Due to weddings and other family commitments there’s been no lambs bought for the past three weeks. I’d say I have about 75% of what I would like bought for the winter and what’s there is now nicely settled.

They all received a mineral drench when they arrived and after a couple of weeks, they received a fluke and worm drench and were weighed and split into three separate batches.

The first batch contains any lame lambs and anything under 30kg. There are always going to be lame ones, but thankfully the number under 30kg was small.

The next and biggest batch is the lambs between 30kg and 40kg and the last batch are the lambs over 40kg. As the heaviest batch bought on the mart sheets was 36kg, I was pleasantly surprised to have quite a few lambs over 40kg mark and even a few up at 45-46kg.

Now granted I weighed them with a fully belly straight out of the field and they were also slightly damp, which could easily add 3-4kgs onto a mart weight, but even allowing for that, the red clover seems to be doing its job and lambs appear to be thriving well.

Vaccination

Now the next question that needs to be answered is, am I going to give these lambs a clostridial vaccine or not? When we had a lambing flock, the ewes were vaccinated religiously, but in the five years that I’ve been buying store lambs, I haven’t been vaccinating, and up until last year, had been getting away fine.

But for whatever reason, last year I lost more lambs than I was comfortable with. Now I know, just because lambs are vaccinated doesn’t mean that I won’t lose any. I also know that one dead lamb will pay for a lot of vaccine, so cost isn’t putting me off.

But I also know people who finish a lot more lambs than me and would question the value of the clostridial vaccine in store lambs. They also think the vaccine is sore on the lamb’s system and inevitably pulls condition off them.

On the suckler side of things, I was an avid fan of vaccination - scour vaccines, pneumonia vaccines, lepto vaccines were all used with good success and I’m always a great believer in prevention is better than cure.

So, I think the only way I’m going to know for sure is to vaccinate for a year and make my own mind up. It’s hard to beat trying things first hand and dispelling the myths!