Reports from the North Island of New Zealand on a radically different approach to lamb rearing

LAMBING in New Zealand is a ver y different proposition to what I am familiar with.

The scale can be hard to comprehend, as is the system, which in most instances is completely outdoors, with minimal supplementary feeding other than grass/ herbage.

As with any process or system, you can only learn so much about it through research, and it’s not until you see things up close and experience them first hand that you get a real understanding of how its done.

Some commentary would have us believe that sheep farming in New Zealand is a homogenous industry, with all farms achieving a standard level of output from a single production system.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In a country with such variation in climate and topography, it’s inevitable that systems will differ.

Just this week there was a large fall of snow on the South Island, but many farmers have not started lambing. Yet on the North Island where I am based on this trip, lambing is quite advanced.

The same variations occur in litter size, ewe condition in late pregnancy and grass supply at lambing.

These differences are a function of both management and of climate.

Just as in Ireland, there are farmers who embrace triplets and those who would rather not see them.

One such farm where triplets are embraced is a commercial farming enterprise with approximately 5,000 tripletbearing ewes to manage across a number of properties — 1,800 of these on a single farm.

These triplets are all lambing outdoors without concentrate supplementation in late pregnancy. In most cases the ewes are expected to rear (or attempt to rear) all three lambs.

This farm has a low-cost triplet-rearing shed where lambs which are really struggling outdoors are taken inside and artificially reared.

With about 80pc of the ewes lambed, there were approximately 100 lambs in the shed.

This triplet farm was one of the first farms I visited when I arrived in New Zealand.

Three of us did a farm walk to measure pasture mass; to give some idea of the scale of the operation: I walked 11km just to cover one third of the lambing fields.

It was also one of the wettest grass farms I have ever set foot on, and there was genuine concern among the farm staff about the 1,800 ewes that were about to lamb.

Mortality

When we returned three weeks later, conditions had improved substantially, with hundreds of ewes rearing three lambs in the paddocks.

There were lots of ewes with twins and singles also, and some wet-dry ewes, ewes which lost all lambs.

The lamb mortality percentages will be calculated at docking, with the hope that ewes will have a docking percentage of 230pc on this farm (2.3 lambs per ewe).

Ewes are set-stocked for lambing, and one of the big challenges is to have sufficient