Written by: Stacy Griffiths
Flooding last winter was on an adverse scale; it has affected many farmers during a busy time. A repercussion for one of our farmers, was that his lambing shed flooded 3 times in the course of a few months. He lost multiple bales of straw and had to lamb many of his sheep outdoors, which resulted in a higher mortality rate.
- Always wear overalls on top of your clothes; never enter the lambing/calving shed in anything but, as you will get messy! The most hygienic thing to do is to take the overalls off as soon as you leave the shed and wash them on a hot or hygiene wash after every use. Don’t re-wear dirty overalls.
- Get in a routine of using hand sanitisers or washing your hands with hot soapy water when entering and leaving the birthing sheds. Minimise your risk of any infections and this will minimise your stress and work in the long run.
- Keep a radio playing in your lambing sheds. We all know how unpredictable sheep can be; the background noise calms them and makes your job easier with less disturbance.
- Have a plan before you start. Make pens up where you can put feed buckets out in the morning for later in that day (stack each shed’s feed bucket on top of each other). This limits ant faffing at night as it’s all ready to go.
- Stock up on supplies and equipment before lambing time. Don’t leave getting ear tags until the last minute.
- Smaller pens can help you out. It helps get the mothers nursing sooner and means if you need to go in there and aid them, there is less room for her to move about. Make sure you are still complying with the minimum pen sizes for any farm assurance schemes though.
- If you have a lamb with hypothermia, one way of helping to raise its body temperature is by using an old pair of jogging bottoms and a hairdryer. If you put the lamb’s head through one leg and use the other leg as a large tunnel for the hair dryer to blow down, this will safely heat up the lamb. Just remember to tie off the waist band hole and to vary temperature settings.
- If worse comes to worst and you need to take a lamb home to care for, travel cots work very well. In the base use old blankets (for heat), followed by a cut off lino, topped with newspaper. This makes cleaning out much easier and keeps the lamb warm and contained.
- If a ewe loses her lamb, and you have triplets or orphan lambs, this tip will be useful to get the ewe to take to another lamb. To encourage the surrogate ewe to take to the lamb, if possible, use her afterbirth (on hay or straw bedding) and rub it onto the hind of the chosen lamb. She will smell her scent on this and is more likely to take to it.
