights helps us to pick out those with the best genetics for breeding.

The end of August and September have been quite busy, finishing harvest, preparing the ground for next year, ram sales and getting measurements from our lambs for the evaluation and drawing lambs for slaughter.

Over the last month we have ultrasound scanned nearly all the lambs, looking at muscle and fat depth, we also CT scanned the top 10 Hampshire ram lambs, to give us the most accurate carcase information and to help maintain progress in carcase weight and conformation. We have also taken around 30 blood serum samples from our Lleyn ram lambs with the potential for breeding, this is to provide EBVs for IgA level (which is linked to parasite resistance). It is exciting times and I am looking forward to receiving the results over the next few weeks.

We have tried integrating the sheep a little more with the arable, by fencing fields off and grazing the volunteers. We tried a field of OSR and a couple of spring barley. The ewes seem to much prefer the spring barley and what would seem to be a field full of volunteers would soon turn back to just stubble. The ewes do look really well on it though and do seem to have gained a good bit of weight.

The lambs we have been grazing on the chicory and plantain really did grow fantastically and we were able to draw around 60% of the lambs earlier in the month. The majority graded U and Rs and were almost all 3L. Stubble turnip establishment has been a little patchy so this should ease the pressure over winter.

Start of winter/planning for winter

As the nights begin to draw in and the weather turns wetter and colder it does really feel like we are into winter. We didn’t get as much forage stored as usual, but most of the forage crops have grown well and the grass fields that have been rested seem to have good covers. It should even out the lack of conserved feed and I am just finalising the winter grazing plan and planning next years too. The majority of the lambs that will be sold finished this year have gone already, which is a big improvement on last year.

With the change in season, the middle of November will soon be here. I have run the potential rams and our ewes through Signet’s Inbreeding Calculator (a fantastic tool), and have allocated ewes to rams to minimize inbreeding and maximise genetic gain. All the data has been entered into the evaluation (including the CT data), one of my favourite ram lambs is the top ram lamb in the country. We will use him ourselves this year along with a couple of high genetic merit home breed ram lambs and shearlings.

Earlier in the month we took blood samples from our Lleyn ram lambs to measure IgA levels, this enables us to select animals with the best worm resistance and is a great advantage of being part of the Performance Recorded Lleyn Breeders (PRLB) group. Both rams we bought this year have high EBVs in their IgA levels, I am excited to see how their progeny perform. This is a very exiting trait and I think vitally important to the industry, and it is great (PRLB) are gathering so much data to enable this.