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BACK Lambing Time Plans
Dumfries and Galloway Standard
“Aw! Dad you’re stinking”; is perhaps not the greeting you would expect the toil worn shepherd to receive from his twelve year-old daughter on returning to the family home. But perhaps last week, in our house, her comment was justified? The reason for my unpleasant odour was because I had just spent the previous six days working 20 hour shifts guddling in all sorts of stuff and places while lambing my flocks of Beltex and Bluefaced Leicester sheep. Pedigree sheep, by their very nature, are extremely demanding and often require round the clock supervision so when almost one hundred of them lamb, in such a short period, shaving and other ablutions are sometimes forgone in return for much prized sleep. The reason that the ewes all produced their lambs in such a short period of time is because they were all artificially inseminated on one day the previous autumn. We have been using AI on our pedigree flocks of sheep for the last ten years. The effect of using this, relatively modern, technique is that a lambing period that would normally be a marathon lasting several weeks turns into a sprint that is over in just six days. There are many advantages of using AI, as part of a breeding program, such as being able to use frozen semen collected from rams anywhere in the country or from anywhere in the world for that matter. Even exceptional rams that have died, long ago, can still be utilised as long as semen from them had been frozen and kept in storage. For me, however, the main attraction of using AI is that I can, more or less, schedule the flocks’ lambing period to suit the availability of, much needed, extra help. The availability of staff is of paramount importance, especially since the workers that I am referring to are my wife and the three little McQuistins! My wife Janet and the three youngsters are, however, poorly placed as far as being available for lambing duties, in that all four of them must attend school. The three children have to go to school as a legal requirement while their mother, a teacher by profession, needs to attend for financial reasons! Despite these problems with careful planning they can still play a vital role at lambing time. This is where our past experience plays a big part in choosing the date that we AI our sheep. Over the last ten years that we have been using AI we have built up a record of exactly when the flock has produced their lambs in previous years. The result is that we can now predict with a fair degree of accuracy the date that lambs will start to arrive and the date when lambing will finish. The plan is for lambing to start gradually on the Thursday/Friday, then it will invariably reach a peak over Saturday and Sunday, when all the slave labour is available, and then tail-off to a finish on the Monday/Tuesday. The most bizarre thing is that, despite the fact that we are working with sheep, a species which is renowned for their unpredictable behaviour, the plan actually works. Now we are entering the next stage in developing our use of AI on the farm. Last autumn we AI’d our flock of five hundred Blackfaced ewes using semen collected from our own Bluefaced Leicester ram lambs. Pregnancy scanning in late January confirms that four hundred out of the five hundred have held to AI, while the others will lamb later in April to natural service. The ewes were inseminated on the 8th and the 9th of November so the first of them should have their lambs on the 31st of March (not forgetting that this is a leap year) and they will be finished by the 6th of April. The Easter school holidays start, would you believe it, on the 31st of March as well. Don’t you just love it…? A man could be forgiven for thinking that with all these modern aids, technology and planning that things could become too easy for the modern sheep farmer. However, in the words of our national bard; the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley. John Kettley and Michael Fish could spring a few surprises, that will bring me down to earth with a bump. Dumfries and Galloway Standard March 2008 |