The science of the lambs
KEEPING RECORDS: Maureen and David Smith and their son Cameron check a ram's details.
By JON MORGAN 11:32, Sep 01 2009
It's coming up to Holly Farm's busy time. That's not surprising. The lambing season is getting underway throughout the country and over the next few weeks, the number of warm bodies on farms will more than double. But Holly Farm in the hills behind Marton is no ordinary farm. It is a Romney stud and the farmers, David and Maureen Smith and their son Cameron, go to great pains to ensure they record every foible of their newborn lambs and their mothers.
It is a marked contrast to other commercial sheep farms where farmers leave ewes to give birth undisturbed. The hill country is not a place for weaklings who need to be mollycoddled and long gone are the days when farmers acted as midwives to their flocks.
But for the Smiths, record-keeping is paramount and the most important information is gleaned shortly after birth. It is the best way to discover which ewes and rams are performing well and which of their offspring are worth keeping to breed from. The best males are sold to hill-country farmers as producers of fertile, self-sufficient, fast-growing sheep.
In a family tradition going back more than 120 years - Mr Smith has a cup awarded to his great-uncle, George Wheeler, in 1887 for a prize ram at the Manawatu and West Coast Agricultural and Pastoral Association show - they keep meticulous records and are able to trace their flock's bloodlines back to the English Romneys of Mr Wheeler's Leedstown Stud.
They are expecting a big lamb drop in a month's time. Scans show a 174 per cent pregnancy rate, with more than 100 ewes expecting triplets. The Smiths have concentrated on breeding strong survival traits into their sheep and confidently expect to record 150 per cent at docking, three weeks after lambing.
This loss of about 13.5 per cent is well below the 20 per cent or more considered acceptable by hill country farmers and includes ewes that die with their lambs unborn. For the past three years, the loss of lambs alone has been 8.5 per cent, a result Mr Smith is pleased with. "We're higher and colder than most," he says. "The hills go to 370 metres and we're pretty exposed to the south and east."
They are hoping for kind weather for lambing but know to expect the worst. Pasture levels are low after a harsh winter and they are hoping some warmth will come to stimulate grass growth.
From mid-September, each day they will each take a motorbike and ride into the hills to where the ewes have settled for lambing. Multiple-lambers are visited twice a day. The aim is to be there within a few hours of birth to catch the lambs before they get too frisky to run away.
Each lamb is slung up on a portable scale and weighed and tagged, its sex identified and any faults noted. Mr and Mrs Smith each carry a small hand-held tape- recorder and Cameron makes his notes on a palm pilot. Faults are mainly to do with the lamb's body and leg structure, but any black spots in the wool are also noted.
The mother's ear tag number is taken and a special note is made of her demeanour at seeing her lamb seized. It is important that she remain close by - an attentive mother is essential to lamb survival. The ewes that stay within one metre when their lambs are being checked are given a star by their numbers.
One that runs away is marked for culling. Such is the rigour of the Smiths' breeding process that not only is she sent for slaughter but so are her lambs and any of her previous daughters still in the flock. Such ruthless efficiency is to stamp out any trace of poor mothering, an inheritable trait, and proof of its effectiveness is that such ewes are now seldom seen.
Any lambs that die within three days of birth are stored in a freezer. At the end of lambing, Hunterville vet Martin Walshe will dissect 60 to 70 to discover what killed them. Common causes are dystocia (slow or difficult labour) and cold starvation. This information will also go into the stud's records and be used for culling.
More weighing and structural checks are made at weaning late in December. In January culling decisions are made.
The Smiths use the Studfax programme to keep an eye on trends in the bloodlines and send their data to the industry-wide service Sheep Improvement, where it is used to calculate the breeding values that are a guide to ram performance for potential buyers. They look for results that show a balance of traits - any "one-trick ponies" strong in one trait to the exclusion of others are not wanted.
For the Smiths, the lambing checks can be arduous but not onerous. They look forward to seeing the latest results of their years of effort. "It's not an easy way to make a living," Mr Smith says. "There's a lot of mucking around, making sure you have good paddocks and good fencing and then there's all the record-keeping. It's more intensive than normal farming."
He took over the family farm in 1969 at the age of 21 when his father died suddenly. It was just 60 hectares; the 300-ewe Romney stud kept it afloat. Over the years, as six further blocks have been added to take the farm to 350ha, he and Maureen have concentrated on building up the stud. Their work was rewarded in 1991 with the Royal Agricultural Society's prestigious AC Cameron Award for leadership and excellence in farming. They are now one of the few Romney studs in the Wanganui- Rangitikei area and supply 400 rams a year to 50 clients, mostly hill country farmers between Marton and the mountains.
They are breeding a fertile ewe with strong maternal traits that produce hardy and meaty lambs. Every breeder would claim the same, but the Smiths' point of difference is that they aim for a sheep that is also easy to care for. They feel they are achieving this with sheep that need no drenching as adults, that are clear of dags and have bare breeches.
For the past eight years, Mr Smith has been a farmer mentor for AgResearch's parasitology group, which allows him to bring a practical dimension to the science. He decided to cut down on his chemical drench use when he learnt of the high drench resistance found in internal parasites. He now drenches his lambs only four or five times in their first year. They are then left to fend for themselves. Sheep that show parasite stress are drenched, then culled, along with their progeny.
The sheep are marked on their susceptibility to dags, a heritable trait, and culled accordingly. In recent years a further trait, that of a tendency to have no wool around the backside, has also become a selection point and he has worked closely with AgResearch scientist David Scobie on this.
Running with the Romneys are 160 south Suffolk ewes, the start of a terminal sire flock.
Asked what trait might be next on Holly Farm's list, Mr Smith admits to keeping a close eye on the wool industry. However, what he sees does not fill him with optimism. "It's a shambles. I was offered $1.75 a kilogram for my wool last week and I'm blowed if I will accept that. It's going into store till things get better."
He describes his flock of easy-care ewes and their hardy lambs as contributing to a "clean and green" New Zealand. This work, the retirement of 17ha of bush under QEII Trust covenants and the planting of steep gullies in pines for erosion control was recognised in the recent regional farm environment awards. They also built, of scented macrocarpa, a homestay cottage with views of rolling hills. They delight in visitors' favourable comments. "A lot of people have never heard silence before. If you're in a city there's always distractions," Mr Smith says.
The farm's heights give a panoramic view of Wanganui, Palmerston North, Mt Taranaki, Mt Ruapehu, Kapiti Coast and even the South Island on a clear day. "For foreigners especially, tramping to the top of the hill or through the bush walks is something of a novelty. If you come from the middle of Frankfurt, this is a spectacular place to come to for a cup of tea."
