Diary

Taylor goes to workRSS feed

Posted: Thursday 5 November, 2015

by Rosemary Champion at 8:55pm in General livestock Comments closed

Bonfire Night and time for Taylor, our tup, to go to work. This is his second year and he has 18 ewes to cover – fifteen of ours and three that we sold last year as ewe lambs and that have come back for mating.

He’ll be in until 17th December, then he and Ted, his wether pal, will be off to their winter quarters. He has a second companion at the moment – Tiny Tim. Tim’s (currently) a tup lamb, but he was a triplet and was tiny when he was born and is still small. To be honest, it wouldn’t have been worth paying £50 to have him slaughtered and butchered, so I’m going to get the vet to castrate him when he’s here to PD the cows later in the month. Then we’ll either run him on as hogget or sell him as a tup companion, as a fleece sheep or lawnmower. He’s really wee and awfully cute J

The other eight tup lambs went off to the new abattoir at Cupar last Monday (26th October). They averaged 26kg, with a range between 23kg and just under 30kg deadweight. While too big for the auction ring, they’re fine for us for private sale. I suppose I should put them away a month earlier but we’re not short of grass and six months seems a fair lifespan. All the livers were condemned – confirming that we have fluke on the farm (which we knew) – but since all were good weights, our fluke control measures appear to be working OK.

The new abattoir is a deer abattoir, so they were happy to keep four skins back (why does that always make me giggle?) and salt them for me. They’ll go to Skyeskyns for tanning just as soon as I get transport organized. It’s the first time we’ve done this although I’ve thought about it every year.

We’ve retained six ewe lambs as potential replacements, including Wabbit, our partly-bottlefed lamb. She’s a big girl, but still follows her mammy, who’s now “retired”, around.

And so the cycle begins again.

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