Five-strong litter takes ewe’s lifetime lamb tally to 28

A seven-crop ewe has amazed staff at an Oxfordshire farm by having quintuplets, taking her lifetime tally to 28 lambs born alive.

The high-output ewe belongs to the milky and prolific “Warborough breed”, a composite sheep bred for early indoor lambing at Warborough Farm, Letcombe Regis, Wantage.

Farm manager David Barber told Farmers Weekly the flock regularly scanned at 230-250%, so triplets and quads were common, but this ewe was consistently productive.

After having a single as a ewe lamb, she had quads as a shearling, her third crop was twins and she’s had five or six lambs each year thereafter. 

Two lambs will be left on the dam and three others will be reared on a milk machine with the other pet lambs by Julie, the farm’s shepherd. 

See also: How an Oxfordshire sheep unit sells 1.92 lambs per ewe

“She had five and I thought I’d check her records to see what she had done before, as she was an old ewe,” said Mr Barber. “I found that she’d had 23 before and they had all been born alive. She is averaging four lambs a lambing.”

The impressive ewe is lambing with 600 others over a fortnight period, although the team is used to lambing about 2,000 in the same timeframe. She is on course to rear progeny that total 546kg of carcass weight (at 19-20kg a carcass) and more than 1.26t of liveweight lamb.

“We normally manage to harvest enough colostrum from milky ewes but have had to supplement with some powdered colostrum this year,” Mr Barber said.

The Warborough breed comprises Poll Dorset (62.5%), British Milk Sheep (25%) and Finnish Landrace (12.5%).

The high output/high input system lambs ewes in December to target the Easter market, then grazes species-rich unimproved grassland with dry ewes.  

Flock performance has hit 1.92 lambs a ewe sold in recent years, with a feed conversion ratio of lambs on feed (creep/pellets) of 2.5:1. 

All the ewes are artificially inseminated, with high-index Charollais and Suffolk used as terminal sires. Ewe lambs are bred to natural service and lamb in January.

With the high scanning rate the farm is well versed in managing pet lambs and multiple births, explains Mr Barber, who is in the process of dispersing the flock following the death of the owner, Tony Good.

“We have been selling in-lamb ewes as the farm is now up for sale,” said Mr Barber. “I sold 70 in-lamb sheep to my son, and they had all been scanned with triplets and quads – I wonder if that’s the highest-scanning group of sheep in the country.”