Farmer Focus: Ewes on grass nuts ahead of tupping
Louise Elkington © Tim Scrivener Yet again, Lincolnshire seems to be missing all the rain. The turnips went in well and had a nice drink afterwards, but it has been extremely dry ever since.
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The plants are there, though I doubt there will be much of a bulb unless we see a change in the weather very soon. Luckily, we put more turnips in this year, so hopefully we will have enough to see us through – even if the bulbs don’t get as big as we would like.
We did manage to make some September hay for the cattle or sheep. We mowed an old, tired ley that is due to come out anyway, so it was really just a security blanket. We’re learning that you can never make enough hay or haylage; it’s like money in the bank.
The ewes are now all off farm, which means regular fencing and daily water top-ups. Because they haven’t had the flush of grass we were hoping for, we are feeding them 0.5kg of grass nuts a day to give them a boost. They just don’t look as good as they should this close to tupping.
They have been given a different brand of bolus this year, so hopefully iodine deficiency won’t be an issue again. We will blood test them at scanning to double-check, though.
We’ve also bought some new tups this year. For the A flock, we have another Aberfield from Innovis to produce our replacement ewe lambs.
We also got a couple of Roussins from a local breeder whose tups have produced some cracking lambs for us in the past: easy lambing, lively, good carcasses and good on their feet. The previous tups also aged really well.
The sheep have really been hard work this year. By contrast, the cattle have been incredibly easy to look after, even though we’ve had to feed them haylage through the summer. We took our first home-bred bullock into the abattoir this week and he looks spot on to go through the butchery.
He will hang for four weeks before being sold through our pop-up shops and website. The fat is a lovely yellow colour, so we are hoping our customers will be very happy with the first batch of Gelston Beef.
It has certainly made us think about increasing our cattle numbers rather than continuing to grow the flock.