Our Gorgeous flock of Hampshire Downs have found fame in the form of a professional photo-shoot by specialist agricultural photographer, Charlie Sainsbury-Plaice! They now appear on his photographic library web site, www.agripix.co.uk and we fully expect to see the shots popping up in magazines, web sites and any publication needing very cute shots of celebrity ewes and lambs!
A few of the ewes and lambs have been scouring (diarrhoea), so we decided that, in line with our policy of ‘sustainable worm control’, we’d have a Faecal Egg Count undertaken.
This means we gather a representative sample of fresh sheep faeces (yes, it’s a very funny sight to see a grown woman following sheep around the field armed with a collection of small pots!), and take them to our vet who carries out a microscopic egg count.The results of our test were good: the samples were largely clear of worm eggs, so the scouring was more than likely caused by a flush of lush grass after the rain this month. This means we won’t need to dose the flock with unnecessary wormers, which might accelerate resistance.
This gives us a very good indication of both the current parasite burden carried by our flock, and also a guide as to how well our worming programme is working.We’re always concerned about wormer resistance, which is becoming such a great problem to all livestock farmers.
The Show season is well underway now, and each year I think about trying to get going with showing our Hampshire Downs. There’s such a lot of preparation to get an animal into show condition, and ‘Hamps’ are extensively trimmed for the show ring.
A couple of years ago I went on a trimming day with one of the top Hampshire Down breeders, Chris Westlake, and earlier this year he gave Adam Henson a quick lesson in how to select and prepare a ram lamb for showing. We filmed this, and you can see the highlights in Sheep on Your Smallholding, Programme One – Establishing Your Flock.
No comments:
Post a Comment