Lambing ewe lambs: the 'pinnacle' of sheep management or burden?

That was the question farmers and experts tried to answer at Paraway Pastoral's conference at Barton Station, Moyston, this week.

Station manager Robert Cooper joined 7000 ewe lambs this year.

They will be scanned next week and are due to lamb in August.

Lambs Alive consultant Jason Trompf and Precision Lambing founder Tim Leeming outlined the pros and cons of such a system.

Farmers present told them they avoided joining their ewe lambs each year due to concerns their growth would be stunted, they wouldn't recover before their second joining, and the cost.

"I think it's the pinnacle of sheep management, if you can get results with it," one farmer said.

"A lot of people are just struggling to get the basics right."

Mr Trompf agreed with much of the farmers' outlook on the practise but also suggested, if done right, breeding ewe lambs was a great way to improve the return on replacement sheep.

"We've been talking about it for 20 plus years," he said.

"It takes a long time to try and progress this.

"It's not easy."

He explained his research in the area and suggested farmers first needed to be more accurate with information gathering on ewe lamb breeding.

"We made sure we knew the actual true number of lambs weaned to ewe lambs joined," he said.

"That sounds really obvious but often the ewe lamb lambing is about the third lambing on the farm.

"Everyone's crap at collecting good data and there'll be red tags mixed amongst blue tags and whatever else re-joins.

"There's often a lack of really good data so the first part of this project was collecting sounder information."

He said therefore, farmers needed to make sure ewe lambs with singles and twins were run separately.

Mr Leeming said ewe lambs needed to be 48 kilograms before joining and at least seven months old.

"Puberty has got to be done right and they've got to be at least seven months of age to actually conceive," he said.

He said farmers had to implement that minimum joining weight and warned weights of 40-42kg didn't "cut the mustard".

Mr Trompf said his research showed that a lot of joined ewe lambs weren't showing any weight gain between scanning and lambing.

"The backdrop I want to give you this year with the June break, these things are going to lamb in August so they're late pregnant in July," he said.

"You've got however many adult ewes to find a blade of grass for and they're prioritised first.

"These are the only dry sheep on the farm and the ewe lamb thing ends up where one person says it's optimistic, I'm saying it's a train wreck."

He warned there would be "ewe lambs all across western Victoria that their growth is going to be seriously compromised in June and July".

"That can be, depending on the joining weight, a death certificate for the ewe and the lamb, and for next year's rejoining," he said.

He said sheep farmers needed to follow the strategy thought to and adopted by beef farmers.

"If you talk to cattle farmers they'll have a minimum joining weight with the heifers," he said.

"That's what we've educated people on for years - 60 per cent of adult size and under that, don't join them.

"You'll pull calves, they'll have poorer rebreed rates and they'll have shit calves and it's an absolute nightmare from that point of view.

"In the sheep industry we've lacked sheep numbers and lacked understanding.

"The focus has been on 'we'll just put the ram in, we've got plenty of rams, it's a different time of joining, join the lot, over join, the ram will draft them'."

He said the only way for a ewe lamb to have a successful reproductive outcome was to change this approach and enforce a minimum joining weight.

"If she gets pregnant at 40kg, we can't have them weighing under 60kg at lambing, so you've locked yourself in to gain 20kg on her at the end of pregnancy," he said.

"I'm saying good luck to that, the economics of that in 2024 in western Victoria.

"She shouldn't have gone to the ram at that weight.

"We've got to up the ante on our disciple and stop thinking about it as an opportunistic thing."

Mr Leeming said all ewe lambs should also be teased with vasectomised rams before joining.

"Initially what some of you have all done is leave the rams out for longer with the ewe lambs so you get more pregnant," he said.

"What happens there is you've got this horrible tail end and strewn out lambing in the springtime," he said.

He said this led to a poor scanning percentage the following year "for those rising two year old second lambers".

"We are monkeys if we are trying to get ewe lambs pregnant and then having 15pc dries the next year," he said.

"It's just false economics, just stupid."

Mr Leeming said lambed ewe lambs were the "highest priority stock on your farm" and if they weren't run correctly, with enough feed, it would be a "train wreck".

Both lambing consultants were honest in their reflections on the mortality rates in ewe lamb flocks at lambing.

Mr Trompf's research found lamb mortality was far greater than in mature ewe mobs.

"The overall survival of lambs out of ewe lambs was not great," he said.

"For every 100 lambs conceived, about two thirds were reared and one third were disappearing between scanning and the lamb marking phase.

"It's worse than the average sort of 30 per cent lamb mortality when we're talking overall - we're talking 35 pc loss."

He said the enemy to the survival of lambs out of ewe lambs was their birth weight.

Mr Trompf said there was a "paranoia" amongst farmers on keeping birth weights low.

"Everyone is saying they don't want to pull lambs and they use low birth weight rams and they won't feed her too much in the last trimester," he said.

"I'm not saying you want to grow her 300g a day in the last trimester but we want to grow her throughout pregnancy and if you've done your hard work early like this, you can back her off."

"The better we do this and the better we get that growth trajectory the whole way through, the better success you'll have at lambing," Mr Leeming added.

He said lambs off ewe lambs also needed to be weaned early.

"They're not going to grow as quick because the milk supply is not as much but you've actually still got to engage that weaning in a disciplined manner," he said.

"Two weeks of recovery for these sheep at the end of this spring is gold.

"A ewe that you take the lambs off and you give them lots of rocket fuel, they'll put on 600g a day.

"We want to reduce our dry percentage."

He said all ewe lambs which reared lambs needed to be condition scored at weaning and needed an udder check.

He said the ewe lambs should be split into light, medium and heavy weights with lights "prioritised like hell".

"They have higher priority than your new batch of ewe lambs," he said.

"They've proven they can give you two lambs as a lamb so in a good reasonable market over a five year market, they've pulled in maybe $180-240 in income and they haven't even cut their teeth."