Ewe shift frequency under investigation

It seems sheep farmers might be making a rod for their own backs by giving ewes daily shifts during winter. The conventional wisdom that daily break feeding is best was thrown into question on Meat & Wool NZ's South Otago monitor farm when it was found four-day breaks helped slash a persistent bearings problem from 7% to 1% reports Rural News. Now a Sustainable Farming Fund project is seeing if similar gains can be achieved across three intensive Southland sheep farms with histories of high bearings. "˜There is still no definitive answer as to what causes bearings,' says John Scandrett of Scandrett Rural, one of a number of companies involved with the No More Bearings Project. Two mobs of at least 650 each have been randomly selected by splitting each flock or part flock for the project, and 100 ewes from each mob weighed and body condition scored. While it is early days, a behavioural difference between the mobs has already been noted. Those on one-day shifts "˜mob up' expecting another shift whenever someone goes near the paddock, and tend to stay mobbed, whereas those on four-day breaks rapidly disperse and revert to grazing. Another observation is that pugging and trampling, a concern often cited about longer interval breaks, is, if anything, slightly less on the four-day shifts. Both mobs are being offered feed to achieve an intake of 1.35kgDM/head/day, the aim being to maintain body condition. Where there is a lot of dead material it is accepted high residuals have to be left to achieve that. "˜You need to allow for that in your feed budgeting. If you force ewes to eat a lot of dead material they are going to lose condition for sure,' says Scandrett. High autumn feeding followed by poor quality pre-lamb nutrition is one of several recognised risk factors in bearings, as are hilly paddocks and high scanning percentage.