The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Sheep => Topic started by: Rosemary on January 27, 2016, 01:00:36 pm
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Twenty nine lambs scanned in 15 ewes - two trips, three singles and ten twins
One of the trips had trips last year, the other had twins.
Two of the three singles are gimmers; the other had twins last year.
Scanner a bit concerned about one of the gimmer singles - lamb small and the uterus not as fluid as she'd expect, but we'll just have to wait and see, and keep an eye on her. Hopefully, she'll hang on to it.
Was going to fluke them but it was pissing down so will do it when we split them up and Heptavac them.
The three gimmers we had visiting scanned with two twins and a single.
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193% :)
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Sounds great :thumbsup:
You may even be able to twin-on those trips ;)
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193% :)
Aye, no quite up tae your standards ;D
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Not even close! (257% :innocent: ). But at least you'll be able to twin on the trips as Sally says. I've got nobody to twin them on to except Mrs Womble! ;D
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Gosh! I'm such a novice - I'd be spooked by your percentages..... Our Balwens generally have singles, with twins being a bit of excitement... If we had your results we'd need to be finding more land very quickly!!!!
Anyway, very jealous. Our scanner not due for a week or two.
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That sounds fab! At what stage can they be scanned? I doubt we'd ever have enough to warrant a scanner! :D
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Not even close! (257% :innocent: ). But at least you'll be able to twin on the trips as Sally says. I've got nobody to twin them on to except Mrs Womble! ;D
One set of trips IS due the day after a single but the other set of trips is right at the end and the other two singles are right at the beginning. Naturally ::)
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That sounds fab! At what stage can they be scanned? I doubt we'd ever have enough to warrant a scanner! :D
Ideally, you want to scan between 70 and 90 days of pregnancy and certainly not less than 55 days or more than 100 days.
When we had three ewes, we had them scanned. I don't like surprises ;D
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Not even close! (257% :innocent: ). But at least you'll be able to twin on the trips as Sally says. I've got nobody to twin them on to except Mrs Womble! ;D
Blimey what breed do you have womble? BFL??
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No, just Zwartbles Roddy, and actually counting only the Z's it works out at 267% :o . We didn't even flush them, so it's a mystery to me. However when I looked shocked, the scanner just said "if you didn't want triplets, why on earth did you get Z's?". Honestly, I had no idea. Lleyns etc yes, but I really didn't know Z's were that prolific. Have I missed something somewhere? ???
Kate - the reason we had ours scanned was so we knew who was carrying what, for example so we knew to feed trips more than singles (not that we have any!). So it's really useful to know, but I must say I'm feeling the pressure a bit now! :-[
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Congrats Rosemary! I expect this year I will be getting more trips than last year, as i did flush them a bit :-\ I have 2 ewes which the ram was in with in October, so should have a few lambs in march, hopefully. Last year I got a lot of singles, a few twins and 3 sets of triplets; Hoping for better results this year :)
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Gosh! I'm such a novice - I'd be spooked by your percentages..... Our Balwens generally have singles, with twins being a bit of excitement... If we had your results we'd need to be finding more land very quickly!!!!
Around here the view is generally "Better a good single than scrappy twins". Depends what you're after - scrappy twins generally make slaughter weight eventually, but you wouldn't want to breed from them.
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Around here the view is generally "Better a good single than scrappy twins". Depends what you're after - scrappy twins generally make slaughter weight eventually, but you wouldn't want to breed from them.
And good twins are even better. Our eight slaughter tup lambs - a mix of twins and triplets - averaged 26kg dw at six months off grass.
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Sounds great, Rosemary - do you know what their conformation was? (R3L etc)
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Sounds great, Rosemary - do you know what their conformation was? (R3L etc)
No. They were fat though ;D And very tasty :yum:
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So 20kg with 6kg of fat then? ;)
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So 20kg with 6kg of fat then? ;)
23 and 3 - fat's light :)
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I used to get mainly 3s and 4s with Zwartbles. I don't have them any more!
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My Zwartbles scanned last year at 220% but we ended up with 200%, not lambing this year as I didn't get my tup lambs away until this week so haven't been able to rest a field for lambing. At the moment we have no grass so feeding tons of hay so quite happy to be having a break!
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Scanner came today and out of 16 ewes 7 singles and 9 empty. including my grandson's 3 Jacobs. We are disappointed to say the least. That was despite borrowing a ram as we thought the original wasn't working!
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Had mine done on Saturday - 10 ewes: eight twins, two singles (one of those will be for the chop this year as this'll be her third year of having only singles, grr), and 4 ewe-lambs: one twin, three singles, so that's ok. Shame the ewe-lambs are due a week later than the ewes otherwise I could have adopted the ewe-lamb twin onto one of the single ewes. Ho hum.
No trips thankfully :) . These are BWM lambing outdoors.
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Scanner came today and out of 16 ewes 7 singles and 9 empty. including my grandson's 3 Jacobs. We are disappointed to say the least. That was despite borrowing a ram as we thought the original wasn't working!
That is disappointing. Were they all served?
My chum has eight ewes and the tup only served five (including one twice) so it's not loking great for him either.
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They all had red bums so we had high hopes. I think they were too fat after the summer. My grandson who has autism was so upset as someone suggested the empty ones go to the butcher. His Jacobs had cracking lambs to a Texel last year so are safe, we're past looking at profit!
Now, as Charlie has customers lined up for lamb we will have to buy in weaned lambs.
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Our percentage is low, we scanned 118 ewes, 8 empty. 80 odd singles, 28 twins. 117 % Half the flock first timers, looking forward to it, but I expect some nutters :innocent:
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The ram went in with a couple of my ewes in September, to give him a bit of company, they should be lambing between feb and march; One of them looks close now and i know for a fact the other one will probably not start until march because I saw him mate her in Oct. Happy days, weirdly i can't wait till lambing :excited: ::) there will be a lot of first lambers this year, because i had to reduce flock numbers, down from 90 to 65, mostly ram lambs and old ewes.
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Soooo can't wait till lambing - and have to wait till second half of April.....
We have the scanner coming tomorrow, and I've very high hopes (after last year's hopelessness), and am desperate not to be as disappointed as some of you... 100% will do me fine! Fingers, toes and hooves all crossed....
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Scanner came today and out of 16 ewes 7 singles and 9 empty. including my grandson's 3 Jacobs. We are disappointed to say the least. That was despite borrowing a ram as we thought the original wasn't working!
Been thinking about this. The ewes weren't covered until the very end of November and the scanner took about 4 seconds per sheep (mine were among about 1,500 of my neighbours ewes) so I am going to wait until May before I give up. What do you think?
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Scanner came today and out of 16 ewes 7 singles and 9 empty. including my grandson's 3 Jacobs. We are disappointed to say the least. That was despite borrowing a ram as we thought the original wasn't working!
Been thinking about this. The ewes weren't covered until the very end of November and the scanner took about 4 seconds per sheep (mine were among about 1,500 of my neighbours ewes) so I am going to wait until May before I give up. What do you think?
Some of mine weren't covered until the end of November but they have scanned in lamb. I thought after a month the scanner could tell. Could you run them through again in a month?
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Whilst at that speed they might get mixed up between twins and trips, surely they'll still be pretty accurate when it comes to empties? :-\ If not, they'd be pretty unpopular with the farmers and abbatoirs wouldn't they?
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Whilst at that speed they might get mixed up between twins and trips, surely they'll still be pretty accurate when it comes to empties? :-\ If not, they'd be pretty unpopular with the farmers and abbatoirs wouldn't they?
I agree wothWomble. Our last ewe is due 2nd May so tupped about 6th December. She's got trips. Our scanner is quick and is never wrong. Sorry :(
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I'd make that about 63-70 days in lamb, perfect timing for scanner to be most accurate. Having worked on multiple large farms, I've only ever seen an accuracy of around 99%, and mostly that is missing a lamb (ie quads scanned and called triplets, or triplets scanned and called twins, very rare to see twins where the scanner has missed one, I've even seen them mark down one live and one dead twin at scanning).
It's possible, but if your ram was taken out shortly after you saw them covered (ie they couldn't have been covered within a month of being scanned) I'd trust the scanner was correct.
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Oh well, just wishful thinking I suppose. I've never had my ewes scanned before and the child was wildly excited and hopeful. We'll have to keep them a bit skinnier next year!
Thanks all.
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I hope I don't regret saying this, but we've been using our scanner since 2004, and he hasn't had one wrong yet, from around 1100. On the odd occasion if something has been tupped earlier, he'll say at least... but for ewes being scanned at the correct time, no errors yet.