I'm sorry but I think it's just one of those things that not every single 1 every time will catch the tup - we find if you put the tups in early ish & can then scan earlier on you can put in the the empty ones back in with the tups again for some later lambs, scan again & if their older ewes then they can be culled out - if their 1st time lambers give them another year & if not its bye bye.
You can um & ah about what it could be & spend all the money on tests & drugs & vets ect, but the scanning should tell you if they had aborted or not - fine if so separate as it could be something like toxoplasmosis that could infect the flock so it's worth investigating if you've had a few or smallenberg - which next year they should be immune to anyway if the reports are true.
If its not diseases then I suppose the next step is good book keeping & management - I'd start by having all rams for small pedigree flocks & commercial flocks fertility tested - also when buying 1 I would tend to buy private to know the linage, the females also you could keep a record of how old when bought or 1st bred & how many lambs & matings were needed & also the quality of offspring each year also if a home bred ewe what was her mother like - That way genetics is ruled out. I also cannot sing the praises enough of teaser rams in both commercial flocks & small pedigree ones as the idea is to keep them in small fields for approx 2 weeks to get all the ewes cycling in estrous together instead of having them in larger fields spread out & cycling over a much larger period of time & then swap the teaser rams with the proper ones in the small field that way you have a much shorter lambing period & a rough idea of when they are all due or were mated & also a great idea is tup markers so you can keep track of who's mated who.
I find the tup markers a great way of keeping track of each tups libido levels as it were - so if need be he can be tested again or culled & also by record keeping with them on things like lambs produced you can have an idea of each ewes fertility & genetics & cull out undesirable breeding stock to optimize both quality & quantity of offspring produced - granted its a lot more work but I think its highly worthwhile in the long term despite the initial costs of teaser rams, vasectomising them, fertility testing, tup markers & time in pedigree or commercial flocks above certain numbers & that's coming from both a vet nurses & a farmers & pedigree fanatics point of view.
Sorry for the essay x.
Topic: Yeld ewes (Read 8402 times)
