January 2014

Pregnancy scanning is one of the key indicators of our flock performance for the year: it informs us how well our sheep are performing, both the ram and ewes, as well as how effective our flock management is. It’s not just a snapshot in time, as conception rates depend on so many influencing factors throughout the year, including the weather, the individual’s nutritional status, as well as their general level of fitness. But the key factor is management – my job!

For a full-time farmer, whose livelihood depends on the next crop of lambs, a good or bad scanning result means the difference between making a profit or a loss for the year. For us, our flock makes a good contribution to the household income, but we don’t have enough land to run a flock of a size that would provide a living.   Nevertheless, we try to employ ‘best practice’ in all we do, and aim for our flock to be at least as productive as any commercial farmer would wish for. So this year’s scanning result of 162% was quite a disappointment – and an indication that our flock management was failing to achieve the results we would wish for – although of the 13 ewes, only one was ‘empty’. By comparison, in previous years we have achieved between 177-200%.

It didn’t take too much navel-gazing to arrive at the reason. Although all the ewes were in good condition – BCS3 – 3.5 at tupping, full-mouthed and with sound udders and feet, it has to be admitted that some are getting a little long in the tooth. All our current ewes are homebred, with fresh genes brought in by a new ram every two years, but our older ewes are now in their eighth year and there is a great deal of evidence that a ewe’s fertility, as well as her ability to rear lambs, peaks at around the age of 3, and declines thereafter. Keeping older ewes not only means fewer lambs, it can also mean more problems in the lambing shed; so why, I hear you asking, keep the older ewes?!

Certainly an element of sentimentality, but – in my defence, they were fit, tried and tested ewes … who may have been ‘around the block’ perhaps once too often.

So, self-recriminations aside, here are our scanning results, with last year’s alongside:

EWE (age)	2014 SCAN RESULT	2013 LAMBING
601 (8)	TWINS	TWINS
602 (8)	TWINS	TRIPLETS
608 (8)	SINGLE	SINGLE
609 (8)	TRIPLETS	TRIPLETS
665 (6)	SINGLE	SINGLE
669 (6)	SINGLE	TRIPLETS
917 (5)	TWINS	SINGLE
10 (4)	TWINS	SINGLE
20 (4)	SINGLE	SINGLE
42 (3)	TWINS	SINGLE
44 (3)	EMPTY	TWINS
52 (3)	TWINS	TWINS
54 (3)	SINGLE	SINGLE

Interestingly, it is still our older ewes that are proving to be just as prolific as the younger ones – but, as every shepherd knows, you don’t count your lambs before they’re safely out in the field eating grass!

The poet Frederick Langbridge once wrote, “Two men look out through the same bars: one sees the mud, and one the stars.” Well, for the past six months I have been seeing the mud and I think it’s about time the rain stopped and gave us all a glimpse of the stars!

Meanwhile, rather than allow our energetic (and in the case of Jamesey, ‘The Destroyer’, downright destructive) horses trash all our deeply muddy fields, we decided to sacrifice our 3-acre Rickyard paddock. It now resembles the Somme, which is appropriate in this Great War centenary year.

I’m planning to read my way through the works of the Dymock Poets from this period: Robert Frost, Lascelles Abercrombie, Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Wilson-Gibson and John Drinkwater. Dymock is a lovely, small village not far from here that has become famous through the deeply moving war poems of these young men – as well as its meadows of tiny native daffodils that turn the local fields into a sea of gold each Spring.

Photo: thedaffodilsociety.com

And finally, amidst the gloom of late December, I found all these little beauties blooming in our garden!


Wintersweet, Jasmine, Cyclamen, Snow Drop

 

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