Animals

Combining the Flock

Today is the time to put the sheep back in to one flock the ram has been separated now for a couple of months to avoid lambs birthing in the depth of our winter. An old idea which persists to this day is that if you put the rams with the ewes on November 5th you will get your first lambs on April 1st this is a sensible idea the lambs are born at the time when the grass is in full flush of early spring growth. This way the lambs grow with the rising productivity of the grass on your land and are ready for sale or killing before the grass productivity starts to drop off in the autumn.

This won’t work for us this year as we left the ram with the ewes through the summer due to not having enough good productive paddocks ready to allow us to separate our ram out early. We can already see that a few of our ewes are already heavily pregnant. Some breeds of sheep have a narrow season for breading others  like our Dorset Downs are capable of mating at any time of year and consequently delivering in the depths of winter.