For outdoor lambing to a Charollais tup, choose a tup with wool on his head. His lambs will have a bit more cover at birth.
(And yes, choose a tup whose shoulders aren't too massive. The expensive meat's at the other end
)
Keep a close eye at lambing time if they're lambing into bad weather. The Charollais crosses will mostly come out fast and get up fast, so even though they may be pretty bare, they'll get that all-important first feed within the first 30 minutes. But in cold wet weather, they do *need* to get that feed within the first 30 minutes, or they can chill very very quickly and become too weak to seek the feed. So things you can do include :
- consider lambing first-timers later (into better weather, hopefully), or indoors, or to a different breed of tup, to reduce the possibility of lambs not getting to the milk bar quickly enough in bad weather
- vigilance at birthings and be ready to catch and support the first feed if conditions mean bare lambs will need to feed very quickly
- have the clear plastic "lamb macs" to hand and fit promptly to any very bare lambs in nasty weather (if you're worried about the mac making the ewe reject the lamb, fit the mac with the ewe able to watch the lamb throughout the whole procedure, rub the birthing fluids over the mac if you can, and smear a bit of the lamb's poop on top of the mac at the tail head, so the macced lamb still smells like her lamb)
We used one (woolly-headed) Charollais tup (at a time) and several Texels for several years, and kept all the nice Charollais cross ewe lambs for breeders, but made sure we didn't put them back to a Charollais. (Tried it once and her lambs were so bare they were practically naked.) This was lambing 250 Texel x and NC Mule ewes outdoors in March on the uplands north of Hadrian's Wall. Yes we had to be a bit more vigilant and "in attendance" in bad weather, and yes we bought quite a few packs of macs, but the speed of birthing (almost frictionless with that very "tight skin"!) and of the lambs getting the first feed made it not too big a deal unless conditions were truly foul, (and the Texels would also struggle then, as their birthings took more out of lamb and ewe, so even though the lambs were better covered, they could also end up not up and feeding quickly enough due to being exhausted by getting born) and we did it for about 6 years (2 tups, one after the other) so it can't have been too bad!
Our grades went up (higher proportion of conformations hitting the "golden square" for bonuses year on year as the proportion of our lambs with Charollais genes went up), finished age reduced (weigh when picking lambs to go - the Charollais crosses will weigh heavier than they look, they're solid little chaps!), and fat ring prices were good too, with liveweights displayed, those good conformations obvious on palpation, and those "tight skins". And, we always bought back some of our own meat from our local butcher (who bought a lot of our lambs off us direct) and I can tell you, the Charollais meat knocked Texel into a cocked hat. Lean but very succulent, tender, and a really lovely delicate flavour, compared to the very tender, very lean, but comparatively almost tasteless Texel meat.
Topic: Charolais or Dutch spotted (Read 886 times)
