The Cheviot sales are about to start / have just started at Longtown Mart. We call them the bunny rabbits, little things with loooong ears! We buy some sometimes, they grow slowly over winter and make very good prime hoggs to sell late winter/early spring, when prices are usually very good.
We got burned one year though, having bought 64 bunny rabbits to eat up a load of grass over winter, when the snow came in November and stayed for 6 weeks. So we had to feed the 64 on hay and cake, they wouldn't all eat cake... nonetheless we still made a small profit on them.
They always seem very expensive to buy, and there will therefore be some years when you won't make a profit, even if they need nothing more than your grass and a few fluke doses.
They are generally sold in large pens; we managed to buy 20 one year, but mostly 50 is the smallest number in a pen.
And you either need to talk to the auctioneer or be good at knowing which are NCC and which the Southern type... I still can't get my head around it myself, so we just get the auctioneer to tell us which pens would suit us. There's a post
here from mowhaugh explaining the different types - clear as mud!
Topic: Wanted - Sheep in yorkshire - anything considered (Read 6307 times)
