This will be a first for Caluka farms. In the coming weeks, 220 of our scanned in-lamb red tag ewes (born 2022) will be available for sale via an online auction. I will post the details on this blog when they are known. However, I thought in the meantime, you might be interested in a little peek at them. The lambs are due to be born 25th March - 29th April 2024.
Below is a video and four photos of them. Most of them will have been born in October 2022 and were too young to get pregnant the first time they socialised with some rams (May 2023). These ewes were then presented to the rams again in November/December 2023 and were obviously ready to be "in-lamb" (pregnant for those new to sheep terminology). They look very nice to me.
Also, 60-70% of these ewes will have born to ewes that had given birth to lambs twice within 12-months. ie very fertile. All of our new rams for the past few years are also only purchased if their worm tolerance is known, so many of these ewes will have had those rams and have some of their worm resistance. The group of rams used are Ultrawhites and Kojaks (also predominately based on Ultrawhites and the Kojaks are the ones with known resistance levels to intestinal worms).
As an update on the farm, we continue to have a hot and dry summer. The kikuyu continues to grow after each grazing, but the volume is not adequate at the moment because the rotation is not able to be long enough. We are starting to feed out some hay and in the coming weeks, we will also start dribbling out some grain as a supplement. We will also remove a few mobs from the pastures for awhile just to let the pastures grow some bulk.
It's been a very tough time for the industry with full abattoirs and very low prices. However, local demand is returning quickly and there is interest again in people switching from woolly sheep to shedding (hair) sheep like ours. Prices are also rising quickly again, especially on the eastern side of Australia.
If anyone is interested in a larger mob than these 220 ewes to begin or add to your hairsheep, please contact me at your leisure via my email (wayne@calukafarms.com or my mobile +61 428188479). As time goes on, we will have much larger numbers of ewes for sale. The video below shows all of the mob as I couldn't fit them all in a photo.
