I'll be really interested to hear how you get on Graham.
Every year BH witters on at me about a Shepherdess system and ad lib creep, and every year I say they'll eat us out of house and home and will just get horribly fat and be worthless.
It'd be good to know if I'm right or whether I should give in and get an automatic system! It would certainly be a lot less work.
I use a bottle rack system in preference to a 4- or 6-teat bucket, pen them in groups of 6 (4 bottles in the rack, one in each hand - in extremis I can do 7 lambs at a time, the 7th bottle between my knees!) This year I've got 12 so far, of which one is having to be kept on her own as she has some orf-type infection which (a) I don't want her giving to the others and (b) the sheep milk replacer stings so she's on Jersey milk. So I've an older pen on 3 feeds, soon to go down to 2 and move to the outside pen with some grass and more space to play. Smaller/younger pen just went back up to 4 feeds a day with a new entrant yesterday
but will be back on 3 feeds by the weekend. They'll move up to the larger indoor pen when the older group move outside - and it will then be easier to feed one lot without the other as they'll be in different places.
The milk replacer I use is 1L per lamb per day (some are 1.5L), and I feed Jersey milk at 1.5L per lamb per day to those on that. So they get a max of IL/(no.of feeds) each per feed, and I pull them off if they look well plumped and before they look triangular
. (Little Diesel would take 250ml per feed if allowed, but is teeny, so gets 200ml max and sometimes is stopped at 150ml if getting too round.)
All have hay available at all times, as well as fresh water. Fresh creep given an hour or so after each feed; the older lambs will start to eat more creep as the time between feeds increases. Then I'll start to decrease the quantity of milk per feed, which will encourage further creep feeding. Once I'm sure they're all eating 1/2lb per day, and they're at least 5 weeks old, then I'll wean them.
They won't get more than 1lb/day of creep, less if the grass is good and they are in good condition. Friends who have used ad lib talk about 20 lambs eating their way through a sack a day...
Surely they'll be all fat and can't possibly make a profit???