After six months of prolonged and heavy rain on our heavy clay soil, the sheep not surprisingly clearly lost some condition by the time lambing started at the end of March. 2 1/2 weeks after lambing started and as predicted by Ian Beckett who does our scanning, 95% of the sheep had lambed, and without any problems. We had finished in 3 weeks. In general, we’ve been very pleased with the size and the ease of lambing this year. One of the great advantages of the Lleyn is if one uses carefully selected rams lambing is rarely a problem. Like many people the recent prolonged period of dry in the first 3 weeks of April and the warm weather that we’ve had so far this spring has been a massive relief and the lambs are thriving on it. We could now do with a week or two of April Showers to really get the grass moving. The gimmers after a difficult autumn and early winter have put on some considerable growth and condition over the last six weeks and are now looking really well. In a way this is not dissimilar to the previous year of drought except last year and early this year was all about too much rain. Both had similar effects on the sheep.
This summer we will have the over 200 gimmers for sale, and a nice selection of high index shearling rams. I hope people will come and have a look early in the season, before they get picked over. I will divide the gimmers into groups by EBV for those who are interested in buying the best performance recorded animals. We all look to buy our rams by EBV and I think it is time that we also selected the females by EBV. I have the data and it is there well worth considering. Do give me a call to discuss.