Most farmers have breeding on their minds, and body condition is still the number one factor in breeding success. It’s a good time to pull out any thin and under conditioned sheep and rule out parasites as a possible cause.

Faecal egg counts

If you get sheep into a corner of a field or pen, hold them for 10 minutes and they will defecate. Get a teaspoon of fresh dung from six to 10 samples and pool it. Do this early in the week and send it to your vet or lab. These pooled faecal egg counts can indicate worm levels.

Sometimes you can also target thin or scoury sheep for sampling to rule out worms as a problem.

Quarantine dosing

It is important not to bring any disease onto your farm, particularly parasites or infectious lameness. All bought-in animals should receive a double combination of wormers like monepantel and moxidectin (quarantine dose). Make sure they are housed for 48 hours before turnout to prevent resistant worms from entering the rest of your flock. Check all four feet every time a new arrival comes in and stand them in a footbath for five to 10 minutes.

Assessing fluke risk

It’s been a wet few months and factory reports suggest that some farms are now on fluke risk. From now on, farmers should follow lamb livers to the factory and check the livers of any cull ewes or fallen sheep. FECs can be used, but they will miss early immature fluke (not producing eggs) which can do some damage, They can be checked as part of overall flock FECs.

Dosing for fluke

Triclabendazole will kill all stages of fluke in sheep, but beware of resistance issues in some flocks. Closantel will kill some early immatures from three to five weeks and is affective against late immature and adult flukes. Nitroxynil kills adult and immature flukes but Albendazole is only effective against adult flukes.

Ewes pre-tupping

The only ewes that may benefit from worming before mating are those that are thin or immature, like ewe lambs or hoggets. These are also a useful group to take some dung samples from, to check for faecal egg counts.

Sheep scab

Watch out for any sheep licking, biting or scratching. They should be investigated with your vet to rule out scab. Dipping or Ivermectin should be effective against sheep scab.

New approaches

With worm resistance and parasites in sheep continuing to be a real challenge, it is exciting to see research being done about the role of mixed swards in helping reduce the problems with parasites. The research globally is in its early stages, but many experts are excited about the preliminary findings.

New Zealand veterinary consultant Trevor Cook suggested that mixed swards do play a role in finishing lambs off after weaning. He claimed mixed swards had two benefits: being highly digestible and reducing the risk of pasture larval (worm).

Plants like chicory are said to have anthelmintic effects and worm parasites find it hard to migrate to animals in mixed swards. For many sheep farmers, this is a space to watch to find new ways to tackle worm resistance.