Lambing is as good as done (we think there is one ewe that still needs to lamb). We did not do pregnancy scanning for this years lambing, it felt like we were flying blind in the beginning not knowing how many ewes were bred.
We used seven rams for preferred breeding and one cleanup ram. The preferred rams were in with the ewes for 20 days before we combined all the ewes and put the cleanup ram in for another 14 days. We try to keep the lambing duration as short as possible in order to better manage the lambs and better evaluate lambs against each other. Below is a breakdown of the lambs born each day during the 2021 lambing season.
We had a total of 295 lambs, 153 ewe lambs and 142 ram lambs. 59 Ewe Lambs (born spring 2020), 26 Yearlings (born spring 2019) and 77 Adults lambed in this period. We bred a large number of ewe lambs because had so many great prospects from 2020 that we wanted to test. The oldest ewes that lambed were 8 years old.
Ewe Lambs had a lambing rate of 124%, Yearling had a lambing rate of 188% while Adults had a lambing rate of 225%. Combined Yearlings and Adults had a lambing rate of 216%. We had a few more triplets than we planned for this year, speaking to other producers it seems like many of them experienced a more prolific year. We like to see a lambing rate of about 200%. We don't pull triplets, ewes that have triplets need to to raise triplets, if they don't then they need to go.
We had slightly more ewes than rams as shown below, 51.9% ewes 48.1% rams.
Below is a breakdown of lambs born broken out by birth type and the age of the ewe.
Overall average birth weights were healthy and it shows promise for how this years lamb crop could turn out. Graph below breaks birth weights out by lamb gender, dam age and birth type.
Below is a breakdown of average birth weights by birth type for sire and lamb gender. There were no big surprises, there was a good match between birth weights for the various rams compared to estimated breeding values of sire growth.
Looking forward to the 2021 season.