Moving sheep - The Accidental Smallholder

Posted: Sunday 8 June, 2014

by Rosemary Champion at 10:56am in Sheep 1 comment Comments closed

We took all the sheep to our rented grazing last weekend. We had a couple of jobs to do first though. First we split the lambs into a separate pens from their mammys. We did this by lifting them over the hurdles - not something that we'll be able to do in a couple of weeks. A lot of them are right wee chunks :-) Once split off, we gave them all a 2ml dose of Heptavac P Plus, marking them with crayon as we went. They'll get a second dose in 4-6 weeks.

Then we ran the ewes through the race and crate, trimmed feet and sprayed with Crovect (they were shorn 21st May). As we let each ewe out, we put her back towards the lamb pen so that we could identfy and tag her ewe lambs. We don't register any tup lambs so we simply tag when they are going to the abattoir but it's vital to get the ewe tagging, and therefore registrations, correct. Every year, I think I might tag at lambing but the tags look so big in little ears - so the same argument goes round every year.

But we did tag one tup lamb - our replacement for Dickie. I picked the smallest tup lamb, who just happens to be out of the same ewe as Dickie. We'll get him castrated later in the year - good news and bad news for him, I suppose :-)

We had to do two runs to the grazing as all 39 sheep wouldn't fit in the trailer; inevitably, some ewes and lambs were split up but were soon reunited on the new grass.

We ran out of Crovect, so had to spray the lambs yesterday - that went remakably smoothly, so we've left the field pen up, ready for the second Heptavac operation in a few weeks. I will probably worm the lambs then too. I meant to get a faecal sample last weekend but didn't get round to it (smacks hand in punishment).

I miss the sheep but it's god to see them on good grass away, and it leaves the grass here for the cows and calves.