While the sale of the in-calf heifers in Roscrea Mart on Wednesday evening was the highlight of the week, away from this it was also a busy week on farm with the start of the sheep breeding season and housing of more cattle.

Cattle

On Monday, 51 weanling bulls were housed. They are currently on silage and 3kg of a 16% concentrate ration. As well as this, the last 40 cows were housed for winter.

Shaun said: “Grass is disappearing quite quickly, with the average farm cover in the mid-600kg DM/ha this week. What is left on the farm will all be needed for the ewes to see them through to housing.”

The weanling heifers are still at grass, but they will be housed over the weekend or early next week. They are getting 1.5kg concentrate at grass at the moment.

Sheep breeding

On Wednesday, the rams were let out to the mature ewes. Shaun is single-sire mating the ewes for the first four weeks, with five rams out with 165 ewes.

The benefits of single-sire mating allow Shaun to know exactly what lamb each ram is producing. With the farm now keeping back homebred ewe lambs for breeding, this will be more important in years to come.

The farm is also collecting data as part of the Sheep Ireland programme.

All the rams are wearing a harness to raddle the ewes

“Looking at the ewes on Friday morning, there is about 30 tipped since Wednesday. I’m keeping an eye on one ram that seems to be a bit disinterested.

"He is spending more time lying down than what would be typical of a ram with ewes. In saying that, he has six or seven of his group tipped.”

All the rams are wearing a harness to raddle the ewes. They will spend two weeks on green raddle.

At that stage, the raddle colour will be changed and the rams will be swapped around the groups as an insurance policy against any ram infertility for a further two weeks.

Then the raddle colour will be changed once again at that stage and all ewes and rams will run together in one group for 10 to 14 days.

Mating for the ewe lambs will begin in about two weeks’ time. This is later than for the mature ewes in order to manage workload at lambing time.

Shaun has used teaser rams pre-breeding this year in order to make the lambing period more compact.