Sophie Wernham

March is scanning month on the farm for us! And we are all pleased with this year's results. With an average of 188%, ranging from the older ewes being just over 200% to 173% in the shearlings. The shearlings this year are around 10% higher than on previous years.

Having put our ewe lambs to a beltex tup for quite a few years we decided last year to try something different, and run on our ewe lambs instead. Although we found lots of advantages for tupping our ewe lambs not only a financial gain but I also believe it makes them better mothers, with lambing outdoors our ewes can be on the ‘wild side’ but the shearlings that have already had a lamb are a lot quieter, which makes the job easier!! (It’ll be interesting to see how the first time shearlings lamb this May!)

We did find the challenge for us was maintaining condition score, especially over the summer months, hot dry summers really took its toll on grass growth and therefore had a big impact on the weight gain on the lambs and condition of the ewes come tupping time, consequently having an affect on our lambing percentage. I feel if our grazing situation was to change, I think we would go back to lambing our ewe lambs. Perhaps we would consider weaning the ewe lambs a lot earlier than the rest of the flock.

With this years crop of lambs starting to hit the ground, we are glad to see most of the hoggs off to market. With the last 140 finishing off on good spring grass hopefully ready to go in the next couple of weeks. With the help of 70 acres of cover crops early in the autumn, from a neighbouring arable farm, we managed to see our first load of fit lambs away to market in early November, seven weeks before we would normally start selling.

The majority of our hoggs are finished on stubble turnips with the slightly smaller lambs finishing on the grass later on. Although last year we did keep a small group of lambs on grass all winter as turnips were limited due to the late harvest in 2021, therefore we were unable to get as many turnips planted as we would have liked. With that being said we have managed well over the winter with the help of some extra grass at a near dairy farm.

The best part of our lambs are sold through Thame market with just over 450 going off to Dunbia this year. All our hoggs that go to Thame are an average of 46kg with Dunbia taking the slightly smaller framed lambs. All in all we are very happy with how all the hoggs have finished and the overall price that they have sold for this year.

Juggling lambing and looking after a two year old has certainly been eventful this month!

We started lambing the third week in April all outdoors in the hope the weather would be kind to us and the grass good. With only one wet day during the whole of lambing this year we were definitely grateful to finally see some rain! We keep all our ewes in their age groups, starting with the first 600 older ewes and the rest following on around a week later.

It was great to spend a few days away from the farm on our second Next Generation session in Welshpool. Lots of great ideas and knowledge taken home from it. We had a fantastic talk from AHDB who then took us to Farmers Fresh abattoir and talked us through the grading process, which I found very interesting.

I’m looking forward to catching up with the rest of the group again in July at the NSA sheep event. 

June has been a busy month on the farm, with the first Ovivac injections done and all the lambs having Clik Xtra applied, we hope to have the ewes sheared in the next few weeks.

We managed to have a good count of all the lambs and we are happy with the result working out at 179%. I think this year's lambing went really well but we did have a problem with foxes in the field where the four tooth’s lambed and I would say that did have an impact on our percentage.

I also found this year that the shearlings didn’t lamb as well as in previous years, Mis-mothering and just leaving one lamb behind. I much prefer having lambed them as ewe lambs I believe it makes them better mothers! So that is definitely something to think about for next year! 

I spent two days this month at the NSA South East Region field days helping Chairman Yann Le Du, it was a fantastic couple of days albeit very hot! Lots of interesting talks from Elenco and Bimeda, it was a great turn out and good to meet some new people. 

I was really pleased to get my pedigree Hampshire Down lambs away to Market in late June. Averaging 42kg, I also entered them into the Three Counties Show butchers lamb competition to which my lambs came fourth which I was delighted with!

On the farm where I shepherd, we have been busy making hay and shearing and are starting to think of weaning, slightly earlier than normal but with the lack of rainfall we are beginning to get tight on grazing. Once weaned we can start to get the ewes and lambs further away from home. 

In Berkshire we didn’t have a drop of rain for roughly 10 weeks and so are now really beginning to struggle. 

With not a blade of green grass anywhere to be seen, we are feeding all the sheep and cattle. Not only using up winter feed but also spending days driving around putting hay out and not getting much more achieved. 

We made a start on weaning and then decided to hold off as the little milk the ewes were still producing was enough to keep the lambs going forward. We are lucky in one way we don’t put our rams in until end of November / start of December so we have a little longer to get the condition back on the ewes. But with only one short rain shower in the past week things don’t look like they are improving much, so we’ve made the decision to continue weaning again in the next few days. 

We’ve been grateful to see some rainfall in the past few weeks. The grass has really started to come back and is growing nicely. We have been lucky to have some stewardship leys we are now able to graze on a neighbouring arable farm which has been a huge help in getting lambs away onto better feed. The crop is predominantly red clover and rye grass, and the lambs were very happy to see something green after an extremely hard summer! With that being said it hasn’t been all great, a handful of lambs came down with photosensitisation, something I hadn’t heard of before! Our vet believes it was caused by going from a mainly hay based diet to lush green pasture which the liver couldn’t breakdown the sudden increase in chlorophyll. Luckily no lambs have been lost and we haven’t had any further cases. 

The end of September meant our last session on the next gen ambassador programme. This one being the furthest from home. We spent three days in Northumberland with the main topic focusing on personal development. We had a fantastic few days and we’re lucky enough to visit two great sheep enterprises. At home we are busy moving sheep around the county, we work roughly within a 45 minute radius which keeps us on the road a great deal of the time! We weighed a group of lambs recently that had been on the cover crops at the neighbouring arable farm and are happy to find that the bigger lambs of the group are nearing the 50kg mark already. We will be looking to draw the first load to go to Thame market by the end of October which is earlier than normal, another reason we are thankful to be able to have these cover crops to graze.