Farmer Focus: Livestock showing is educational
Kate Beavan ©Richard Stanton Lambing kicked off two days early – much to the delight of students on the farm who had a sheep husbandry course that day with an added bonus of three sets of twins.
Every sheep farmer wants ewes that can successfully rear two lambs without any problems.
Keeping accurate records and culling problematic ewes are both steps towards this goal, but information on the animals’ genetics can also be a useful tool.
See also: Read more from our other livestock farmer focus writers
I have been following the recent discussions regarding estimated breeding values (EBVs) with interest. EBVs are invaluable when looking for specific traits such as litter size and disease resistance, but I have heard of some farmers being disappointed after relying totally on them.
They are estimated after all and rely on the accuracy of the data used.
You can’t underestimate a good stockman’s eye along with the breeding history of the animal.
It is being said that show animals are holding our genetics back, but showing livestock also plays an educational role. More than 237,000 members of the public visited the Royal Welsh Show last year and were educated in many ways, not least by seeing the livestock on show.
We’re constantly looking for ways to reduce output costs and produce lambs suitable for our environment and the market.
Growing oats, barley and wheat to feed our livestock has proved cost effective over the past couple of years and also strip grazing our ewes on roots over the winter months.
We are now contemplating growing beans to reduce the need to buy in protein for our animal feed.
On a final note, I would like to thank NFU Cymru for inviting me to talk at their Glamorgan conference. We were made extremely welcome and it was heartening to see so many young farmers in the audience.
The same youngsters travelled to London later that week with a wooden cow, chickens and flour mill to educate school children about the journey of food from farm to fork. They did a fantastic job and we all need to keep banging the drum for British agriculture; education is so important.
Kate Beavan farms 200ha alongside her husband Jim on one of two family farms near Abergavenny, Monmouthshire. The main enterprise comprises of 900 breeding ewes and 50 suckler cows. Meat is sold direct to the family’s traditional butchers shop. Kate and Jim hosted the first series of Lambing Live in 2010.