Sheep farmers “coping well” with lambing
Lambs enjoying the spring sunshine. Photo: Jane Bellerby
This wet and wild spring in Golden Bay has brought a mixed lambing season.
According to location, the sheep farmers lamb at different times, trying to second-guess the seasons and optimise weather situations for their flocks. The anxiety of listening to heavy rain at two in the morning at the height of lambing goes beyond bank balance concerns.
Gavin and Jane Petterson, who run 1400 ewes on 200 hectares at Hamama, lamb in early September and are pleased with their ewes and lambs. The composite Fintex Romney breed do well on Hamama soils, and this year have managed with less shelter.
“Our Burnt Section paddocks are a bit exposed, so if the weather is dodgy we cover lots of the lambs. It’s a balancing act really, because where we do have lots of shelter in our paddocks further back, that’s where the facial eczema crops up,” says Gavin. He says the milder temperatures mean their grass growth is ahead of the last two or three years’, and the good mothering abilities of the ewes are making it a relatively smooth season.
At Upper Takaka, Roger and Judy Murray have two stages of lambing: first their 200 or so older ewes lamb on their flats, then the remainder of the 600 Perendale-Suffolk or Dorset crosses lamb in late September on their harder hill country.
Judy says it’s been a season of more triplets than ever before and a high twinning rate, which is pleasing. “That’s the older ewes, and we’ll wait and see with the hill mob.”
The ewes on the harder hill country are set-stocked and they look after themselves. Roger is not expecting a good lambing from them as the combination of the ewes being in light condition after the autumn dry and then a wet spring season is not a good one. “Usually the grass has grown well by now, but it’s a couple of weeks late.”
Johnny Harwood lambs 3500 Romney ewes further on at Upper Takaka, and he also doesn’t start until late September.
“We lamb on the hills, and the hope is that by the end of September the grass growth will have kicked in and the weather will be more benign for young stock,” he says, though this year cold snowstorms and heavy rain set in as his lambing started. Johnny says they’ve come through it all right with a little management adjustment.
“I put the ones having triplets and some of the lighter old ewes down on the flat, and it’s been a reasonable lambing despite the conditions.
“The sodden ground means there was a higher degree of navel infection than usual in the lambs at about a week old. We’ll know the true percentage at tailing time but I think we’ve got away with a good lambing generally.”
Len and Cheryl Win, farming on Plains Road at Collingwood, choose to lamb over a longer season than most to try and spread both the workload and the risk. Their 1500 ewes and 400 hoggets lamb in three stages, beginning with 1000 mixed-age Romney, Finn and Texel crossbreds in early September, 500 two-tooths on 20 September, and the 400 hoggets on 5 October.
“The hoggets started early this year,” says Len. He adds that it is probably due to the stress of the season’s weather conditions, as the long bouts of wet and cold limited grass growth. Cheryl and Len do a lambing beat each day, and with this years’ triplet rate running at nine percent they take one of the lambs off the ewe and foster it on to another. This minimises the stress on a ewe trying to feed three lambs, but does increase the human workload at the height of the season.
“It’s been a struggle but we’re coping well, and overall the lambing has been good. A few days of sunshine soon gets the grass growing and we’re hoping for our usual tailing percentage of around 155 percent,” says Len.
Joyce and Grant Wyllie at Kaihoka Station say this lambing has been one of the best yet, in spite of the weather.
“We’ve got good sheltered paddocks, and out here on the coast in the worst of the wet, it wasn’t too cold,” says Joyce. Their 5500 composite-breed ewes, which are reverting to being mainly Perendale, are not monitored daily in stormy weather.
“We do a daily round when it’s fine but leave them in stormy weather, rather than disturb them from their chosen sheltered spots,” says Joyce. “It’s the farmers down in Southland that we’re thinking of and counting our blessings this season.”
Jane Bellerby
