Lambing 2024

I have made a discovery! Our stud mob has a preferred lambing date. It doesn’t matter when we put the ram out, the bulk of them seem to lamb between August 19 - August 29 and then we have another explosion 17 days later (which makes sense). I suppose this is the perks of single sire mating and if the ewes all cycle at the same time the poor fella can’t get around them all and some have to wait until the next cycle. Anyway lessons learnt and I’m going to go back to a 14th of August start date as the 2nd of August just seemed to be a little early and left me aimlessly driving around empty paddocks for a good part of a fortnight, as you will know if you were tuned into our instagram account.

The stats turned out not too shabby with 208 ewes mated and 307 lambs running around at the moment taking the lambing percentage to 148%. We were back to a high dry rate of 9% again this year which I will definitely aim to reduce next year by bringing the lambing date back a couple of weeks which should give the 2-tooths time to cycle up. We are still averaging a lamb mortality rate between 12-14% which probably isn’t too bad but could be improved with a bit more shelter in each paddock, I’m thinking a few red tussocks might be the mutt’s nuts.

All in all I was super proud of how the girls performed this season as they refused to pop out any bearings or go down with milk fever and we only lost 4 this season due to post lambing infection. As each year goes by they give me more and more confidence that I can just let them do their thing and really tone down my interference which, in the long run, should have some tasty benefits for the breed.

Below I have attached the stats from the last 4 years if you want to see the direction we are heading in: