Edward Earle, Gorey, Co. Wexford, works as a quality engineer and farms over 300 ewes in partnership with his parents.
The 31-year-old, who studied agricultural science at WIT and UCD, is That’s Farming’s newest weekly contributor – here is his next update:
The saying of ‘red sky in the morning, shepherds take warning’ was right on the mark for Wednesday.
After a glorious sunrise, the weather changed to what we are all used to…rain. On Tuesday morning, while checking the ewes and lambs, one of the lambs, a twin, looked dull.
When the lambs get up for sitting down, a lamb should stretch, which is a kind of indication of a healthy lamb, however, this lamb did not.
When we got him into the pen, we could tell that he had pneumonia. He had a fast breathing rate and was running a temperature of 40.7°C.
We treated him with antibiotics and brought him, his mother and his comrade back to field beside the yard so we could keep a close eye on him and treat him.
We could see an improvement in the lamb and by the afternoon, he was looking brighter in the eye and his temperature had down to 39.4 degrees. His temperature was 38.7 degrees on Wednesday morning.
With the rain on Wednesday night, we kept him in just to be safe and not to put any extra stress on him following the pneumonia.
We were fortunate that we caught it early as most times, the first sign of pneumonia in young lambs is a dead lamb.
Lambing 2020 – that’s a wrap
Lambing 2020 has finished, which now allows for a full night’s sleep and a recharge of the batteries which is needed after a busy lambing period.
With all sheep out on grass, this has allowed some time to focus back on the yard.
We have taken down all the feed barriers and penning out of the sheds.
One simple thing we do before the dung is removed is to go around the sheds with a bin bag and bag up all bits of rubbish such as bits of twine, plastic bottles, etc. At least, this way, we won’t have to pick them up in the field later in the year when the dung is spread.
It was good to have a local contractor clean the sheds out this week as it will allow us to get the sheds washed out and disinfected – So that’s the weekend worked sorted!!
