What a year we have had. Starting with constant rain and followed by drought, it has been a difficult and expensive year for most farmers.

Traditionally, store lambs produced in the west of Ireland are sold for further finishing in the east. But given the difficult growth conditions, what are the options for farmers who traditionally purchase store lambs and what are the options for farmers selling store lambs? If we look back over the last seven or eight years, store lamb finishing has been able to achieve high margins in all but one year.

The general trend has been that finishing store lambs over the winter period by utilising surplus grass or forage crops followed by a period of intensive meal feeding and aiming to sell in the period late February to early April has been the most profitable option.

The purpose of this article is to outline the options available to finish store lambs on farms where surplus grass is available as well as on farms where it is not.

The results and targets set out in this article have been achieved annually in store lamb finishing trials being conducted at the Teagasc Athenry sheep research farm.

Finishing lambs on all concentrates

The economics of finishing lambs on all-concentrate diets is a function of the value of the lamb, the cost of the concentrates and associated costs, plus the anticipated market returns.

This year, there are reports of under-finished lambs being sent for slaughter or forward stores being sold at poor prices. The economics of housing and intensively finishing forward-store lambs stack up where the market prices for store lambs are poor.

Table 1 demonstrates two examples of a lowland lamb at 35kg or a hill lamb at 30kg being finished intensively on concentrates, leaving a margin over selling them at €1.80/kg and €1.60/kg respectively.

Where extra growth can be achieved on grazed grass, the margins will obviously be higher.

Teagasc has developed a useful calculator, which can help you carry out budgets, taking into account your own anticipated costs. You can download this here.

Key points when finishing lambs on all-concentrate diets

  • For grass-fed lambs, it may be worthwhile training the lambs to eat concentrates prior to housing. This will make the building-up period to ad lib concentrates quicker. Training can take place outdoors by introducing creep feeders or it can happen indoors by providing lambs access to ad-lib roughage during the training period.
  • If finishing lambs on an all-concentrate diet, make sure that the concentrate is suitable for feeding ad-lib to lambs.
  • Build the lambs up slowly to avoid digestive upsets. Initially offer 300g/lamb/day and increase by 200g/lamb/day every three days until full feeding and continue to offer a small quality of long roughage (hay, silage or straw). Ensure that lambs have water at all times.
  • Avoid too much starch or finely ground ingredients. There is a benefit in feeding course rations with some cracked or whole cereals. This reduces the risk of digestive upsets.

  • Look at ingredients to assess quality – see Table 2. Avoid feeds with large quantities from the red list. Green represents the highest energy ingredients, whereas orange are intermediate.
  • Mineral vitamin inclusion is essential for longer feeding periods.
  • If finishing male lambs, include ammonium chloride for long-keep lambs to prevent urinary calculi at an inclusion rate of 0.5%.
  • There should be no need for additional mineral vitamin supplementation where properly balanced concentrates are being fed.
  • Growing lambs (less than 35kg) have an additional requirement for protein and should receive a diet containing 14% crude protein (CP). Very small lambs (less than 25kg) will probably benefit from a diet containing 15% to 16% CP. Lambs that are well grown and in the finishing phase will not benefit from dietary CP levels above 11% or 12%.

    • Traditional store lamb finishing systems

    The most profitable store lamb finishing systems have a period of grazing built in. Ideally, lambs would be grazed until forage runs out in December or January, from which point they are either housed or finished outdoors on ad-lib meal. The lambs most suited to this system are lighter store lambs, which can generally be stocked at eight to 10 lambs per acre where significant grass covers have been accumulated. Experience from fattening lambs in Teagasc Athenry has shown that these lighter lambs have higher levels of compensatory growth at grass and tend to catch up with the heavier lambs during the autumn/winter grazing period.

    Marketing

    Traditionally, the time of year when hogget prices peak is from the end of February until the middle of April. In 2019, Easter Sunday falls on 21 April and Ramadan starts on 5 May, so it is likely that prices will be strongest towards the end of April.