It's rare to produce an E grade lamb (at the right weight) out of a mule, and the majority won't attain U. Generally the top grades need a bit more meat breed in them - so are likely to be the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the mules.
We start with mules, cross them to the Texel, that's our foundation breeding stock. From these we produce good fat lambs and next-generation breeding ewes. We may retain breeders from the next cross as well, but beyond that they may be getting too pure and start to get into difficult lambings / poor milkiness, etc.
In recent years we've used the Charollais to inject some easy lambing, finer skins, faster finishing and denser muscle. Superb (and succulent and tasty too) fat lambs, and the females make good breeders too.
Our grades, and the proportion of our lambs that hit the grades before being overweight, have improved considerably since using the Charollais.
The other consideration is do we get paid enough for the E grades to make their production worthwhile?
The bonuses vary from buyer to buyer and sometimes from scheme to scheme, but in general a top grade lamb attracts a bonus of 15ppk - so on 21kgs that's £3.15 extra. If a naturally-working tup can father 100 lambs a year and last 2-3 years, you can justify spending £600-£900 on him. We don't generally spend anything like that much, but now and again do buy a better tup and keep some of his daughters on.
Now look at semen production and other modern intrusive reproductive techniques, and work out the returns one tup can give and you can see how a good breeding tup might be worth tens of thousands of pounds.
Are feed conversion rates higher for extreme grades? Are the extra lambing problems worth while?
Beltex finish slowly, which can mean reaching the best grades overweight, which is a complete waste of money. However if you can keep the size down, you can hit the after-Christmas market with top grade light lambs, and then you really will make money.
I can't say we never get difficult lambings, of course, but by keeping tabs on what combinations give easy lambings and fast growth rates, versus those which give harder lambings and slower growth rates, we have considerably reduced the number of difficult lambings we have. We had an outstanding small Dutch Texel tup for 3 years; his lambs were small and squirted out easily, grew to great conformation at an appropriately small size, and he had a fine skin too, which both aids easy lambings and improves our fleeces
The next DT was not such a success but we got two successive really good Texel tups - not overlarge and fine skinned - which have conferred similar characteristics to the initial DT.
Last year we tried a Beltex x Texel - his lambs will start coming next Thursday. They should be born small and will grow slower, but should make top grades albeit later in the season. Daughters should be milky.
Last week I sent 100 lambs (maternal lines) that killed at 19.6kg mostly R & O grades ---paid a flat rate for all of them , averaged £85.26/lamb which is more than the best E grades made at the local mart ---so where is the best profit margin?
Well, if we could all get £85 for all our 20kg R and O lambs, the bottom really would drop out of the extreme tup market!
I'd love to know where you were selling them! (Feel free to PM if you don't want to post - but of course I will understand if you don't want to share
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Topic: Commerical lambs (Read 9023 times)
