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Writer's pictureZoe Norton

We made it to 2022!

Sorry ive been so quiet lately, its been a busy few weeks! But, we finally reached the new year and the countdown is on for lambing and calving 2022!


December was a very good month for us to finish the year on. This is the month we typically have our cattle and sheep pregnancy scanned, so a nervous but exciting time! On the 16th, we had Westpoints Chelmsford pay us a visit and give us the fantastic news that all the cows were in calf! A full house! And not only that, our biggest calving number to date. After adding in the 7 new heifers this year, we're up to a total of 22 cows.

One of the new heifers - Cookie

Which reminds me, the new girls! Sometimes, every now and then, you need to treat yourself. For us, its usually in the form of buying new animals! So Just before Christmas we visited a good friend of ours, Neil, to see if we could find a heifer for each of us. We found 2 lovely girls, Panda and Cookie... and then maybe another one! Mrs Blue. So its all go on the cow front!

Then on the 17th, we had Ben come and scan the sheep for us. Ultra nerve wracking as we have a completely new flock, using unproven rams and only a handful of ewes who had lambed before. But we were very pleasantly surprised, with a total of 14 singles and 33 twins (one possibly a triplet), and a lambing percentage of 163%. We had hoped for above 150% so very pleased with the result! All of our girls who stayed with us from last year are carrying twins, including the Southdown girls. Who knows what's going to come out of them! Big domed noses with mutton chops?!

Will the Southdown lambs be as cute as last years?

The start of the year saw us welcome 3 calves, the first to come from the farms new pedigree black limousin bull Phoenix. The girls all calved themselves and are loving being mothers again. These 3 sadly missed out on rearing a calf last year after a couple of hideous calvings, so its fantastic to see them with calves at foot.


Whats Next?


As we head into February, we are on the final gear up for lambing and calving. Our first early bunch of ewes will come in on 5th February, only around 8 girls to get us started. The main bulk of ladies are due in the second week of March, so its a slow start before full on mayhem! Whilst we dont have a particularly big flock (some farms are lambing 1000+ ewes) we will also be calving at the farm and our own cows will be calving. So we have around 80 cattle and 50 ewes to give birth in about a 6 week block - with just the 2 of us looking after them! And not all in one location either. It will be pretty intense, but Gary and I work really well together with the animals. Which is strange, because they usually say to not work with children or animals, and for good reason! Its no secret that sheep can be bloody infuriating, and cows always want to calve at 2am with help from us. But our motto is do the shit stuff together, and its a little bit less shit. So dealing with that prolapse at 4am with another cow trying to calving and only on an hours sleep is a little bit easier when you've got each other.


But hopefully that wont happen again this year!


Stay safe and get ready for babies!


Zoe


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