The Breeding Season Starts Again - Tupping, Weighing and BCS.

With Autumn well on its way, those of us who lamb in the spring will be preparing for next years lambing. It is a good time to check over the rams, buy in new blood stock and get the ewes into tip top condition. This is the start of the season and like all starts it is important to get it right. Any lack of detail now, can not be made up later.

Ewe Weights and Body Condition Scoring - BCS

Pre tupping is the ideal time to check the ewes over, of course you are doing this! sending the poor ewes to cull! but why not weigh them and body condition score them. AHDB trials have shown major links between the condition of the ewe and her lamb performance. This is then also linked to her lifetime performance on farm and your profitablilty. It may sound obvious! but good lambs do not come out of thin, light weight ewes! Sometimes it is good to be reminded of the basics.

How Many Ewes - How Many Lambs and What is the potential income?

Do you know your expected lambing percentage? - Check out the lambing planner to see the effect of  lambing percentage, the number of ewes put to the tup and your expected number of lambs, how much more you could make!

See :Using the sheep lambing planner

Check tags are in and working

It is also a good time to check tags are in place and work correctly. This is not only for legal reasons (your breeding ewes should be double tagged) But it will save time later in the season and give us an accurate count of stock on holding. But be sure to record your retagging (you have to by law!)

See : Sheep Tags and Retagging

 

Check the Tups are in the system!

OK! so physically you are happy with your Rams, but have you actually recorded them on the software, downloaded their EBV's from SIGNET and entered their pedigrees. Make sure your recorded the movement on! This is a good time to get it done, well a head of scanning and lambing. After all in 6 weeks time the tups job will be finished. You will send them off to some distant field and probably not think of them until next year!. This one is missing a Tag, a retag is in order!

Create Those Tupping Records!

Whether you are single siring or mob matting creating a record of the number of ewes which were put to the tup is very important. The number will form the basis of lambing statistics. If using a single sire, recording which group of ewes the ram was put to will give us tup performance data and allow the software to automatically assign the sire to the lamb at lambing. Do this now! it will not take long and will be ready for scanning! It is the same for AI and embrio implant, recording this information now whilst its fresh in your mind is much easier than two days before lambing.

See :Creating tupping records