Tuesday 21 June 2011

Rain at last!... and now we shear the sheep

Well, Open Farm Sunday on June 12th was incredibly wet but for those who braved the horizontal rain, there was lots to do including a sheep-shearing demonstration, bottle feeding lambs and a children's "Make your own Shaun the Sheep using Overtown Wool" competition. Numbers were predictably down by around 50% but we still had around 80 visitors and the cream teas went down well, raising £130 for charity. There are "a few" packs of scones left in the freezer so we plan to wait till we have a good forecast and then hold an impromptu cream tea picnic to raise money for Tree of Life for animals veterinary hospital in Rajasthan, India. I will publish the date on the website and all are welcome. It will be a very informal event....just bring a rug or chair to sit on, some friends and family and we will supply the cream tea!

The next job is sheep shearing. Mark Taylor who works for us on a regular basis and did the demo at OFS, has already sheared the ewe lambs and rams so it is just the main flock left for the contract shearers to do now. The forecast is for wet weather this week and they are coming tomorrow so we will get the ewes in this evening and they can spend the night in the barn.
Sheep have to be totally dry or the shears just won't cut through the fleece and if they are cold then the lanolin (natural oils) in the wool tends to be a bit sticky and this also makes it difficult so a bit of time spent today will save an awful lot of bother tomorrow.

In a couple of weeks and once the wool has grown back a little, we will apply a fly repellent that should protect the sheep and lambs from blow flies for around 8 weeks. The Greenbottle is the main culprit and will lay its eggs on areas of dirty or waterlogged wool and in ideal conditions they will hatch out into maggots within 12 hours! The maggots initially feed on the wool or get into small wounds but the fluid they excrete irritates the skin and causes sore patches that eventually end up as small wounds. These get infected and from there the maggots can start to attack the underlying tissue. If left untreated, sheep will die from dehydration due to skin damage and systemic toxicity due to the waste products the maggots excrete into their system. It is a horrible death but although it is impossible to prevent all cases, it is fortunately preventable in most cases. However, as the springs get milder and wetter, we are starting to see cases as early as March when we would not normally be concerned till early May or even in to June. We can't shear too early here as we are so high up and the weather can still be quite cold into May and early June but if the weather is mild and the fly strike risk increases, shearing is brought forward a bit. It's a balancing act but the welfare of the sheep is the deciding factor.

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