Farmer writes: an important Norwegian visitor calls

Last week, I had the pleasure of hosting the Norwegian Minister of Agriculture Jon Georg Dale and his colleagues on my farm.

His visit to my farm, although he was here in Ireland on business, was one of a personal interest in sheep farming and sheepdog handling, in particular.

He himself has competed in sheepdog trials in Norway and has won various titles. Thankfully, my dogs performed well and I wasn’t left redfaced when I brought some sheep in from a nearby field while he was here.

It was interesting to hear that the Norwegian average sheep flock size is slightly smaller in size to our own at about 65 breeding animals with farmers also receiving about 30% of their income from subsidies.

Another part of the minister’s responsibility is overseeing the running of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The seed vault currently houses 840,000 different seed samples from all around the world. The Vault’s mission is to provide a safety net against accidental loss of diversity in traditional gene banks from around the world.

It was interesting to hear the work that they are doing in this regard.

The breeding season is drawing to a close here and the rams are being removed this Friday after a total of seven weeks. For me, this is enough time because when next spring comes around I have a definite end date to my lambing. This, along with the regular changing of the raddle colour, also allows me to predict when things will be busy and be able to take on any extra help required.

I have nearly 65% to 70% of the farm closed for the winter and despite the grazing conditions being favourable, I will avoid the temptation to regraze any of these paddocks again this year.

I have enough grass built up on the remaining ground to keep the ewes out until mid to late December as long as weather conditions remain as they are.

Lambs are starting to get scarce here, with another draft gone this week.

Fences

The remaining rams were housed last week as I found they were spending a lot of time walking up and down along the fences the last few weeks searching for access to the ewes in my fencing and therefore not thriving.

They had been on meal beforehand, so it didn’t take long to settle in. I plan on housing the remainder of the ewe lambs after the next draft of lambs go.

A few weeks ago, I sent off some liver and kidney samples to check mineral levels as I thought the lambs’ performance wasn’t as good as it could be.

The results showed that cobalt was low; with this in mind, I have given all the lambs another dose of cobalt to rectify the issue.

Hopefully, I will start to see the results of this over the next few weeks. It is important to keep an eye on mineral levels in the sheep as it can have an effect on whether the animals will thrive.