Graeme Bethune and his sheep face a big challenge

ADVENTURES IN FARMING

FARMING CAN be a desperately tough business. This spring I have had a dozen lambs die, and a portion of the rest of the lambs rapidly lose weight and condition. Now while the details are perhaps upsetting, they are reality. Sheep farming involves illness and death, even for flocks like mine which aim for maximum sheep health. I am going to tell you about a bad time on my farm, because I believe that if you really want to understand where wool for your yarns comes from, you have to be shown the bad with the good.

Towards the end of May, I noticed lambs losing condition - they went from fat and glossy to a bit dull and poopy-bummed. The first thought for any shepherd is that this could be worms, so I had a flock poo sample analysed, but it found nothing.

I did the same again a week later, with the same result. The second test is because when you do a flock sample you are taking little bits of fresh piles of poo out of a flock of 120 ewes and 170 lambs, so you can miss something. Between the first sample and the second I started to find dead lambs.

In any year you will find the odd dead lamb, cause unknown. It’s frustrating, but sometimes they just die and you are left scratching your head. But in this case, the lab tests suggested more needed to be done to investigate, so I took the third dead lamb to be autopsied. The lab came back with a diagnosis of Coccidiosis. This is a parasite that lives inside the cells of the intestines, stealing the nutrition of the lamb, and leading to them not getting enough out of their food. So the lamb continues to suck milk and is starting to graze grass, but slowly starts to go downhill. Coccidiosis typically shows at 4-6 weeks of age - that was the age of my lambs. Lamb poop is green and loose - mine again. Lambs lose condition and some die - again, this was exactly what was happening here.

I was bitterly disappointed and angry about the diagnosis. I took it as being my fault; I felt I had failed my sheep.

Now I want to focus for a moment on this emotional response. This is a truth at the heart of animal farming in Britain: that we sheep/cow/goat/pig keepers (mostly) care greatly for our beasts, and the emotional cost of this sometimes can be awfully hard. When you look at your yarn, bear in mind the hard work and emotional investment that good wool producers make in the sheep of its origin.

Treatment thankfully is available: an oral medicine which kills the parasite.

The autopsy was on Monday, the diagnosis was on Thursday, and I treated the lambs on Saturday. It worked, thank the maker.

But from the first death to the last, I lost 12 lambs. In the great scheme of things, not terrible, but it upset me a great deal, and every death was a blow that increased my anguish about what was happening. I had been so pleased with my lambs this year, so self-satisfied with how I had managed the difficulties of lambing, so this struck like a repeated kick in the fork.

It has been a couple of weeks now and the lambs have bounced back beautifully to their happy, shiny, lovely normal selves. But the repercussions continue. Financially it has been a huge hit, at a time when money was already tight - between vet bills, lab bills, medicines and the stock loss, at least £1200. The emotional cost to me has been huge; I cannot properly relate the anguish and helplessness of finding formerly healthy lambs dead.

Now it’s over, I look to the future. I will have to change which fields I turn new lambs out into for a couple of years, to let the eggs of the parasite die away. I will spray my lambing sheds with specialist disinfectants, and for the next couple of years I will treat lambs with the special drench to prevent another outbreak. This will make things a little complicated and raise costs, but it is what needs to be done to maximise my sheepies’ health.

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