Can I give the beginners point of view please? When we first got sheep, I went from panicking that they were too thin one minute, to too fat the next! We certainly feed the Zs far more than we used to, having gotten over the fear of being too kind to them and having big lambs etc. Basically they're a high input / high output kind of breed, and need to be treated like that.
This also reinforces Womble's first rule of smallholding, which is "It's all about the context". We're raising a lowland breed at 220m altitude in the middle of Scotland. This means that if somebody raising Borerays in Norfolk followed our plan, it would most likely end in disaster, and vice-versa.
One thing I did wrongly to begin with was to only press down on top of the spine. Actually, you have to use quite a bit of pressure, and must feel along the side of the spine at the 'short ribs' as well (and under the short ribs if you can).
For info and comment, our planned condition scores for the Zwartbles throughout the year are:
Sep 3
Oct 3
Nov 3.5 (Tupping early Nov)
Dec 3.5
Jan 3.5
Feb 3
Mar 3 to 2.5 (start feeding concentrates 6 weeks before lambing)
Apr 3 to 2.5 (lambing during April. Keep feeding concentrates until mind May to ensure good milk yield)
May 2.5
Jun 2.5
Jul 2.5 (lambs weaned at roughly 16 weeks old. Most Z flocks seem to creep feed, so that they can get the lambs away to the butcher straight off their mums. We haven't tried that yet, and consequently ours are finished on grass by mid October)
Aug 3
Currently our flock ewes are CS 3, having lost 0.5 point at least over the last couple of months. The gimmers are still nice and fat though. As a result, I'm going to split them up into two flocks, and will give the older ewes some concentrates as well as hay to hopefully prevent them from losing any more condition.
I'm still learning though, so I'd love to hear comments from more experienced keepers on this. In particular, I'm still quite vague as to exactly how much concentrate to feed in the run up to lambing and afterwards, so would like to have better figures in mind for this that we can then work up or down from according to conditions. Any thoughts folks?