[Womble]

We've been offered some grazing to rent that hasn't had any sheep on it for three years or so. We don't really need it, but I'm tempted to take them up on the offer because it would give us the opportunity to 'clean out' our existing pasture of worms, which we may never get again. (I should say that we have never had high worm counts except for Nematodirus in lambs, which we're hopefully in control of now, having rotated lambing paddocks).

We run an MV-accredited flock, closed save for a new tup arriving every two years, so if I could eliminate worms from our pasture, there's a decent chance of keeping it worm free if we used the gold standard SCOPS quarantine regime for incoming animals.

My question is, would the hassle of this be worthwhile, and how long would we have to rest our main fields for, before we could consider them worm free? What do you think folks? 

[shep53]

THOUGHTS  'if you lambed at home wormed the ewes with group 4 or 5 wormer ,so all worms were killed and the lambs  had never been on your grass , then moved to the new grass ,this would keep the new ground worm free .  Then either graze your own land with cattle or cut it for hay or cut it like a lawn (  cattle have different worms  and will eat your sheep worms .  Hay will remove and kill worms and then desiccate any in the very short grass in a warm summer  same for cutting short continuously  )    Ideally you would do for a second year but you would have to either lamb on the new ground or lamb inside

[Tim W]

You will not eliminate worms from your farm---you may vastly reduce the burden though
Biggest killer of worm eggs on pasture is UV light followed by extreme cold /ploughing
 A year without sheep will make a large difference to the worm burden but even if you drench all animals with a new generation wormer some worms will survive to re-infect the pasture

Worms multiply at such a rate that I find sheep on ''clean '' grazing will have the same burden as those on ''dirty'' grazing by the time the lambs are 10-14 weeks old. However the challenge rises at a slower rate and helps(I believe) to prepare the lamb's resistance

If you want to reduce the worm burden the best way is to have resistant ewes---these act as a hoover ...always ingesting and destroying worm eggs ---just hassle your ram breeders to measure/record/select/breed for this priority maternal trait

[Marches Farmer]

We use grazing on the land of two neighbouring smallholdings to reduce the worm burden in our sheep, as described above, and try to put the sheep on cleaner grazing just before stressful events, such as weaning, shearing or splitting the ram lambs from ewe lambs.  We also alternate the turnout fields each year - ideally this should be between three fields but our farm layout allows only two. 

[Coximus]

Alternate your fields as often as possible _ - Try to make sure about 1/3 of your land each year sees no sheep for 6 months - best time is winter, so graze your wetest fields bald in Oct, leave empty till regrowth in april - 6 months of cold on short grass kills. Generally rotate strictly and choose ewes for worm resitance (I 've already spoken to TIm about buying in Rams for this very trait).

The clean grazing would be best used in a mob stock - Put ALL your sheep on it, tight grazed for a short time, maybe use electric to cut it up into small blocks - meaning they are not re-ingesting their own eggs, then leave the ground and next year cut it.

No need to use wormers unless you have a problem your dealing with - IMO routine worming just hides poor performer that need to be removed from the flock - resistance to worms is the answer,.

[Dans]

We had ground that hadn't been grazed when we moved here. I managed to convince my vet to give us zolvix as a quarentiene treatment (it took a lot of phone calls and reference to SCOPS). We got the ewes at the end of Feb last year and did a FEC at the end of Sept. In a mob sample we had a total of 15epg Trich, so not all the worms got cleaned out (I realised after the vet had left that I should have done the dosing as we had quite a few orange mouths), but it is a very low burden. We are hoping to not have to worm regularly as we have split the ground up into 5 smaller areas and are doing regular rotation.

I don't know if that helps at all.

Dans