Lambs saved from wintry deaths

The lambing season has brought a happy chaos to a shed in rural Marlborough, where farmers have been trialling a project saving young lambs from a wintry death.

Triplet and quad-bearing ewes are giving birth indoors, on cushy beds of straw at The Pyramid in Avon Valley, about 40 kilometres southwest of Blenheim.

Pigeons watch from the rafters as newborn lambs receive their first feed of colostrum, the antibody-laden milk from mothers straight after birth.

Farmer Richard Dawkins said lambs were extremely vulnerable in their first 24 hours, so keeping them inside with their mothers really boosted survival rates.

‘‘In the paddock there are a few challenges; starvation is a big one and that is mainly due to mismothering, the lambs get mixed up and the ewes get confused as to who belongs to who.

‘‘A lot of lambs don’t get enough milk and perish,’’ Dawkins said.

‘‘Difficult births is another challenge, and exposure to the weather is another problem ... It only takes one polar blast to come through and it will just wipe out everything born that night.’’

Beef + Lamb NZ funded the three-year indoor lambing project, with advice from rural vet Pete Anderson.

‘‘It is great when you pack up for the night and you hear the rain coming down and you know they are all happy down there,’’ Dawkins said.

Ewe deaths were now down from 10 per cent to 3 per cent, and lamb deaths were down from 33 per cent to 21 per cent.

Most of the remaining deaths were in the womb, Dawkins said.

‘‘So once the lambs are born, the rate of success is really high.

‘‘We’ve had only one lamb die once it left the shed.’’

Dawkins calculated the trial saved about 163 newborn lambs last year.

‘‘But also, farm-wide survival has dramatically increased.

‘‘We spend that extra time checking single and twin mobs, and now the triplet-bearing mobs are inside, the twin-bearing mobs are in the good paddocks, so they are doing a lot better.’’

Indoor lambing was catching on, Dawkins said.

Farmers used to worry about their scanning percentage – the number of ewes having multiple lambs.

‘‘But the success of your lambing season depends on the number of lambs alive at weaning.

‘‘We are achieving more lambs alive at weaning, despite the lower scanning percentage.’’

The animal welfare exercise proved to make financial sense too, Dawkins said.

‘‘The indoor project in isolation, it does actually make you money ... we generated $24,000 of extra income, just from those extra lambs.

‘‘While it does boast a profit, the true value is in the flow-on effects farm-wide.’’