Thread by @IrelandsFarmers

So here we are at Sunday & I need to add a bit about my sheep before I finish. This will probably look a bit more factual than a story, but it’s just some things that I’ve discovered, that work & make my life easier.

As I settle in to a year on year routine with the Lleyns & learn a bit about them, I find ways that work for me & for the next few years I build up the flock & have the satisfaction of seeing my own breeding come through. Soon every sheep on the farm, has been born on the farm.

The big advantage to this is that things become more predictable & diseases can be more easily controlled. But as always in life, things can take an unexpected twist. Up here it’s normal to get short snowfalls, but they generally last a few days & melt again.

But you can get snow quite late. That picture in my bio was taken on 6th April 2021. If you look carefully you’ll see young lambs. That’s the reality of farming in thew hills. On some lowland farms they’ll have cut their first crop of grass by the end of April.

We’re just glad that it’s growing. And It always does grow 😁

However 2013 will be forever etched in my memory as the year nature bit, & bit hard. It’s the 3rd week in March & I’m ready to start lambing. All week they’ve been forecasting snow, but we farmers panicked every time they forecast snow we’d be paralysed half the winter.

But by Friday lunchtime snow is starting to build & I think “maybe this one is a bit more serious” So after lunch I set off with the old Discovery to get a bit of extra feed. On the way I encounter a few stuck vehicles but nothing I haven’t seen before.

As we do in the countryside, I stop & help. They’re mostly people trying to get home to the coastal villages & are grateful. I make an exception for 3 young fools, who thought it was fun to drive up into the hills & muck about in the snow. “I tell them to get out & walk”

The run home from the farm supplies is normally less than 10 minutes. Tonight it takes two & a half hours as we’re following a big quarry loader ploughing a track through the snow at less than walking pace. There’s a half queue of cars behind him.

When I arrive at the end of our road it’s blocked. I find a bit of a space & climber over snowdrifts waist high & make it to the yard. The sheep are all housed & there’s fodder. A couple have lambed & I sort that. The power has gone along with mobile phone signal. 😬

The big feature is the wind. Its causing the snow to pile everywhere & I realise that in no time the Landrover will be covered. We’re living a mile away in a rented house at this time, So I think I’ll make for the house.

My wife has gone to stay with her mum & dad for a few days, she’s recovering from major surgery & boy am I glad she’s not here. The house is like an ice box But I manage to rig up a little generator I have in the garage, it’s enough to fire up the heating boiler for an hour.

I look out on Saturday morning & realise the Landrover is not getting back up that road. It’s a mile to the farm & I spend the next 3 hours clambering over snowdrifts the height of my head. I eventually get to the farm & it’s chaos.

There’s lambs everywhere & sheep both looking for & rejecting their lambs. That strong maternal instinct that makes the Lleyn a great mother in the field can work the opposite way in the shed.

A lesser known fact about sheep is that they identify their young by smell, specifically they smell the anus. If the smell is correct, super if not that lamb gets a sharp head but.

Actually, this is one downside to keeping Lleyns. Lambing indoors, manes that occasionally if you’re not immediately at hand, another sheep sniffs the lamb & presto you have a rejected lamb. An indoor lambing system is a bit like a conveyor belt.

The sheep lambs & you pen her + her lambs to give them time to bond & then lambs time to get a couple of feeds off mum & then it’s out the door to a sheltered spot in a field. Only there is no fields, just a sea of white so deep that fences & hedges are buried.

So, the outcome of this when we eventually get a thaw, is multiple orphan lambs. A third of the breeding flock & half the new born lambs all piled in a heap waiting for the fallen stock lorry, when they eventually get the roads open.

The government announces a compensation scheme based on the numbers of dead animals collected. But saddlery (without evidence) famers & the knacker are in cahoots. The lorry when it calls is accompanied by a civll servant in their own car to count the dead animals.

If my problems are bad, it’s nothing to my neighbours, all their sheep are out on the hills & over the next few months the piles of dead animals that are recovered is horrific.

At one point they used the army to fly over & drop round bales of silage out of helicopters. But, no one tells the young soldiers to take the plastic wrap off so the bales bounce onto the ground still wrapped & are virtually useless to starving animals. Officaldom eh😬

But, that phrase we’re all now familiar with ‘build back’ is apt & so we do. But if I’m honest I’ve never really recovered the financial losses. The sheep that survived were marked too. Most were never the same. But sometimes out tragedy comes an idea.

Because if I’m honest, the sheep industry (in my humble opinion) has become too reliant on the use of doses etc to keep parasites at bay. So I begin to read & research & decide on 3 principles. No Pets. No passengers. Don’t try to beat nature.

No pets, nothing gets kept, because it looks nice or is cosy. If it performs it stays, if not it goes.

No passengers, This has to work. If a ewe is not rearing lambs (preferably two) then she’s a liability & she’s gone. Lameness is a major problem in modern sheep production. It’s mostly caused by bacteria infecting the hoof.

Most famers try to prevent this by routine foot-bathing & antibiotics. Foot bathing means running the entire flock through a solution of chemical every few weeks. I develop a different system. Any animal can get an infection so first time gets a injection & I spray the leg red.

2nd time lame? Unless there’s an obvious reason such as na injury or overgrown hoof - she’s gone. This may seem counterintuitive, but over 5 years I’ve managed to virtually eliminate lameness & the foot bath is never used.

Same with worms. I only worm lambs with an organic drench at 4-6 weeks. No ewes are wormed. Some lambs will require spot treatment later in the season, but anything that’s ever had a ‘dirty bum’ will not be kept for breeding.

Im not saying i’m a genius & I’m definitely not holding myself up as a model for others to follow, but this works for me.