Benefits
The benefits of having 2 healthy lambs at birth has a knock on effect for lifting production on your farm. Scanning means:
You have the option of turning off these lambs to slaughter at an earlier age; freeing up grass for your productive ewes at the next joining.
By getting a good start to life your twin lambs will gain body weight quicker.
Good body weight in healthy twins correlates strongly to high fertility in adult ewes.
Secondary wool follicle growth will increase in healthy twin lambs. As an adult sheep, the twin lambs will have a finer fleece. This has obvious bottom line advantages.
Managing single lamb bearing ewes to avoid problems which can occur with big single lambs.
In good seasons you can have management issues with single lambs.
A difficult birth resulting from a big lamb being born can result in a condition called ‘distocia’. The lambs head becomes crushed as it is being born; resulting in brain damage and the lamb dies of starvation few days after birth. Help avoid this by scanning.
Single lambs can become too big and the ewe is unable to give birth to the lamb without help to the ewe and the lamb will die resulting in a large and unnecessary costly loss.
With correct management of feed intake you can avoid big unborn single lambs. Select appropriate paddocks and nutrition for single lamb bearing ewes and you will avoid lambs that are too big at birth.
By scanning for twins in your ewe flock, you will know exactly how many foetuses you will have before they are born instead of counting the amount of live lambs at lamb marking or weaning time.
Scanning means that you are able to identify where most of your lamb losses are occurring and put into practice management tools to counteract these losses.
SCANNING CAN PREVENT A COMPLETE DISASTER
- What if you did not scan and only half of your ewes gave birth?
- What if you did not scan and you had no lambs?
- What if you did not scan and you lost 60% of lambs and you did not know the losses were going to be so high?
- How much money would this cost your farming enterprise, especially when sheep prices have been so high?
If you know that your ewes have not joined, you can do something about it, take control, mitigate any loss or livestock or profit
- call in a vet for diagnosis – disease
- re-join the ewes to the rams
These things do happen and as a scanning contractor I see this in the field. These farmers who scan have options and can do something about their problem. All because they have scanned their ewes!
In short, scanning is peace of mind. You know what is coming and you can manage your flock and farm. With that knowledge, you can maximise profits.
