Alan Montgomery

17 May 2002

Alan Montgomery

Alan Montgomery runs

a 300ha (750-acre) mixed

farm near Downpatrick, Co

Down, Northern Ireland.

As well as cereals and

potatoes, the farm supports

a 130-cow suckler herd,

950 breeding ewes and

1000 store lambs

THE easy care lambing trial has been a fascinating affair this season.

Ewes now in their fifth season have become bigger and fatter than the ideal. Being run as a separate flock means they are probably getting preferential treatment. A rogue male lamb somehow impregnated 12 ewes before he was discovered and several ewes aborted their lambs after being weighed just before lambing.

Lambing the rest was spread over the whole of April with no more than five lambing in one day.

Plastic mesh shelters of different shapes were erected in half the outdoor area where one-third of the ewes lambed as part of ARINIs easy care lambing project. The other half of this field held a further one-third of these ewes, which lambed without shelters, while the remainder lambed indoors.

Unfortunately for research workers, ewes hardly used the shelters to lamb in, as the weather was so good.

Lambs were weighed, sexed and tagged and moved to a replicant post lambing field where they joined ewes from the indoor batch. Shelter use was again recorded. Its use was markedly greater here, although some may have been due to young lambs shading from the sun.

There are significant savings in feed costs when comparing outdoor and indoor systems. But the prime aim of this study has not produced the savings in labour required to make outdoor lambing a more attractive option. Absolute minimal supervision coupled with a quick method of moving sheep post-lambing is needed to make the system viable.

All six farms in the study have been issued with faecal egg counting packs. We have recently spent half a days training in their use. All ewes were dung sampled four weeks pre-lambing and again at the pre-lambing weighing.

They were wormed using doramectin at lambing. Worm samples will again be taken four weeks post lambing, along with a random sample of 20 lambs at monthly intervals during the grazing season. Worm numbers of different types will be recorded and dosing will be carried out according to threshold levels. &#42

Fine weather has been great for lambing, but not so great for a research project running on Alan Montgomerys farm.