Weaning 2024
With the cold, frigid lambing behind us, we were looking forward to seeing how everything was shaping up with our stud flock. Understandably growth rates were down, an average of 3kg from last year, but the lambs still had good composition so we are confident that they will shoot along now that the grass is growing again. I negated drenching these lambs pre weaning which was a bit of a gamble but it paid off as they were all looking great coming down the race so I thought what the hell and decided to skip their weaning drench too. I will be keeping an extremely close eye on them leading up to our sale in February but so far, so good.
The 2-tooth rams were also affected by our wet Spring with their average weight dropping 5kg from last year’s flock. If I am going to slap all of my cards on the table however this was largely due to poor management. I will tell you why… We had just moved onto a new patch of land before lambing and there was this one young grass paddock (lets call it paddock X) that I was struggling to read. Although it had plenty of grass in it, the most on the property, problems kept arising in it. Firstly one cold night I lost 6 pregnant ewes in it to milk fever. I put this down to them not being shifted early enough and carried on with life. I then put some cattle in it to clean up what the ewes hadn’t eaten but all they did was stand around the gate getting sassy at me. I kind of thought something was up so I made a call that even though we were super short on grass coming into September, I wasn’t going to lamb any commercial ewes in it. In hindsight this was a great decision, however it meant my boys had to be the sacrificial lambs and reside in this dodgy paddock over lambing. They got through it (just) and at the end of it all paddock X still had some very high covers in it.
In the mean time I have done a soil test to try and flush out the problem and nearly all of the macro and micro nutrients were well below optimum. Hopefully I can remedy this before next season!
Notice how few sheep made their way into paddock X (top left) when we opened the gates up.