Farms start year on high
It is good to be able to start this year’s column with a few positive thoughts.
Calving has just got going and so far we have eight heifer calves and one bull calf. They are by the Shorthorn bull and we are looking for female calves.
The cows are looking well on the high quality haylage made last summer. When the analysis came back, some of it was as high as 80 per cent dry matter. In comparison, the hay we bought in and analysed from Stirling was 82 per cent. Therefore there is almost three times the feeding in each haylage bale that there would be in a wet bale of silage.
I should not tempt fate, but it looks like this winter will be less stressful than the last one. We have plenty of forage, there has been little snow and most of the ewes are in good condition.
We just finished pregnancy scanning the ewes in our Kirkton flock, and I am pleased with the results. The scanning percentage is 132 per cent, with seven per cent barren. This barren percentage would be high for a commercial flock, but because of single sire mating groups and the high intervention our research requires, it is acceptable.
We have three lines of animals in our research flock. The control line of Scottish Blackface ewes with average genetic index value, scanned at 126 per cent; the selection line of Scottish Blackface ewes with higher genetic index, scanned at 138 per cent; and the Lleyn ewes scanned at 132 per cent.
Farmers have been a bit sceptical about the use of EBV index values, but there is no doubt they work. For example, if you used the above high index rams on a 1,000 ewe flock, this would potentially equate to 120 extra lambs. Next week, we are scanning our high hill flock at Auchtertyre, so it will be interesting to see how they do.
The male lambs from last year were finished in the sheds at Kirkton and Auchtertyre for slaughter. One group has been used at Kirkton to trial kit that keeps track of their feeding habits and individual feed intake. It is composed of feeding bins that measure how much and how often the lamb eats, and is working with the EID tag of the animal to record this information.
We had a successful workshop on this on February 13, when 37 delegates from research, advisory, industry and farming came to Kirkton to discuss ways to measure feed efficiency in sheep.
Delegates spent the morning on the farm with demonstration of the kit. The afternoon was spent indoors where we had interesting discussions and brainstorming as to how such kit can help the Scottish sheep industry. It was interesting to hear ideas from different stakeholders. The feedback suggested that use within national breeding programmes was one of the best ways to make use of the data collected. The workshop allowed us to develop a network of people interested in sheep feed efficiency, to take some of these ideas forward.
Finally, visitors to the farm recently were final year agricultural students from Harper Adams University, in Shropshire. They spent the morning learning about precision livestock farming and sheep systems and genetics research, as well as information about the environment and biodiversity in the hills. It is always nice to discuss the work that we do at Kirkton with the potential next generation of livestock farmers.