Tegasc advice: Sheep

Early lamb Easter is early again this year (Sunday, April 4), so lambs destined for this market need to be available for slaughter in the last week of March. Maintaining lamb thrive is essential if these lambs are to achieve the target liveweight of 38-40kg. Adequate high quality nutrition and appropriate parasite control strategies must be in place to achieve high levels of performance. Get lambs started on a palatable lamb crunch from about two weeks of age and, once they start consuming 250g per day, start switching to a cheaper concentrate. Look for value; concentrates with a high level of cereals (barley, oats, wheat and maize) and pulp are suitable. A crude protein level of 14% will be adequate, as the lambs will be getting high levels of protein from the ewe's milk. On the parasite front the main two production limiting parasites are coccidiosis and nematodirus (later on). Coccidiosis can hit the flock (indoors and outdoors) once lambs are about three to four weeks of age. It presents itself as a dark/bloody scour and the lambs will be ill and, if not treated, may die. Treatment/prevention can be carried out by using an oral drench such as Vecoxan or by medicating the feed with Deccox (under veterinary advice/prescription required). Lameness Controlling lameness indoors is one of the major challenges. Avoid housing lame sheep at all costs. To be in a position to house your sheep, an intensive treatment programme for lameness should be embarked on about a month before you intend to house. Repeated footbathing and paring plus antibiotic treatment of infected animals can quickly reduce lameness within the flock to very low levels. The dilution rate for footbath solutions is as follows: Footbath ingredient; Dilution rate Zinc sulphate; 10% (1kg per 10 litres of water) Copper sulphate; 10% (1kg per 10 litres of water) Formalin; 3% (3 litres per 100 litres of water) Experience from Technology Evaluation and Transfer (TET) farms in the past has shown that where treatment/preventive treatments are not implemented during the housing period the level of lameness in the flock increases multifold. The use of hydrated lime/cubicle lime prior to bedding twice weekly has been shown to reduce the spread of lameness in housed sheep. Footbathing the sheep during the housed period should also be employed to reduce lameness. Fluke Deaths resulting from liver fluke appear to be high for the second year in a row. An increasing number of flocks appear to be losing sheep despite having drenched with triclabendazole-based drenches. A number of flocks that had problems with triclabendazole-based drenches last year have been caught out a second year running having used a different brand name, which, however, was also triclabendazole based. When buying flukicides, check the active ingredient and also check what type of fluke the product is effective against. A relatively mild December will mean that sheep grazing outdoors will have been picking up fluke. Therefore, products that are effective against immature fluke (triclabendazole, Rafoxanide, Nitroxynil or Closantel) should be used. Any sudden or unexpected sheep deaths should be sent to the regional veterinary laboratory for analysis, and where lambs or cull ewes are being sent for slaughter, try to get feedback as to what condition the livers were in. Nutrition Poor weather and delayed harvesting of silage/hay crops has resulted in poor quality winter fodder being available on many farms. First cuts taken in May/June appear to be of good quality but there appears to be a huge range in the quality of round bale silage, with reports of some silages being as low as 52% DMD, which is little better than straw. Feeding forages with low digestibility presents the ewe with a number of challenges. The energy level of stemmy forage is low, so to make up for this the ewe should have to eat more. But because the digestibility of the material is low it takes a lot longer for the ewe to break the material down so the intake is reduced. This results in the ewe not being able to eat more forage to make up for the lower energy in the forage in the first place. This means additional concentrates have to be fed to make up the shortfall. Where forage digestibility is low, 65% DMD supplementary concentrate feeding should start eight weeks pre lambing. For every 5% drop in DMD, concentrate feeding should start two weeks earlier. If you are unsure as to what the digestibility of your winter forage is, get some samples analysed.