Innovative Sheep Breeding
Home of Performancelleyns and ProlleyNZ
Call us on 07970 773840 an 07780 687416
Feeding fodder beet to ewe lambs.
- by John Peregrine Aubrey
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- 29 Jan, 2021
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Innovative Sheep Breeding
The home of Performancelleyns and ProlleyNZ.
How do you get your breeding sheep through the winter? Part 2
Here at Innovative Sheep Breeding, we tend to use various forage-based strategies to keep our sheep on-farm and maintain our biosecurity. At the moment we grow a rape/kale hybrid and fodder beet.
The rape/kale hybrid is redstart, a germinal variety, which benefits from a smaller stalk diameter that leads to better utilization. It has superior nutritional characteristics and can be fed in sizeable blocks without wastage, though yields are not the highest for this crop type. The remaining stalks also rarely need topping before the field is ploughed, which is an advantage.
The fodder beet is Geronimo, a medium dry matter variety and, in my opinion, is at the sweet point between palatability and frost resistance. The two characteristics being negatively correlated. Fodder beet produces the most dry-matter per acre/ hectare of any forage crop but costs by far the most to grow. We have had issues with beet yellowing virus, which has reduced yields while maintaining or increasing costs, making the crop less attractive to grow.
The high yield makes it difficult to graze in-situ without creating a mud bath and the associated welfare issues that might follow. Harvesting and storing it before distribution adds significantly to the cost; however, you can distribute the roots wherever you choose, assuming you can travel. The biggest problem with harvested fodder beet is getting it fed, which can be both challenging and costly.
We use the bucket of our loader and our TMR feeder because we have one and it works. However, we should not underestimate the damage done by machinery travelling in the fields. There is always a price to pay in terms of damage to the grass and soil structure.
Here is a video of us feeding our tupped ewe lambs, the youngest of our breeding sheep, in what might be described as challenging conditions, though they could be much worse than this. You have to pick your day and watch the weather like a hawk.
The ewe lambs are a mixture of Performancelleyns, ProlleyNZ, and pure New Zealand sheep, Suffolks and Sufftexs. The machinery and the ewe’s feet are damaging the ley, but this will repair. However, it could shorten the ley’s life and make cutting grass for conservation a bit of a bumpy experience. The ewe lambs tend to have brown faces, which they get from eating muddy roots.
We also use these techniques to feed our over-wintering Performancelleyn and ProlleyNZ rams, to get them to the age and condition where we can offer them for sale as shearlings. They are not given any concentrate and are allowed to mature slowly for a long and serviceable life. They have to “do” on forage alone.
Innovative Sheep Breeding. How does the flock look?
How do our breeding sheep look?
Well, here is a video of some ewes and lambs taken on 26/05/2021.
The sheep are just about to be sprayed with fly control treatment.
The Lleyn (Performancelleyn) ewes were winter shorn and will not be summer shorn. All they need is Clik extra to carry them through the summer, which means we do not have to shear them with lambs at foot, and we do not need to get them back down the road to our buildings and the hot and bothered shearers.
The lambs are a mixture of Performancelleyns and ProlleyNZ crosses. They are an average group of sheep, not just the elite sheep. The lambs were born over 6 to 8 days and are, on average, 82 days at the time we took the video.
These sheep have been grass-fed only. Also, there had been only one period of rain in mid-march before we weighed the lambs in May.
The lambs were all weighed on 10/05/21, which would be an average of 66 days, and the average group weight was 27.25 kgs. The average daily live weight gain for the lambs was 340 grams per day since birth. The maximum daily gain was 488 grams per day. This individual weighed 40 kgs at 66 days of age and is the animal highlighted in the video with an arrow. He is a ProlleyNZ cross. These are exact figures as we record the birth date and birth weight of all these lambs.
We upload all this data to Signet Breeding Services, who process the data to get Performance figures for the individual sheep.
As any sheep farmer knows, there is a lot of variation between individuals. If you capture enough data and process that correctly, you can improve the performance and quality of your flock’s genetics. The clever thing that Signet Breeding Services would do is remove the environmental effects from the raw data.
If you want to improve the performance of your maternal/dual-purpose flock, you need to buy performance recorded stock from the best performing flocks.
We have the highest average indexed Lleyn flock in the UK and work solely on the ethos of supplying you, the commercial sheep farmer, with the best genetics to improve the profitability of your flock.
The Performancelleyns are a purebred Lleyn, while the ProlleyNZ combines our best Lleyns with the best New Zealand genetics. The ProlleyNZ combine the best of both countries advanced breeding strategies to capture hybrid genetic vigour while keeping wool levels to UK acceptable levels.
The best way to benefit from all the years of our breeding and our unique genetic position is to purchase our Performancelleyn or ProlleyNZ rams.
You can find out more on our website innovative-sheep-breeding.co.uk and enter a competition to win a shearling ProlleyNZ ram.
You will not be disappointed.
Here at Innovative Sheep Breeding, we tup all the suitable ewe lambs that we retain to put back into the flock.
As a sheep breeding enterprise, looking to produce continually improving performance, we change over a third of our breeding ewes every year. Breeding sheep from ewes lambs shortens the intergenerational interval enhancing the rate of genetic gain in our sheep.
In this video, we are moving our ewe lambs back to the shed for pregnancy scanning. We need to know which ewe lambs are pregnant and how many lambs each sheep will give birth to.
There are three classes of ewe lamb in this video. There are our performance recorded Lleyn ewe lambs, which we call our Performancelleyns.
There are ProlleyNZ ewe lambs. These are our composite sheep, a combination of our superior Performancelleyns and elite New Zealand maternal sheep.
Also, there are New Zealand Suffolk and Sufftex ewe lambs, which are more terminal in nature but can be used very successfully in maternal sheep breeding.
An interesting point is you cannot tell the difference visually between the Performancelleyns and the ProlleyNZ ewe lambs. Lleyn sheep and the composite sheep. Which means we should be avoiding any problems in the variation of physical characteristics. An issue that Innovis have had with some of their composite sheep.
The ideal scenario would be that from every ewe lamb put to the tup/ram we would get a pregnant ewe lamb with a single lamb. However, it does not work like this, unfortunately. Mated ewe lambs will not all get pregnant, and many will have twins.
The question is always how to manage those extra lambs. You can remove them and hand-rear them, but that tends to create work and no profit unless fat lamb prices are very high. So, I favour letting the ewe lambs rear doubles but carefully managing them. Nutrition and worm burden being the main areas of concern
At Innovative Sheep Breeding, we favour mating ewe lambs for our customers, as long as they are big enough to tup and they can be managed correctly. Lambed ewe lambs make far better mothers as shearlings, and it is more profitable than waiting for the second year. Just remember management is the key to success.
There is a helpful series of articles from the AHDB about sheep breeding and ewe lambs here. There is a series of links to articles on breeding ewe lambs at the bottom of the page.
We have Lleyn ewe lambs for sale in September, and we may have ProlleyNZ ewe lambs in the future. So, contact us early as they are highly sought after.
However, the shearling Performancelleyn rams and the ProlleyNZ rams we sell, offer a better value solution if you can retain your breeding sheep.
