One of the biggest jobs on the farm each year, is lamb marking. There are three main jobs involved – vaccination, ear marking and castration. First we bring a mob ( this year we have the whole flock split into four mobs) into the yards and draft the ewes off. This leaves us with a big group of lambs. 
From here on until we have finished it is very noisy, as the lambs and ewes bleat for each other. Poor babies – it doesn’t take long for them to be back with their mums.
Once the lambs are separated we start marking. We have a “cradle” that sits on the fence.
Cam lifts a lamb into the cradle and puts a small notch in one ear depending on its sex. For some reason sheep are very relaxed when on their backs with their heads a bit elevated like this. They stop wriggling, even shearers put the sheep in this position when they start shearing them.
While Cam is ear notching, I vaccinate. The vaccination we use works against the six main clostridial diseases we tend to get in this area, and also contains selenium and b12 minerals, as they tend to be quite deficient in our soils, and lamb growth can be affected. The ewe lambs from this mob will actually stay in the flock and not be sold for meat so they get an extra vaccine which prevents them from getting ovine johnes disease. Cam does that one as it involves a special vaccinators, which require a bit more strength to operate.
Once one has been vaccinated I castrate the ram lambs, by placing a very small band over their testicles. The band cuts off the blood supply so they shrivel up and eventually drop off. It also cuts off the nerves so it is relatively pain free. The hormone testosterone tends to affect the taste of the meat, which is why we castrate them.
As soon as they are done, they come out of the cradle on the other side of the fence, and can run out to find their ewe.
Here’s Cam drafting the lambs from the ewes. That one jumping up is a rogue black-faced wether from next door that we drafted out of the mob – he’s determined to get in with the others
The kids love playing with the babies! You can see that rogue black faced wether managed to get over into the lambs!!
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