The Harper Adams Future Farm flock currently stands at 794 breeding Pedigree Lleyn ewes with around 1,000 lambs reared every year. We also run a small flock of up to 30 teaching sheep to use for practical lessons and demonstration activities. All sheep are Maedi Visna (MV) and Enzootic Abortion of Ewes (EAE) accredited and fully vaccinated against clostridial and Pasteurellosis diseases.
The flock lamb from mid-February through to April indoors with a small number (150 ewes) lambing outdoors in May. The first service ewes are mated to Lleyn tups in family groups of up to 50 ewes per tup, the second service ewes also mate to a Lleyn tup but the third service ewes are mated to a Charolais tup.
The ewes are scanned during their pregnancy and then when they are close to lambing, the ewes are housed according to how many lambs they are carrying; this allows the shepard and other farm staff the ability to control feed intakes and monitor the ewes BCS (body condition score) and plane of nutrition. Most ewes that lamb a triplet will have one lamb adopted onto another ewe that only has a single lamb, we ideally want every lowland ewe to rear two lambs per year.
We use ‘wet adoptions’ for most lamb adoptions which is usually 100% successful. However, on occasion when a ewe loses her lamb(s), we do use the skin from the dead lamb as a way to adopt a new lamb onto the ewe. Students have the opportunity to do this and assist with colostrum tubing, tagging and tailing as well as lambing if needed. Once the lambs are born, our Shepherd makes sure they are all ear tagged and registered with the correct details to the Lleyn society.
In the future the farm will be focussing on lambing more ewes outdoors, which is detailed in the ES Farm Productivity page, but for now the indoor lambing gives all HAU and Harper-Keele students access to come along and get some lambing experience and general sheep husbandry. The students work alongside experienced farm staff and get a ‘real life’ hands on experience during the day and on night lambing duties.
The flock of sheep at Future Farm is mainly for the purposes of commercial meat and wool production, however, throughout the year there may be trial work taking place, for example during the lambing season, researchers may be looking at colostrum quality, ewe mothering behaviours or look at sampling placentas and introduicing lamb milk replacers.
As a commercial flock it is important to collect data about the sheep, in the form of weight, BCS and illnesses for farm assurance and to assess how the flock is managed. This data is also essential in supporting the academic services of the university in the form of teaching, student HRP’s, and PhD trials or in the form of working with a commercial industry partner on a research project.
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