Re-arranging mobs and broken ribs

Over the past 10-days, it has been extra busy with us re-arranging mobs, rotations, and me cracking two ribs has not helped. I'm going to be immobile for awhile. Below are some photos showing the feed is still growing rapidly and we have room for many more livestock.

We have bought another 199 skinny trade sheep, but need more. If you have skinny sheep in Western Australia, please feel free to give me a call.

We have weaned more larger lambs from our main mob and introduced the rams to the old girls today (28th July). Ewes with small lambs in the other ultrawhite mob are now in with the main ewe mob with lambs - where the rams are. So we now have one large ewe mob with young lambs at foot, and some very excited rams. The other ewe mob is now smaller and they have just started lambing (were due to start on 30th July).

We have a growing weaner mob that we will draft off the 40-50kg LW ones as they grow, and a trade mob (the skinnies). I'm hoping we can find many more skinny sheep each week to keep the cash flow going, and to utilise the pastures. Spring is not far away and I don't want to waste the the pasture growth by not having enough sheep. It's better for us to put the pasture into sheep growth rather than hay, especially at the current prices.

And no, we won't be cutting hay. The economics do not stack up for us. We will build confinement areas within the next 12 months and will have a hay stack ready for that time when we need to give pastures a spell or something has gone wrong (perhaps a disease problem) and we need to confine a mob or two. We will source the hay from inland growers as needed. In the mean time, we do need to source some hay as roughage very soon to get us through to the end of spring.

The skinnies have access to eight of the 18 main paddocks, and at the back end of the farm so that we have some distance between the trade sheep and our core sheep flock. The aim is still to crank up the numbers to average >20 adult sheep/ha across the farm by the end of the year, plus lambs.

If anyone has, or when you do have weaned green tag ultrawhite ewe lambs, give me a call as we are looking for many more between now and November 2019.

The main ewe mob with small lambs at foot, that as of 28th July, rams were put back in with them. Need to keep that lamb pipeline in production.

The growing weaner mob. This is the area that had a pH of 3.1 and was recently mulched to smash the reeds and small trees. They have been on there for 11 days now, which goes against our 7-day rule, but it's just while we are re-arranging the mobs and the paddock rotations.

Some of the weaner mob up closer. It's been 11-days with them in this paddock, and now that we have finished re-arranging the mobs, these weaners will be moved to new paddocks for them to rotationally graze and not be in a paddock for more than 7-days.