[PK]

What would be a reasonable fee for a 6 week period?

[Womble]

We pay £15 per live lamb born, for an absolutely top notch tup. We don't keep him for that long though. Actually last year we only had him for a weekend!

I suspect that's an awful lot more than you'd pay for an average / good commercial tup, but the arrangement works for us and our wee flock.

[twizzel]

What would be a reasonable amount to pay to potentially introduce iceberg diseases, resistant worms and scab? Think of it that way. Better to buy a ram lamb/shearling/older ram, put it through quarantine and then either kill it or sell it if you don’t want to keep a ram all year round.


If you’re hiring your tup out, no fee is worth bringing a biosecurity hazard back to your flock.

[Eeyore-77]

Hi PK
I give the farmers wife a Litre bottle of gin when I take the tup back about mid December and he is always chuffed to bits as far as I can tell, and says no worries about getting a tup the following year. He lambs earlier so his boys aren’t needed, and he doesn’t seem to mind me feeding one of his tups for a while. I’ve just 8 girls this year so he won’t be too busy.
As the others say it depends on your set up and concerns about bio security/infections etc.
Cheerio.

[ZacB]

The last ram we borrowed set us back around £80-£90. This was from a fellow Hamp breeder who had sold us some of the original stock.
As already said - bringing something on temporarily is a risk and I’d certainly not be loaning out our rams to potentially bring things back.
Far happier now we’ve our own stock rams.
PK, we’ve Hamp ram lambs here if you decide to go down the ownership route.

[sheeponthebrain]

What would be a reasonable amount to pay to potentially introduce iceberg diseases, resistant worms and scab? Think of it that way. Better to buy a ram lamb/shearling/older ram, put it through quarantine and then either kill it or sell it if you don’t want to keep a ram all year round.


If you’re hiring your tup out, no fee is worth bringing a biosecurity hazard back to your flock.

Surely a hired tup will go through the same quarantine as a bought tup.  I'd almost guarantee its going through quarantine when it goes home, if its returning to a bigger flock.
 otherwise it's not worth the risk of hiring out.

[twizzel]

I wouldn’t be so sure. It’s surprising how many people don’t quarantine incoming stock… I’d not assume anything. Obviously once it leaves you it’s no longer your concern if you’ve hired it, but if they don’t quarantine it on arrival after coming back from you, did they quarantine it when they bought it?


And if the ram has been hired out to you, how many other flocks has it been hired out to?


It cost me the best part of £75 to quarantine a ram - that was a knock out zolvix drench, taking bloods for mv, CLA[size=78%], johnes and scab, and keeping it separate for 3 weeks before introducing it to my sheep. I’m not sure how many people would spend that on a hired ram- be it the owner or the people hiring it? [/size]