How is your Flock Breeding Season going?
During mating and early pregnancy, the priority is to maintain ewes on an upward plane of nutrition.
On most sheep farms, November is a quiet time of year with most of the management jobs completed. Depending on lambing date, the rams are either with the ewes for a few more weeks or will be let out with the ewes over the next few weeks. The ideal situation would be to have all the handling tasks such as dosing, dipping, vaccination and foot bathing completed prior to ewes joining the rams, trying not to disturb the flock too much during mating.
Farmers still need to keep an eye on the flock as it is a critical time of year for every flock owner. If there are issues with the ram, such as lameness, infertility, or poor health, it will result in a drawn-out lambing season or no lambs at all next spring if it is not picked up.
Rams as they say is half your flock and are expensive to replace. It is important to keep a close eye to see are they working and remain healthy during the breeding period. Raddling of rams allows farmers keep track of mating progress. Changing the colour every 17-18 days will help identify possible infertility problems with rams. It also helps predict lambing date based on what raddle mark is on the ewe with lighter colours lambing first and darker colours lambing last. If you put the effort in now issues with ram infertility will be spotted early.
It is important also to have enough rams on farm. Preferred ratio of rams to ewes is 40 to 50 to 1 for mature rams and 25 to 1 if using a lamb ram. If the ratios are higher, it may cause lambing to last longer as rams missed ewes when cycling and ewes were only mated in the following cycle.
Rams at the end of the mating season should be gathered up housed or put in a sheltered field and fed to build up body condition. A lot of rams never survive the first mating season as they did not receive the attention they needed during this period.
Prior to mating the key is to have ewes in a body condition score of 3 to optimise conception rates and litter size. During mating and early pregnancy, the priority is to maintain ewes on an upward plane of nutrition. So have a sufficient supply of grass during this period. Depending on the location of the farm and the history of fluke, ewes will need to be treated for fluke. This autumn has been mild and wet ideal conditions for fluke.
This group of sheep are often neglected on farms. A study by Keady and McNamara in Teagasc Athenry concluded that ewe lambs maintained on a high plane of nutrition for the first winter increased lambing weight at weaning by 0.6kg at all lambings up to 5 years of age and reduced the incidence of ewe barrenness from 6.1% to 3.6%. Look to increase body weight by 40 to 50g per day over the winter. Attention to dosing and management of lameness is key to achieving this liveweight gain.
To ensure a sufficient supply of grass at lambing try to target 40% of the farm to be rested by mid-November. Ideally these should be the fields closest to the yard. It is also an ideal time of year to take soil samples to assess the fertility status of the soils. Once the results come back a fertiliser plan can be put in place for next year. If lime is required and ground conditions allow some of this lime could be applied now.
