August waits for no one and it wasn’t long before I had the EID tags ordered and was hitting that downward dog to limber up for the 2026 lambing beat. With an extra 50 breeding ewes to record in the studs this year, I was hoping for a stress free lambing and boy did it deliver. Apart some trash weather smack bang in the middle of the 2nd cycle they cruised through without too much assistance. I only needed to help 3 ewes during their lambing and had a small tally of 4 deaths, only one of which was caused by sleepy sickness. This was a fantastic change from last year which I think came down to feeding them less over the early stages of pregnancy. Another stand out feature of this season was a big fat zero bearings, a dream for a hands off lamber like myself, why this happened though I have no idea.
251 ewes were mated this year with 5 being removed before spreading out due to condition. Of the remaining ewes, 17 were dry, giving us a dry rate of 7%. 388 lambs were born giving us a fertility percentage of 151%, this will drop significantly due to dead lambs so I have a gut feeling our lambing percent is back on last year. This could be due to the increased number of first lambing 2ths (as this is how I grew the stud mob to 250). 78 ewes had singles, 137 had twins and 12 had triplets, however I would much prefer to have 0 triplets as their survival isn’t that great.
Overall this lambing season was a bit of a mixed bag. If you were to look at just the figures it would be easy to say that we have taken a step back. From a management point of view however I couldn’t be happier as this year truly felt like our stud were living up to their easy care reputation. If you were keen to get a visual recap of our lambing head over to our YouTube page where we have put together a 5 part series showcasing the ins and outs of lambing both this stud mob and our commercial mob. Follow the link below!