Lambing 2025

Me oh my, yes boy, it feels good to be done! As I am writing this the studs have called it a season and the commercial girls are 4 days away from finishing up. And what an interesting season it has been.

The studs did me a favour by lambing on time this year due to the fact that we moved the start date back to mid August. A great lesson learnt which I think farming is all about. We came into this season with a few ewes less than last year, 195, so we were always going to struggle breaking our record of 307 lambs at weaning. The girls however, who I must say were in great knick, gave it their best shot and currently we have 293 prime Wiltshire offspring bouncing around out there. This means that unless something drastic happens they should wean out at about 150%, a 5 year high! The amazing winter we had down south also gave us our lowest lamb mortality rate at 8% compared to 13% in the terrible conditions last year.

Unfortunately we had a lot more ewes die this year, 7 in total all of which were lambing problems, which seems to be the trade off of feeding them well during the early stages of pregnancy. Next year I am going to aim to reduce their food intake in the earlier stages and hopefully the girls won’t be spitting out such big donkeys.

By far the most satisfying moment was clocking into the third cycle and clocking off from the daily instagram updates. As it was our second year giving everybody an intimate look at how we do things, I felt more than ever the burden of coming up with interesting ways of explaining the daily grind and tip-toeing around the more gruesome details. There is a fine line between being transparent and keeping the channel family friendly but such is farming.

Anyway thats all for now, time for a quick breather before we start gearing up for our annual on farm sale. Woooo!