Pigs, Poultry and Poo by Jason Gibbs

Author:Jason Gibbs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Pigs, Poultry and Poo
Publisher: The Crowood Press
Published: 2012-07-09T00:00:00+00:00

EXPANDING THE SHEEP FLOCK

At the same time as we added the OSBs to our holding, we also started building up our flock of sheep, continuing a trend of adding animals in waves as we became more confident. The experiment with fattening up the lambs had given us the confidence we needed in handling sheep, and we knew that Lafite and Mouton really needed some friends as just two of them really didn’t count as a flock – at most we could describe them as perhaps a ‘flockette’. So we talked with our farmer friend and fount of all knowledge, John, about getting some more.

We Purchase A Small Flock

After some discussion his advice was that we take some ewes with lambs at foot (that is, still suckling). This would mean we’d have some lambs to fatten up in the first year, and then, once we’d decided how we would breed from them – in the sense of whether we would use a ram or AI – we’d have lambs each year going forward. We liked this idea, and therefore only had to decide how many couples we wanted. Our twisted logic escapes me now, but we settled on needing four ewes, expecting to produce six to eight lambs a year. Gordon asked if he could buy a ewe too, and we would then look after it on the same basis as the previous lambs and OSBs (shared costs and so on). We agreed, so we settled on getting five ewes and were expecting around ten lambs with them.

On the day John rounded up the sheep from his flock, five ewes and their eight lambs seemed to naturally separate themselves out for us, and so those were the ones he brought to us. Initially I was disappointed that it was only eight lambs, but then realized that as we now had fifteen sheep (including the two Soays) they would probably be enough of a handful! The new flock was duly released into our small field, to keep them separate from our existing animals in case of foot rot or some other issue. We had finally learnt a lesson! This field should have been cut for hay, but hadn’t – which leads to a small digression into hay.

Managing a Hayfield

At this point we still weren’t using all our land. As mentioned before, we had a verbal agreement with a local farmer (not John) that he would use the fields for hay, and then for grazing his sheep during the winter for a rather small sum of money. The idea was that it would keep our grass mown and the weeds mostly under control, and a small sum of money is better than nothing! It had worked out fine the year before and we were expecting much the same again. Unfortunately our poor fencing had meant that the cows had got into the hayfields and wandered about in them for a couple of weeks before we could sort it out, and it appears the farmer had seen them.

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