April 2020: Shepherd's Report

GALA BAILEY-BARKER

We could not have had better weather for lambing this year. It really helps us as shepherds when it is warm as the lambs are much less at risk of getting cold if they don’t get colostrum (first milk from their mother) in their bellies quickly enough.

Our flock has changed a lot over the last few years. In 2018, Rose lambed our bought in Romneys for the first time. I was pregnant at the time and couldn’t get involved in any lambing births. Poor Rose had terrible weather and the Romneys were wild having come from a big flock where they hadn’t been handled very often. In 2019, we lost 15 pregnant ewes in a dog attack that January, something I think will haunt all of us for a long time. Lambing that year went pretty well but I think the stress of the attack on both the sheep and us was still very present. It was also the first big farming event I’d got involved in since Elsie was born, and she was only 8 months old at the time.  

A year on, we bought seven ewes from my friend Susanna at Barcombe Romneys to make up for the ones we’d lost from the attack; like us, she has a small flock and her sheep are very steady and used to being handled. The original Romneys we had bought in have settled down and gotten to know us. This has made lambing an altogether easier and more peaceful event this year, along with that lovely weather. The ewes are mostly un-disturbed by Rose and I wondering about checking on them throughout the day. We only had one very late-night challenging birth and four loses in total. We only had two sets of triplets born this year and one from each set has been successfully adopted on to a ewe with only one lamb. It can be fun having pet lambs if they are rejected by their mothers (a ewe cannot really support triplets) but it is also exhausting and they are always healthier being taken care of by a ewe. We now have 103 lambs growing bigger by the day and frustrating their mums who can only bleat loudly at them to make them come back at dusk. This Thursday we are moving them off the farm to let the grass grow for the milking cows to eat, who have been in the field where our mobile hen houses are. It makes for quite the lovely scene of traditional mixed farming.  

We won’t be buying in anymore ewes from now on as I am closing the flock again. This means we only buy in breeding rams. Running a closed flock significantly reduces the risk of introducing disease and parasites. Raising our own ewe lambs also means they know us which significantly reduces stress in the whole flock.

Meanwhile, I’ve started shearing our ewe lambs and empty ewes as we seem to have some early fly strike. Rose and Maya did a wonderful job of getting all our oats and barley in the ground and we’ve got a great bunch of volunteers on the farm and the lovely Miriam has come back to help us this summer since her University is closed.