Farmer Focus: Figures are good despite very wet lambing

Lambing for 2024 is now complete here at Gelston, Lincolnshire. It’s been a long, hard couple of months, but we’ve done it, and the sun has finally started to make an appearance.

Considering the horrendously wet conditions, losses of 11% for our outdoor lambing flock aren’t as bad as feared, although a little higher than our indoor sheep, which is at 6%.

We questioned whether lambing outdoors is the right way to go, but the ewes and lambs have coped far better than us shepherds.

Grass has also been a bit of a worry. It struggled to get going in the cold, wet weather. Ideally, we would start rotationally grazing the February- and March-born lambs with their ewes, but grass is still tight.

See also: Steps to improve labour efficiency laid out by sheep adviser

About the author

Louise Elkington

Louise Elkington runs 500 breeding ewes and a small suckler herd in Lincolnshire with husband Chris. Gelston Lamb sells all meat produced on the farm through pop-up shops, deliveries and catering. They have 54ha (133 acres) of grass on a farm business tenancy and agreements for stubble turnips and hay aftermaths.

Read more articles by Louise Elkington

We have mobbed up two groups and put them back on some haylage to top them up. This gives us a field to rest and get going before we split it up.

Last year, rotational grazing really helped us manage our grass, which resulted in us growing better yields.

There are more lambs this year, so it’s even more important to get the management just right.

My husband, Chris, and I started rotational grazing in 2019 when we became an AHDB strategic farm, and most of our grazing is now set up for it.

We have taken advantage of grants for water troughs and fencing to split fields.

We still use a lot of electric fencing to divide each field into four, with the water in the middle, which animals can access from each section.

This has saved so much time, enabling us to concentrate on other areas of the farm and business.

Show season is upon us, and for Gelston Lamb, that means flipping our award-winning burgers.

A big part of our income comes from catering at country shows. We are now in our tenth year of catering and have slowly built up a good and loyal following.

Up until last year, we did everything out of a couple of gazebos. We finally bit the bullet and converted an old sheep trailer into a quirky catering trailer.

It’s hard work in there as it can get extremely hot, but it’s a great way of meeting people and marketing the brand.