Farmer Focus: Festive lamb demand pushed sales up 35%

December was fabulous but manic. The pop-up shop was a massive success, even beating Easter sales.

We also had our best-ever Grantham farmers’ market and the most orders ever received in December, resulting in sales being up 35%. 

Hard work is starting to pay off and knowing our produce is being enjoyed by so many is very satisfying.

See also: Direct lamb sales from the farmgate help #FeedTheNation 

About the author

Louise Elkington

Louise Elkington runs 500 breeding ewes in Lincolnshire with husband Chris for their Gelston lamb brand, supplying restaurants, 13 Co-op stores and their online shop. They have 54ha (133 acres) of grass on a farm business tenancy and agreements for stubble turnips and hay aftermaths.

Read more articles by Louise Elkington

We closed the butchery between Christmas and New Year, which gave us time to catch up on some farm work.

We also managed to have a few days for family time, which is so important, especially with young children growing up so quickly.

Our March lambing flock was scanned – always a nerve-racking yet exciting day for a shepherd. We were more nervous this year with bluetongue, so were very relieved to scan at 180%.

This is our B flock, which is made up of older ewes and ewes that have been downgraded from the A flock.

I’ve not had chance to properly look at the figures, but I did notice that quite a few that we’d moved from the A flock had scanned as singles this time.

In an ideal world, these should perhaps be culled rather than put into the B flock, but we are selling so many lambs through the butchery that we can only keep 100 of the best ewe lambs.

We don’t want to buy in replacement ewes, so it’s hard to keep growing numbers.

Twinning rate was 61%. We would like to be nearer the 65% mark, however these figures include a few Border Leicesters that haven’t performed well, so overall, we are pretty happy with that result.

Scanning high is all well and good, but it’s lambs sold that matters – and you rarely see people shouting about that on social media.

We had a slight change of plan with the cows that we wanted to outwinter.

It soon became apparent that the land was far too wet for them to stay out for the whole season, so we have housed them. They settled in straight away.

We chose Stabilisers, which seem a lovely, calm-natured breed. The customers at the pop-up shop were thrilled to see them, too.