Farmer Focus: Better shearing seminars begin
© Matt Smith Spring has decided to make a bit of an appearance, which is quite nice. It’s always good to see daffodils popping up, although we’ve not had too bad a winter – well down here anyway.
The deer fencing is still ongoing and at a reasonable rate considering we are trying to fit it in around our day-to-day jobs as well as fitting in the odd day of shearing.
See more: Read more from our Livestock Farmer Focus writers
We are busy planting leylandii trees. We brought 2,000, which are getting planted on the lee side of the earth hedges we built last summer.
Hopefully they get started before the wind blows them over! We look forward to the shelter they will provide in the future.
We have just over 300 deer on, with only another 120 or so to come in the very near future, some of which are youngstock, which we will hopefully finish later this year.
Fluke setback
On the sheep front we seem to have had a bad run of liver fluke in one of our single mobs. Thankfully not all of them, but this is still a setback so close to lambing.
We are getting on to predator control earlier this year pre-lambing, which is working well so far. All sheep have had their annual Heptavac, wormer and have been full bellied crutched pre-lamb.
On the whole all the stock are looking well with most still getting some silage and fodder beet as well.
This week myself and Matt Luxton (my personal trainer who trained me for the record) are running the first of our “shear performance” seminars, which is being supported by the British Wool Board.
The first seminar is at Lanark in Scotland. They are designed for performance improvement for shearers, whether it be to win their local show, improve their daily tallies or even take on the world!
I feel this is a great opportunity for me to put something back into an industry that has given me so much.
I think that shearing in Britain is becoming a lot more professional and more and more British shearers are being sought after around the world.
Matt and Pip Smith run 1,085 breeding Romneys and Romney-cross Lleyn ewes across 121ha. Matt is also a shearing contractor and train sheepdogs.