Life on the Farm: January to March

Hello from the farm! We thought we’d share a little slice of life on the farm from our corner of the countryside. It’s been a busy start to the year (as always), full of feeding silage to our sheep, scanning, lambing prep, and oats!

January: Feeding the Flock

January is very much a feeding month here. With everything quiet in the fields, our attention turns to making sure the sheep are getting the nutrition they need to stay in good condition ahead of lambing.

Our sheep run entirely on pasture in the summer—grass, clover, and a few herbal mixes—and in winter, it’s silage that we have cut from those same fields. A lot of farms will add cereals or bought-in feed at this time of year, but we’ve worked hard to build a system where our flock can thrive on forage and silage alone. It keeps things simple, sustainable, and well within our control. The silage quality makes all the difference, so we put a lot of effort into getting that right each summer.

February: Scanning and Lambing Prep

February brings the scanning – and this year, we were really pleased with the results. We scanned at 175%, which for us is spot on. It gives us plenty of twins, a good handful of singles, and only 50 or so triplets, which is just the right balance for our setup.

Because we mainly lamb outdoors, a higher scanning figure isn’t always better. Once you’re over 180%, you tend to just swap twins for more triplets, which are much harder to manage in our system. Indoors, you can shift lambs around and match triplets up with single mums—but outside, it’s easier to let nature take the lead. We don’t want to be running round the fields after new born lambs (they’re faster than you think)!

We’ve got the lambing groups sorted now. The twins will be split into 14 fields, with just 45 ewes per group, to give them plenty of space to find their own quiet spot to lamb. The singles will go into three groups of 90. As they lamb, we’ll drift them into large, sheltered areas where they can settle in peacefully with their new arrivals.

March into April: Lambing Begins & Oats are Looking Good

March is when everything kicks off—lambing time! We’re lambing 1,000 ewes this year: 900 Easycares, 50 Easysuffolks (Suffolk crosses), and 50 Dorpers. The Dorpers are a real mix and give us some beautiful lambs.

We’ve got some half-Dorper/half-Easycare ewes (pure black), some three-quarter Dorpers with patchy black and white markings, and a bunch of seven-eighth Dorper ewe hoggs that look almost just like the classic Dorper—white body, black head. The lambs from those hoggs will be nearly pure Dorper. Most of the lambs this year will be black and white in some form, depending on the genetics of the ewe. It’s always exciting to see the variety once lambing kicks off properly.

And while the sheep are taking centre stage, our winter oats have been quietly getting on with it. We sowed them in early October and they have had a pretty easy time of it—mild and fairly dry weather has helped them along nicely. Our agronomist was out yesterday and gave them the thumbs up. No dramas so far.

These oats are destined—fingers crossed—for the gluten-free market. Oats are naturally gluten free, but the risk with most farms is contamination from wheat or barley grown nearby. We don’t grow any other cereals here, so we keep that risk incredibly low. That’s a big plus when it comes to selling into that specialist market.

So that’s life on the farm from January through to March. It’s all about feeding, prepping, and welcoming the next generation of lambs. There’s a lot going on, but that’s the beauty of spring on the farm—life coming back into every corner of the fields.