Although storm Gertrude is trying to blow us away, it is unseasonably mild with cherry blossom out in the garden. Our neighbour was at his dairy discussion group the other day and while they where standing chatting, the Teagasc adviser put the soil thermometer in the ground. Ten degrees, and that’s on heavy Meath soil. Grass is growing.

There was a very interesting debate on social media last week over the price of factory hoggets at present. They were 500c/kg on 19 January 2015, and on 19 January 2016 they were around 530c/kg. While this can only be seen as a positive, the crux of the matter is how come some lambs can come into €100-€120 at 12-15 weeks while others can take 10 months or more to come into the same money.

I fully understand that some of these are hill lambs and are not born until April or May. But take our own flock for instance: the majority of our lambs are born within six weeks of each other, yet they are sold over a 12- to 36-week period.

They are all treated the same in regards to all management and feed issues. Obviously, lambs born as singles will not take the same time to reach their target finishing weight. There are lots of factors that can influence the rate at which lambs grow. I am long enough drafting lambs for the factory to understand the multitudes of variables, but how come a batch of lambs from the same ram and pretty much the same ewes turn out so inherently different?

Making sense of it

Their genetics should be fairly similar, they live side by side in the same fields all their lives, receive the same treatments, and yet some lambs can be looking at their comrades going off in the trailer a long time before they do.

The argument on social media was whether getting €120 for a 10-month-old lamb now is better than getting €100 for a three- to six-month-old lamb in June to September 2015. The figures I am using are based on the factory sheets from the last few years and I am happy that they are pretty accurate. I know which lamb I would rather sell.

I have read and studied sheep research by a myriad of groups that that tell you about lamb growth rates and daily live weight gain, etc, yet none has never shed much light on why there is such a difference from one animal to another when they are both treated similarly and reared on the same pasture.

Yet as my father always says: “Could Elvis’s brother sing, could he?”