SHEEP TALES

PART 4: N EW L IFE Ellie Stokeld shares the story behind her very special flock of Border Leicesters

AS I write this, it’s July and we have already started preparing for next year’s lambing. It takes a lot of time and effort to make sure everything is right. We breed our sheep to have all the right traits for the Border Leicester breed and, above all, to have the best fleeces we can produce. I buy my tups (rams) and ensure they have the best skins (fleeces) available. Through very careful breeding we produce ewes with wonderful skins to put to our rams. We match ewes and rams together so their offspring are as perfect as possible at the end of the day, we need to produce lambs with perfect conformation and which will produce perfect fleeces.

The ewes and the rams need to have MOTs at this time, to make sure that they are healthy enough to mate. The rams’ testicles are checked and everyone is wormed and given a mineral drench.

Both ewes and rams are given mineral blocks which aid their fertility.

The ewes’ gestation period is five months and one week; we don’t lamb early, as I like to put them out onto grass as soon as there is any about. We aim to start lambing on March 1st, so counting back, that takes us to mid September. Quite often, the ewes do not take the ram immediately but go over to their next cycle (every 17 days), so that usually works quite well for us.

We would like the ewes to all lamb together, but that doesn’t often happen. We are thinking of putting a ‘teaser’ out with the ewes to help us achieve this. This is a vasectomised ram who goes out with the ewes a couple of weeks before the ram to “get them in the mood.”

Once the time comes, the ewes are put into separate fields with their chosen rams. The rams are raddled a colour is put under his chest which transfers onto the ewe once he has been friendly. We change the colour every 17 days so that we can see which ewes he has mated with.

In December, our scanning man comes to confirm pregnancy and how many lambs each ewe is going to have. This enables us to feed them properly a ewe carrying triplets will need more protein than a ewe carrying a single lamb. We try to leave the ewes out as long as we can, as it is better for them to be able to walk about outside. They are brought into the barn in January and put into pens with other ewes having the same number of lambs, so they can all get the correct amount of food.

Six weeks before they are due to lamb, we vaccinate them with Heptavac P to prevent nasties such as pasteurella and pulpy kidney. Then we wait for our first lambs and for the magic to begin!