August is quite a busy month, with harvest in full swing and a few sheep jobs keeping us busy. The lambs are growing well, but we like to have the best ultrasound scanned before making too many decisions on who stays for breeding. All the Hampshire’s and a selection of lleyns from each sire are scanned. We submit a scan weight for all those not scanned. The rams have averaged 300g/day on farm so far, which I am really pleased with. We are still aiming to not worm potential breeding Lleyn ram lambs to help select the most tolerant. So far this seems to be working, when we are getting high burdens and worm the rest of the group, these left untreated seem to bounce back and recover their growth rates.

Ultrasound scanning the lambs gives us an idea of their carcase composition, which feeds into Signet’s evaluation to create Estimated Breeding Values (EBVs). For the Hampshire’s we then select the best ram lambs to go on to be CT scanned to get a look inside and see how they would kill, along with traits like spine length and Intramuscular fat (IMF). Spine length and meat yield are two of the key bits of information I use when we get the results back.