Watch: the holy grail of 200% lambing

The later-lambing batches of pregnant ewes were scanned on 4 January, and are carrying noticeably fewer lambs than their earlier lambing counterparts.

That has come about after most of the younger sheep were held back and the rams introduced at the end of the second colour cycle to spread the birth dates over a wider duration.

This has resulted in a sizeable number of red and blue rumps, and the enormous collection of orange (like last year) has been significantly reduced. I am reasonably confident that the awful spike in numbers, when half the flock gave birth in the space of a few days in 2017, will not occur this year. Time will tell.

From 240 ewes scanned in total, the average figure is 185%. This includes a few empty sheep, and another few that have something unusual happening within the depths of their reproductive system, so may give birth to a living single, or possibly something that resembles one of Attenborough’s deep-sea creatures.

There are also a sensible number of triplets and doubles, and slightly too many singles. And now comes an admission from a diehard sheep farmer that is going to sound incredibly like a defensive excuse: 185% is a far more desirable figure than the 200% that was achieved last year.

Every shepherd seems to have a holy grail in terms of lambing percentage, which is somewhere in the region of two lambs per ewe. Indeed, I have spent half a lifetime striving to hit this magical target, and these past few years have seen me creeping ever closer to the mystical crown.

Finally, I managed it in 2017, and like so many aspects of life that we yearn for, the reality isn’t half as sweet as the anticipated goal.

Indignation

About 20 years ago I was chuntering on to a neighbouring farmer about trying to get my lambing percentage closer to 200%, and he asked me if I really wanted much more than 175%. Spluttering with indignation, I wanted to let him know his conservative and backward views were from a bygone era, and had no place in the modern world of forward-looking sheep farmers. It seems, however, that his opinion may still hold true today.

In 2017, I sold 36-day-old lambs for a tenner apiece, due to an abundance of sheep having trebles. I also let a few ewes rear triplets, but only if they were exceptionally good milkers.

By my simple reckoning, £360 from the sale of day-old lambs does very little for overall farm profit, and the only advantage I can think of concerning a big crop of lambs is the kudos attached to the bragging rights.

I could have reared them as pets, but I’ve been down this road before and don’t think it leaves a decent net margin. I could also have run a batch of 40 ewes with three apiece on their own, but I’ve also had experience of this, and for every sheep that successfully rears triplets, there will be ewes with wrecked udders, and others with one or two screw lambs.

I know some people work hard at transferring extra lambs onto ewes with singles, but my timings never seem to coincide between triplets and singles being born at the same time, and the time factor is another big issue.

Perhaps I would view a multiple-birth lambing system differently if (A) I had more time on my hands, (B) I had state-of-the-art housing with unlimited numbers of lambing pens and (C) I had about half the number of pregnant ewes to look after.

But there is another point to consider. If you turn a ewe upside down, you will notice the udder is clearly divided in two halves, with one teat on each side. By my elementary mathematical ability, three does not divide evenly into two: it never has, and it never will.

And therein lies the real nub of the whole issue about trying to achieve lamb-rearing percentages of over 200%.

The answer is staring us in the face: mother nature never intended it to be that way.