Field Margins: Slow progress is still progress for Neil McGowan

From a slow start to spring, grass took a giant leap when the heat (briefly) arrived and silage grass came ready very quickly. Despite some grand plans, nothing has happened yet, and daily thunder showers have gateways in mud where there is only bike traffic.

Kale and grass seeds tell the same story, still anxiously packed in their bags in the shed. I’m sure that progress will be fast when the weather gives us a break, but goodness me – the clock is ticking towards the annual deadline which is the Royal Highland Show.

Calving has gone reasonably well, with only one latecomer calving after bulls have gone out. Everyone is happy that she’s missed her chance and won’t be getting served this year. Calving assists must be a record low, although I don’t have the records on hand to check.

From 194 calvings there were nine slight assists (one was coming backwards and seven were twins), and the calving jack was used five times (twice with two-year-old heifers). That makes a total of 7% assists which I think is pretty good, and as a result of four things.

Firstly, selection on calving ease (that’s both picking bulls and heifers, and culling cows). Secondly, cows came out of the winter in good calving order, neither too fat nor lean. Thirdly and perhaps most importantly the patience of Jim Smith, who has spent many an hour in the evening watching a cow on the camera quietly making her own progress. And lastly, there’s always a bit of luck needed.

Grandfather’s advice

Calving has not been without issue – we’ve lost a couple of cows which is always greatly demoralising to go along with the economic loss. One was chalked off to ‘undiagnosed – something that went wrong at calving’, and the second was ‘should have been culled last year’.

I have a friend who reminds me now and then of his grandfather’s advice – ‘you should cull a cow the year before you need to’. I tried to keep that in mind when sorting cows for bulls last week, when we put together a group of cows that will stay away from the bull.

They made an eclectic group as they moseyed off to an outlying field – there is quite a bit of experience there, some a bit slow-moving, there’s the one that didn’t let us near her calf for a few days, and then there’s the one young cow that seems to have managed to grasp all the poorest traits that were available to her in her family tree. Getting these cows out of the system and making way for some heifers does, at least, feel like progress.

Lambing has finished up and seems to have been pretty good. Lambs are all tagged at birth and losses recorded, but we’ve not had the chance to make a stab at numbers yet.

A greater proportion of triplets in the scan prompted us to lamb them on a fenced off section of a high clover-content silage field, with the idea to try to leave more suckling three.

Muddled up triplets

It quickly became the field I dreaded going to as most of them had lambed within a week – but despite looking like chaos at times, ewes kept their lambs together remarkably well.

Most of the lambing assists this year were with muddled-up sets of triplets. There have been a few take mastitis and all three lambs end up in the pet pen. I get the feeling that if we had we just lifted the third lamb from the off, then we’d have a healthier looking pet pen and maybe not that many more in it – better lambs outside and less brock ewes.

Twins and singles have been a breeze. Lambs are doing well and ewes starting to open up and should make good clipping when the time comes.

I got an exciting trip away when lambing finished as part of sheep research project that we have been involved in.

After sending them many boxes of lamb poo over the last year, a couple of scientists from Moredun took me along on a trip to the Netherlands.

With the tulips looking fine in the garden at home, I was hoping to maybe spot some of the bulb fields from the train. We passed a lot of second-cut silage in full swing, though, and the wildflowers were blooming, so I think the tulips would be well over. As we headed south over flat river-delta land, I found out that the bulbs are mostly in the sand near the shore.

Parasite resistance

We have been selecting sheep for parasite resistance for 20 years now. The amount of testing we have done has gained momentum over that time and we are well into the thousands of worm egg counts for recorded, individual lambs.

We have taken similar numbers of firstly saliva samples, and then as we learned more about it, blood samples to measure a thing called IgA – which is a protein that the sheep produces when it mounts an immune response to something – and in this case, the ‘real baddie’ strongyle worm with the very long name.

Progress has been frustratingly slow, and is very hard to judge. You need a FEC test before you can get a vet’s line to buy worm drench in Holland, followed by another FEC reduction test to check on drench resistance. We visited two sheep flocks on our trip.

Both were managing their sheep with the primary focus on avoiding worm challenge. The first farmer combined this with environmental grazing payments, grazing for two weeks blocks and not returning for three months. The second farm still had ewes and lambs shut inside ready to wean, and grass going to head outside!

The first farm had multiple drench resistance and I can only imagine the second did too.

If what we saw in the Netherlands is what sheep production looks like with drench resistance, there has got to be a better way to deal with it.

My key takeaway messages were: don’t get into that situation; and ‘sheep have worms, so zero worms is not the goal, managing and controlling them is’.

We have a number of tools for controlling and managing worms. Drenching is a pretty important one, but we can’t rely on it too heavily or we’ll end up like these Dutch farmers.

Grazing strategies

Grazing strategies help – but I can’t help thinking there are so many competing goals in a grazing plan. Are we trying to balance grazing for the benefit of the ryegrass plant, or the clover plant, or the curlew and lapwing, or the sheep, or the parasite, or just somewhere for the sheep to stand and eat while we get this silage field cut?

Having sheep that are more parasite resistant is another part of the control strategy.

We are probably never going to measure a reduction in drench usage due to a FEC ebv, because there are so many other factors at play, but if it plays a part in relaxing some of the other strategies it has got to be important.

The work we have done with the Performance Recorded Lleyn Breeders group developing a Parasite Plus breeding index is starting to show signs of promise, but it’s slow progress.

Slow progress is still progress.