Farming

Our flock Our Flock Our flock consists of around 120 Jacob sheep . Jacobs are brown and white in colour but when they are born they look black and white. In our flock we have 3 rams, 40 breeding ewes and 1ram lamb. We use the castrated ram lambs for meat which we sell from our ‘farmers market stall’. Our oldest sheep, Betsy is 11 years old and is still going strong! We use our best sheep to show at Stroud each year and our flock is called ‘Elmwicke’. Our chicken Chestnut or maybe a different one we’re not sure!

Medicine and steriliser Iodine, this is a steriliser we use this when the lambs are born and spray it on their umbilical cords and around their tails when banded. This is a medicine gun we use it to inject the lambs with the medicine which is needed. We also use a drench gun when we need to give medicines orally.

Illness Sheep can catch many different illnesses for example: Fly strike(Maggots) Worms Liver fluke These are the most common sheep illnesses; some illnesses can cause death in a severe case (in this case it is kinder to shoot them).

Banding Rubber banding is when we put a small orange rubber band around the lambs tail, this is to shorten it as when they are born their tails are quite long which if left that length could cause problems. When the lambs/larger sheep go to the toilet the poo can sometimes get stuck and can cause fly strike. Fly strike is when flies lay their eggs on the rear end of the sheep which if left untreated hatch out into maggots which then eat the flesh of the sheep. To prevent this from happening we put a small rubber band halfway up their tail which cuts off the supply of blood to the end part. After about 3 to 5 weeks the ends naturally fall off. This procedure is done at birth and doesn’t hurt them.

Lambing Once a year during March and April our sheep lamb. Our sheep have 1-3 lambs each year and can lamb around 10 times in their whole lifetime. Some of you may have heard of Button the sheep he was a triplet he was also the smallest out of the 3 lambs, as he was the smallest his mum abandoned him and we ended up having to bottle feed him and look after him fulltime. We use many different items to help us with lambing ,here are some: Lambing rope, bottle, feeding tube ,sterile gloves and many more.

Thanks the end