Outdoor lambing at the Sheep School Farm

Beattie aims to trial collar project in coming weeks

Another outdoor lambing period has successfully concluded at the Sheep School farm just outside Ballinagh.

David Beattie is walking through his field containing around 200 sheep as he speaks to the Celt. As the flock flees to the far corner of the field, one month old, healthy lambs gambol around their mothers. It’s a common sight in the countryside these days, and on David’s Sheep School YouTube channel, where he now has a following over 30,000 strong.

David took the decision last year to have all his sheep lamb outside in the field, and this lambing season has finished with few issues. His stock are purebred Lleyn sheep, a “hardy” breed with thick, tight-wooled coats which can withstand harsh weather conditions.

Lambing on David’s farm officially began towards the end of March, which was late but a “blessing in disguise” with the “slow” Spring meaning there “wasn’t much grass”.

“It was tough at times, there were a couple of very bad storms that came in,” he recalls. However he adds, “Even with the bad weather, I would still lamb outside.

“Over nine out of ten of them will lamb themselves and you never have to lay a hand on them.

“The old farmer will tell you that a sheep’s biggest enemy is the one standing beside her, from disease and worm and liver fluke and all the rest. They tend to spread problems around themselves.”

Shed

David finds the “bigger problem” in a lambing shed is that they are often “packed” which is a “nightmare” situation for diseases such as enzootic abortion, toxoplasmosis and salmonellosis, with the latter causing him to lose 28 sheep in the past - a “disaster”.

“It was a wakeup call on biosecurity. When sheep have a problem in a shed it just spreads around them like wildfire, whereas out in the field you have to admire sheep when they’re lambing. They’re a flock animal but when one goes to lamb she’ll go as far away from the rest of them as she can. All the fluids and any problems are miles away from the rest of them, but when they’re in the shed and one drops a lamb they all go over and sniff it.”

He has also noticed “very low” empty sheep when scanning this year which he puts down to outdoor lambing.

“They hadn’t that spread of disease from the shed.”

Meanwhile, Lleyn sheep are “very good mothers” therefore lambing difficulty is “quite low.”

David’s sheep suits this outdoor lambing system, and he acknowledges isn’t suitable for all breeds.

“It’s easy for me to say outdoor lambing is great, but you really need sheep that’s capable of doing it.”

However, there is a downside to having a purebred flock, in that recording their ancestry is extremely important and each lamb must be tagged and chipped at around four days old. Aside from the difficulty of catching lambs out in the field, piercing their ears with tags also exposes them to bacteria. However David has ditched his pen and paper and invested in a handheld reader to make the task easier.

“You can scan the chips and link the sheep to the lambs, it’s very handy. Once you have that done it’s saved on the computer.”

It’s not the only technological advancement that has come about on the farm since it began in 2014. In a few weeks’ time, David will trial an alert collar prototype invented by himself and his brother Rob; the tech man of the initiative. Using AI and GPS technology, their SheepGaurdian collar will recognise normal flock movement patterns and unnatural patterns, allow farmers to track sheep in real time, and will determine if there is a predator such as a dog among the flock. Depending on the breed of sheep and the size of the field, one collar per 150-200 sheep would be sufficient. He is also thinking of linking the alert to some sort of banger that would make a loud sound and scare the predator.

The collar will alert the farmer’s phone, when they can decide the next course of action. Oftentimes the presence of somebody arriving and maybe clapping their hands is enough to scare the predator, however he also adds that farmers are “well within their rights to shoot a dog” if it was worrying, or about to worry their livestock, and there was no other means of preventing it.

“Nobody wants to do that but sometimes it is the only option,” he says.

“You can’t be around them [sheep] all the time every day and you don’t know what’s happening. Then you arrive to check a batch of sheep and the dog is after making mess of the whole lot, and the dogs are long gone and you have no idea when they will come back or what to do about it.

“The farmer is fully out that expense and it can be significant,” he says, while the dog can come back “anytime”.

He came up with the collar idea around 12 years ago based on experiences he has had on his own farm. Over the years, he has lost 36 sheep and lambs to dog attacks, valued today at around €10,000. Meanwhile, the Irish Farmers Association estimates that the average dog attack results in 11 sheep injured or killed per farm, while the cost of the attacks range from €1,100 and €1,800.

The collar made its debut at the Ploughing Championships last year when they received a lot of interest from farmers, and realised “the scale of the problem”.

“There’s a huge amount of interest in it.”

They are hoping to take orders at this year’s Ploughing Championships, and plan to have the collar ready for sale in January next year.

“It’s a huge problem and the market is there for it, it will hopefully solve problems.”

Meanwhile, David encourages anyone who is walking their dog near sheep to keep them on a lead, even if the dog has never chased sheep before.

“It always seems to be a problem at lambing time, and in my opinion even with my own dogs, it’s the lamb scooting along the ground that sets that hunting instinct off in a dog and when they go into that mode it is very hard to call them back.

“Anybody that can visually see sheep, no matter how far away they are, a dog needs to be on a lead.”