BY THE time Dunblane farmer Rab Paterson had gathered up 40 dead lambs in the aftermath of Monday's bitter winds, he had stopped counting.

Late lambing outdoors in Scotland is a management choice made in the expectation that youngsters will arrive into reasonably mild weather to mothers lactating on a healthy stomach-full of new grass, but this year’s record-breaking dry and cold April hadn’t set things up that way, and as the new month began, abrupt sleety downpours dropped an inch of rain into a wind-chill recorded as low as minus 8°C at Rab’s Auchenlay Farm, near Dunblane.

With 500 sheep to lamb, starting in the last week of April, Rab is usually ready for anything, but this season brought conditions that inflicted the worse overnight damage he'd ever seen.

"We've had snow at this time before, and it didn't take the same toll – the glen where we lamb is usually good for shelter, but we had sleet, then wind changed direction at night and just tore right into them. The weather is a ****," he observed, bluntly.

SRUC sheep and grassland specialist, Poppy Frater, confirmed that late lambings around the country will have been hit, not least because ewes may have struggled to lactate well with so little grass coming forward.

"Lambs come out with some brown fat on them, but in these kind of conditions that can be used up very quickly to keep warm, then hypothermia sets in," she said. "The fact is, if you are really pushing the farm system, which you have to do to make a profit, you'll be relying on grass and an optimal stocking density in that field.

"You can't stock in anticipation of a bad year – planning always has to be for an average year – so there is always the chance of getting caught out." Ms Frater advised farmers still lambing that, if money must be spent on feed for ewes, doing so now will have the most positive effect on lamb growth: "If you have less than 4cm grass at optimal stocking, you should be feeding the ewes. Lambs are much more efficient at putting on weight when they are smaller – and ewe milk is the best food they will ever get." Arable farmers are also nervously eyeing the impacts of April's lunar conditions, with crops sown into cold dust feeling no natural encouragement to emerge. Crops specialist Professor Fiona Burnett noted the swing to extremes, as sowing delayed by the excessively wet winter has been followed by emergence delayed by an excessively dry spring.

"The worry is that harvest must still be at the same time, so crops will need to charge through their growth stages to get to the same end point. With May, June and July to go, these will be 90-day crops. "Is this the 'new normal'? Its our third dry spring in a row, so its not enough to say its a trend," added Prof Burnett. "But it certainly seems that once we get into a period of weather, we tend to get stuck with it."