Farmer Focus: Cull ewes top prime lambs by £20 a head
Dan Phillips © Richard Swingler Following February’s piece, I am pleased to announce the safe arrival of our newborn son.
All are settling in well. However, the sleep deprivation that a newborn brings, combined with the imminent onset of lambing, means I could face a rather tiring month or two.
See also: Tips on maximising returns from cull ewes
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What a difference the past two weeks of good weather have made.
We have completed our first application of nitrogen on the oilseed rape, winter wheat and grassland this week, and we are prepping to drill the spring beans.
This helps reduce the job list and means we can have all hands on deck for lambing. Here’s hoping the weather will stay fair for a while longer.
We have also been selling fat lambs and cull ewes this week. The trade has been notably strong.
The culls and our better, fatter lambs were sent to market, with the plainer lambs going deadweight.
For the first time in my recollection, cull ewes outsold the prime lambs, with the culls averaging £173 a head – nearly £20 more than the market lambs.
Deadweight lambs averaged £160 a head. This really underlines the changes in the market dynamic over the past few years, and the importance cull ewes can have on the profitability of our sheep enterprise.
What struck me, however, was the real lack of numbers of prime lambs in market.
Ten years ago, there may have been 3,000 to 4,000 lambs forward. There were fewer than 1,000 last week.
While overall slaughter numbers are about 6% down year on year, I can’t help but think the live markets could increasingly be losing out to the deadweight.
There are various reasons I can see for this. The live trade is far more volatile, sometimes even dependent upon pen allocation.
Charges were £8.94 a live lamb, but only £4.18 deadweight, including transport. Contracts offering an extra 10p/kg are available for larger numbers.
Collection centres are popping up in traditional market areas, making logistics easier.
We are sending our better quality lambs live and our plainer lambs deadweight. Yet, the plainer lambs come to more money a head.
Although I am a big supporter of the markets (we buy 95% of our stock there), it is difficult to ignore the figures when deciding where to send our finished animals.