Beersheba Farm

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Strong Wool Breeders Association Annual Sheep & Wool Fair – May 7th 2017

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On Sunday we went along to the annual Sheep & Wool Fair that is run by a small group of “Strong Wool” breeders. In this case, “strong wool” refers to wools over 30 micron and used for rugs/carpets. The breeds are: Border Leicester, English Leicester, Cheviot, Drysdale, Romney, Perendale and Lincoln.

Representing the Drysdales were Gilbert and his sister Gillyflower. Naturally, they took out Champion Drysdale Ram & Ewe. 😉  Gilbert’s fleece also snared Champion Drysdale fleece and the Champion Medullated Fleece.

 

 

Beersheba Gilbert

 

Beersheba Gillyflower
Gilbert’s fleece

Three young English Leicesters came too and they collected Champion English Leicester Ram & Ewe. Their dad’s fleece took out Champion English Leicester fleece. And, to top it off, a skein of grey English Leicester yarn I had spun up won a blue ribbon (1st).

Silver English Leicester yarn, spun from raw fleece

Arrived home totally exhausted, of course, and hope to do some more shows later in the year.

Maybe we will see you there?? 🙂

Managing ram aggression

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Most of the year the rams at Beersheba Farm live in bachelor flocks. Then, when the days shorten and the ewes… cycle…. the rams get their chance to live with the ladies for a few weeks. Hormones rage (!) and then… they have to go back to the bachelor flock and maybe come face-to-face with the rams who didn’t get their chance that year as well the rams who were in with other ewe flocks.

In this high-testosterone atmosphere there are fights. And there can be deaths. So we, as farmers, have to undertake procedures to avoid this. Losing a ram from a brain aneurysm is not something I want to have happen again.

If you’ve ever had the opportunity to see rams fighting you will know that they will back up and then charge at each other, hitting heads with great force. (Which is why we have expressions such as ram-raid and battering ram) You can often pick when they are preparing for breeding season – they repeatedly bash trees to tone-up their strength!!

So, when you take the rams from the ewes and the territorial hormones are still flowing strongly you can get fireworks. The way I diffuse this as much as possible is to cram the rams that will be in the bachelor group all together in a small yard, mixing any just-got-demoted-Romeos and the we-missed-out-wannabe-Romeos.

This achieves two things: a) they rub their scents all over each other, so there is less “us vs them”; and b) they don’t have room to back up and charge each other. They can still swing their heads into each others shoulders/ribs/butt but it won’t have the same force as a full-throttle attack.

A couple of hours later and they are usually pretty chilled. There may be a bit of bravado here and there but the “kill on sight” reflex has been dulled. I like to them put them out in their paddock with a nice, attention-diverting snack too.

“Where’s the food?” All calm and chummy. (See the callus on the centre ram’s head? That’s THE spot they hit.)

And as a side-note: everyone sort of expects that rams with horns are worse behaved…. well, not in my experience. Certainly, they can do a really nasty side-maneuver that polled breeds can’t BUT they aren’t Super Rams. In fact, the only ram I have ever lost in a fight was a horned ram – and he lost to a polled one. My theory is that a glancing blow to a horned ram causes more torsion or uneven force on the skull which can result in more internal damage.

Beersheba McDuff (dec.) in 2007 Photo taken by Rick Kroll

 

A Day Out: Bothwell SpinIn & Fibre Festival

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The small, historic village of Bothwell in the Central Highlands District of Tasmania holds a Fibre Festival every couple of years.

Two days of wool and spinning? Obviously I had to go this year!

So I contacted my friend, who owns the (awesome) shop, The Lucky Ewe in Oatlands, which is quite near Bothwell. She agreed that I should come to Tasmania to chat wool and other fibre-y subjects. (Luckily,  she loves the wool from our farm! And Gilbert the ram.  😉 )

There was a flurry of activity to get ready before travelling and then I was flying down to Launceston to begin my Tassie Adventure.

The first day of the Bothwell EVENT was quite warm and there were quite a few traders set up – from the Ashford stand to makers of handmade peg looms and alpaca breeders. With the sun making itself felt the ice-cream van did a brisk trade!

The display in the hall was lovely with spinning and knitting competitions as well as some traders and demonstrations.

Conversation was constant throughout the day as I sat there and spun Castledale. Lots of questions about the Drysdale fleece and yarn samples I had to show.

Day 1 seemed to be all talk, spinning and chasing the shade….. 🙂

Weaning lambs

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Just like with children, weaning can be a time full of drama or … not….

There are several reasons why we wean lambs here at Beersheba Farm.

Mostly it is to do with basic management. It’s much easier to cater to the needs of different age classes of stock when they are grouped together. For example, if there is a ewe that is putting “everything” into her lamb/s – to the detriment of her own body condition – then it is nigh impossible to improve her body condition while she is still lactating. She will just channel all the extra energy and protein into her milk. She’s a good mum! 🙂 By weaning the lamb off it allows the ewe to build her reserves again and take care of herself. Likewise, it is much more efficient to supplementary feed lambs, if needed, as a group rather than have all the “mums and aunties” scoffing the lot.

Another consideration is the pastures at the time the lambs are approximately 16 weeks old. By that age they have a fully functioning rumen (their first stomach which uses bacteria to break down the cellulose and starches in grass) and are not so reliant on their mothers for nutrition. Ideally, the grass is still green and “best” when the lambs get to this point of being fully on grass but also needing high quality feed to grow their bodies. Every farm and district has different environmental conditions and pasture species which influences what is best for them. We have predominately native pastures and a dry summer so it is ideal to wean lambs  while the pasture is good enough for them to grow and their mothers to physically recover.

(Now may be a pertinent time to point out that sheep, like many other herbivores, are biologically designed to get pregnant etc every single year. In fact, if they “skip” a year it can be difficult for them to fall pregnant at a later time.)

There is another reason also: most ewes cycle better when they haven’t been lactating for approximately 8-12 weeks. This can vary a lot with different breeds but, essentially, in some sheep lactation is a contraceptive!

When ewes are being joined there is always the risk that if they have lambs on them from the previous year that the ram will either get the ewe lambs pregnant or damage them by trying to get them pregnant. We prefer to avoid this scenario.

So that brings us to today: weaning Drysdale ewe lambs. (The ram lambs had been weaned at 12-16weeks before they started getting up to mischief!! Yes, they can start that early.)

This season we had much wetter summer than usual and the grass was better than usual. Due to various reasons we hadn’t got around to weaning the lambs and they have been left on their mums much longer than usual. (They are 5-6mths old)  And yes, quite a few were still drinking – just in case anyone thought that the ewes would just wean them by themselves …

Today they were separated from their mums and everyone had a worm drench. Then the mums went to a quiet paddock for some R&R and the lambs have gone into the paddock with the best grass along with some grown-up “aunties” for company. There was no yelling for Mum/Lamb and it was all very civilised. The ewes actually quite like it when the kids go off to school…. 😉

Being a small farm it means that we don’t have limitless paddocks and large mob sizes. So after joining is completed in April sometime then the ewe weaners will end up back with their mums and aunties until it is time for lambing in August.

We “took” a lovely video this morning of the ewes being taken to their paddock and nary a one was crying for a lamb…. trouble is, the camera operator stuffed up and only took a picture instead of a video…! 😳

Drysdale ewes, freshly weaned

 

Waiting for the Autumn rains

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Summer is supposed to be dry here. It was wet. Very wet.

The bonus of that was that the native grasses grew nicely and we had some more feed.

The downside is that remaining dry grass and clover has all the nutrients leached out so the quality of it drops markedly. The other major downside was the running battle with flystrike in the sheep. The wet weather over the Spring had damaged the fleeces of the crossbreds especially and that sort of fleece became prime targets for flies. We ended up with quite a few “poodle sheep” and we got more experience than we would have liked in using the handshears and the machine shears. That’s life….

Another downside is the very real risk that all that rain in summer is “too early” and then you get the dry spell – in autumn. When you don’t want it because you’re wanting the grass to grow before the winter slowdown. Tricky….!

So here we are, enjoying cooler nights now but just hoping we don’t get too many dry cool changes before long.

The merino ewes this morning

Joining time

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Joining time, also known as “tupping” or mating, is the period of weeks that the rams spend time with the ewes – and hopefully get them all pregnant.

Here at Beersheba Farm we prefer a rather short joining time which delivers a corresponding short lambing time.

The rams are out for 5 weeks and this basically allows the ewes 2 oestrus cycles to get pregnant. Lambing is usually completed in around 4 weeks.  This greatly assists paddock and ewe management and keeps one of our busiest times of the year from dragging out.

Ewes are in oestrus for approx 24-48hrs every 16-17 days. When that happens you can often notice that a ram will have separated from the main flock of ewes and will be with 2-3 ewes that are currently in season. Ewes in season will seek out the ram and we’ve had many cases over the years of “illicit liasons”, “not-so-covert breakouts” and “shameless flirting”. Sometimes a ewe will reject the ram she is with and seek out another that she feels is “more her style.”

One way or another they certainly keep us on our toes. 🙂

 

Merino ram and ewe away from the main flock.