With the lambing season fast approaching for many mid-season lambing flocks, attentions will turn to getting nutrition right over the coming weeks.

A good way of identifying thin or overweight ewes is by body condition scoring (BCS) them. If this job isn’t carried out before lambing, then farmers can run into problems such as twin-lamb disease, prolapsing and poor milk production.

Therefore, over the course of the next few weeks, it is no harm to either carry a pen and notepad or make a note on your mobile phone of any ewes that are causing problems – that are affecting the profitability of the enterprise.

Year-on-year farmers persist with keeping problem ewes and this has a huge knock-on effect when it comes to the efficiency and profitability of the enterprise. 

For instance, many farmers will have scanned their ewes and more than likely will have had a few empty. A good portion of these will have run their ewes with the ram again – this is especially the case with early-lambing flocks.

However, not only are you extending the lambing season but you are increasing the workload on yourself while at the same time persisting with keeping underperforming ewes.

Problems such as poor milk production, mastitis and lameness are common issues on all sheep farms across the country. However, to improve the efficiency of the enterprise it is best to cull ewes that have these problems – especially if they are repeat offenders.

It is worth pointing out that some of these issues can be related to on-farm management decisions and these problems can be avoided. However, repeat offenders should be culled.

Therefore, now is the time to analyse and record what animals are causing problems. By not recording, the chances are you will let ewes that are underperforming go through the system again and end up having the same problems next year.

Recording ewes that are performing well should also be carried out in order to increase genetic gain and improve the performance of the flock.

At the end of the day, the profitability of a sheep farm is down to the number of lambs produced. Therefore, breeding the highest performing ewes will only greatly enhance this.

Whether it be a pen and notepad or your mobile phone, take that extra minute or two to record how your flock is performing and identify where you can make gains in your flock.