The aim of our system
To use the objective science of EBVs to breed sound commercial ram lambs and females with muscle depths above 2.50 without losing the traits for easy lambing and maternal ability. As we do not have the largest flock this may take some time but it is a goal worth setting and it helps keep Andrew focused. However as we have a constant demand for Charollais lambs for freezers we can afford to cull hard to maintain quality and ewes can be placed into our small commercial flock.
We lamb our pedigree and commercial ewes in December, with a further lambing in March of returned ewes and commercial ewe lambs on which we try out those ram lambs that are being taken round to shearling rams. The best ram lambs will be offered for sale at society sales and direct from the farm.
Our ideal Charollais ewe must have been one of twins, and rear twins as a shearling, preferably be ARR/ARR, she should be sound on her feet and be wedge shaped with good gigots and a straight top-line - as we progress we would like them all to have a Scheme Index of 300!
We are MV accredited, members of the National Scrapie plan and Signet recorded.
All pedigree ewes are housed on the 1st November and fed haylage and feedblocks. They are fed a 16% concentrate ration depending on the number of lambs they are carrying and after lambing the ewes and lambs are turned into a polytunnel where the lambs have access to creep feed and the ewes have ad-lib haylage and 1kg per head per day of 18% protein concentrate.
Lambs are weaned at 12 weeks and turned out to grass as soon as the weather and grass allows and the ewes are forgotten about until a month before tupping!
Our commercial mule ewes are turned out to grass as soon as possible after lambing with lambs being slaughtered at 45kg liveweight to meet our customer demands for proper sized lamb chops!
