December Blog

Well its all happening – with 100 yearling stags gone in the first week of December then its into weaning lambs. We were very pleased how the lambs went – weaning at 36.3kg liveweight and dressing out at 18.5kg carcase weight, 51% yield. 90% of the male lambs went to the works off mum, the remaining 10% we sold as stores, averaging 30kg liveweight. A very pleasing result for our lamb breeding/finishing operation in a year where you only get one chance! After weaning its time to sort out the cull ewes for the works and to crutch and jet the ewes we are retaining. Thomas did a good job of the crutching in the race and Eldon jetted them all, finishing up with half the solution left over so it remains to be seen how effective the jetting for flystrike will be!

We are busy velvetting our 40 2 and 3 year old stags – they too seem to be late however we haven’t been able to offer them the feed we would like in November. In December we have had to supplement them with some Barley as their paddocks have been short of feed (hinds are getting the best pastures).

Yearling hinds were weighed again at the end of December, averaging 192 grams/day throughout December. They now average 91kg, however we will cull the bottom 30% so the animals to be retained will now average 100kg liveweight.

As the new year approaches hinds have now finished fawning and fawns are very active running around early morning or evening. The paddocks that they fawned into are now past their best with little legume left and the grass all gone to seed. Feed quality is falling and we have introduced two mobs to barley in Advantage grain feeders. The remaining mobs we will start grazing on Lucerne paddocks.