English Mule working well on large-scale lowland sheep farm

Dugie Rennie farms alongside his wife and family just outside Lanark, Scotland.

He farms a total of 450 acres.

All the land Dugie farms is owned and it’s divided into two main blocks. It is a fully lowland farm.

The two main enterprises on farm are lambing the 700 stock ewes and bringing all lambs to finish and finishing 400 cattle annually.

The English Mule

In recent years, Dugie has been buying in English Mules from Alan Struthers. These mules stay local their entire lives having only travelled a few miles from the hill they were born on.

The aim of buying in these English Mules was to try to improve maternal and self-sufficiency traits with in his flock.

So far, this has been working very well for Dugie and he has seen great improvements in his ewe flock and workload at lambing.

His aim, going forward, is to continue buying in the Mule hoggets and hope that his flock continues heading in this direction.

Scanning rates have also remained very constant with the mules since having them averaging in and around 200% each year.

Buying in the Mules as hoggets works very well for Dugie as he doesn’t lamb down any ewe lambs on farm and this free grass from not grazing ewe lambs allows him to keep more ewes that are producing lambs.

He also likes to buy his replacements directly from farmers as he knows exactly where they have come from and the breeding behind them.

All ewes on the farm are lambed from mid-March onwards with the bulk of the ewes lambing in April. Dugie aims to lamb as many ewes as possible outside each year but this of course is very weather dependent and can vary year-on-year.

The English mules have also been working well in both Dugie’s indoor and outdoor systems. Depending on grass cover, Dugie will also buy in ewes with lambs at foot.

Finishing lambs

All ewes on the farm are mated with Texel and Beltex X rams to produce lambs with a good carcase that are easy fleshing, as Dugie aims to have as many lambs as possible finished of grass.

The English Mule has also been working well in this regard for Dugie with a great milking ability to feed two lambs without needing extensive feeding; thus keeping the cost of producing lambs down for him.

Any of the lambs that are not finished of grass are weaned onto a run of after cut silage and creep fed. The lambs are fed meal in a nut form bought in from a local feed merchant, as Dugie finds that the sheep have done better on a nut and are getting all the nutrients they need to prevent any problems down the line.

Finishing cattle

Annually Dugie finishes 400 head of cattle. The 400 is made up of both bullocks and heifers. All of the cattle are bought in from local marts at around a year old. With the number of suckler herds in Scotland dropping, Dugie is finding it harder each year to find suckler-bred cattle so now buys both a mixture of cattle from the dairy herds and suckler herds to fill his numbers.

Once the cattle land on-farm they are all vaccinated and get a dose and kept in isolation from the main herd for at least 30 days. They are then grouped into batches depending on weight and age.

All of the cattle on farm are grazed and then put indoors to finish. All of the cattle are housed on straw and fed barley and silage that is all grown on farm. It is fed through a total mixed ration.

Growing crops

On farm, Dugie grows 100 acres of barley annually; this barley is then used to finish cattle and the straw is used for bedding cattle and ewes at lambing time.

All of the silage Dugie feeds on farm is also all grown on farm. Both silage and barley are harvested by Dugie using their own combine and machinery. This gives Dugie the advantage of being able to cut whenever the weather is right and not having to wait for a contractor.

Use of technology on the farm

Just last year Dugie made a large investment in a Te-Pari automatic sheep race. This race is completely automatic and weighs the sheep and drafts them into batches in accordance to weight. Dugie commented that “it was a great investment to get work done quicker and easier, but has also been a game changer in measuring the performance” of his lambs providing him with information that he never had before.

Dugie is now able to use this information to better his flock year-on-year.

Dugie has also been faecal sampling his lambs in recent years in an aim to hopefully reduce an instance of anthelmintic resistance that could become a problem for the farm in the future. Faecal sampling also helps him to reduce the cost of dosing with such a large number of sheep.

With the use of the data collected from the weigh reports and the faecal sample, Dugie has noticed a small correlation on the farm between a drop in the lambs weight gain and the level of worms present on farm – so he now faecal samples any lambs that have even a small drop in weight gain to help prevent any worm burdens from taking hold.

Alternative enterprise

In the last few years, Dugie and his wife have set up an alternative enterprise on farm of producing goat meat. This alternative enterprise has turned out to be very successful for the pair so far. They only have a small number of goats on farm currently but the market for goat meat is remaining very strong in the UK so they are planning to increase the number by buying in more kids to bring on to finish.