Random Farm

Let's talk entropion.

For those who aren't familiar, entropion is when the (usually bottom) eyelid rolls inward and the eyelashes rub on the eyeball, causing irritation. If not fixed it can lead to ulceration, blindness, and even loss of the eye.

Entropion can be congenital and this is moderately heritable. It's a complex polygenic trait that isn't a simple dominant or recessive situation, but it is a known thing in romneys. It can also appear after difficult births and in lambs that get dehydrated.

When we started our flock we had no way of knowing if our foundation ewes carried this trait because it's extremely rare in adult sheep, being relatively straightforward to fix. Several of our foundation ewes produced lambs with entropion and the first couple of years were a bit of a nightmare as every lamb had to be checked at birth and any with entropion would need to be fixed straight away.

Fixing involves manually turning the eyelid to the correct position, repeatedly, as many times as it takes till it stays there by itself. In our first few lambings, some of these fixes involved 2-3 days of doing this. As you probably know, lambs get stronger and faster in those first few days and an entropion eye does not slow them down, so for us any lamb with persistent entropion after 24 hours comes into a small paddock so we can catch the little bu**er easily and we do it every hour till it's sorted.

Other options include injecting a bleb of antibiotic or saline into the lower lid which holds the lid in position until it 'sets' like that. This is generally a vet job. There are also suture clips that can be used, there's a technique using a halter arrangement made from a rubber band which is apparently quite good (we've never tried it), or in really persistent cases, it can be stitched.

However, we've only ever needed to use the bleb technique a couple of times, and for the most part manual turning has worked for us.

But, because it's a royal pain in the arse and horrible for the sheep, we have also religiously culled anyone who was born with entropion. As a result, this year we are nearly finished lambing and only just had our first case.

This little dude was born yesterday but the entropion wasn't spotted till this morning. Sometimes the swelling from having it for 24 hours can make it harder to fix, so after turning it out this morning we checked again just now. Luckily for us, we can see the edge of his bottom eyelid all the way from the back to the front, which shows it isn't rolled in anywhere. There is still some swelling which obscures it in the pic, but you can see his eye is no longer watering and it looks like he's going to be ok.

He obviously won't be a breeding ram though, despite being from two registered parents. We simply will not sell an animal that's likely to introduce this kind of problem into someone's flock. It's a shame that some people still will, and we recommend asking about this when buying breeding stock because dealing with multiple cases of entropion a year SUUUUUUCKS.

We haven't been doing that well at keeping you updated on lambing, so here's a quick one. Eleven ewes have lambed for a total of 23 lambs:

2 singles
7 sets of twins
1 set of triplets
1 set of quads.

One of the quads was stillborn and we've sold 2 excess triplets and a rejected twin, so have a total of 19 lambs on the ground with 6 adult ewes still to go and potentially 3 hoggets. Some lamb cuteness is included in the photos with this post.

We have also been working on one of our windbreak fences since one of the 100x100 posts snapped off in a windstorm last spring. The fence has been propped up with a brace since then but the last couple of weeks we've removed the rails, put in two new posts, and added back new rails since the old ones were untreated and starting to deteriorate.

All that remains to do now is to level the tops of the posts which were far too long at 3m, and paint it to match the rest of the fence. Eventually we'll also replace the remaining untreated rails and hopefully no stinking nor'wester will knock it over again!

Very pleased to share that despite the nasty little storm that blew up out of nowhere yesterday, all our lambs made it through and the ewes were smart enough to not lamb in the middle of it.

To tide everyone over till we have more little ones, here is a picture of Bridie breaking the fourth wall while her daughter looks at her sideways. Seems like it needs a caption 🙂

Lambing is now proper underway here at Random Farm. We have three ewes lambed for 6 lambs born, and another three due this week before the bulk of them drop next week.

Here are a few pics of the lambs born so far.

OK, following on from the perfectly spherical sheep pic last week, here is a sheep that's gone beyond spherical into elliptical. Panda (middle) is not due till next Friday so she has another week to continue enlarging.

She's a Finn cross romney, as is the lighter ewe with the dark face on the left. Finns are known to have lots of lambs. She's only a cross but she kicked off her career with twins as a hogget and then had triplets last year so it's anyone's guess how many she'll have this year.

In other news, our first lambs were born overnight, to one of the white ewes. She's had two coloured lambs, a ewe and a ram. It would be convenient if they all did this as we have quite a few people on our waiting list for lambs this year.

Now to brace ourselves for the onslaught of tiny sheep!

This is Spidercat. She comes from a line of sheep that are basically clown cars. She started slowly with her first lamb being a single. Last year she had twins, one of those pairs where one is massive and the other tiny, but she managed to feed them well enough so even the small one made sale weight by Christmas.

This year, well.. she has two weeks to go, you be the judge. Her and Mist who is standing next to her are due on the same day. We suspect that's going to be quite a day!

We're now in the peaceful time where the ewes are all lumbering hippos quietly waiting for things to happen. They've been vaccinated and belly crutched and are ready for the next step. All we really need to do is keep the nutrition going and wait.

It would also be nice if any rain we get comes in lots of 10mm or less. It's taken three weeks for the water from the last deluge to drain off and we're finally in a place where the paddocks are not squelchy. We gave the ewes a zinc sulphate footbath last week, the first since that wet year in 2022. Normally we don't have to but when your flock is in fetlock-deep mud for weeks, it's prudent to give them a bit of help for scald and they are too large to treat individually without risking damage to them, so standing in the footbath is a good solution.

They still have to be manhandled into it. Of 20, only 2 remembered the last time and walked straight in. The rest seemed pretty certain that the footbath was actually a bottomless well that they would fall in and never be seen again. Shoving sheep into a footbath is good exercise, somewhat akin to scrum practice at rugby.

But now they're out there trundling around and nobody is limping. Long may it last.

Last week the boundary fence along our driveway was removed and replaced. The old fence was at least 15 years old and had been built with rails that had only been nailed into the posts. Over the years the rails had warped and twisted and were popping out of the posts, some of which were rotten. It had a few wires but they had no tension and when we found one of our mature ewes in the neighbours', we agreed that it was time to do something.

The new fence is 8-wire battened, and has an outrigger on the horse side and a hotwire 3 wires up on the sheep side. This should keep all the critters in their respective places.

The fencers did leave a stack of the rails and old posts lying on the side of the drive. We split the rails, which are in relatively good condition, with the neighbours. They didn't need any posts so we took those. We spent a couple of hours yesterday afternoon stacking them.

We plan to use them for protecting new trees as they are planted. We've always constructed our tree protection out of bits and bobs scavenged from around the place - it'll be nice to methodically build something solid for each one. The old posts aren't that great but they'll last long enough for our trees to get bigger, safe from chomping sheep teeth!

Some of the fleeces on our ewes are looking quite nice. We're looking at doing some pre-lamb shearing this year so last week we selected who would be shorn in July and who would be left till October/November

It's a bit of a juggling act because if their fleece is left on for October/November shearing they can't be shown in the spring shows or possibly even the autumn ones as they won't have enough wool. If we shear them now to be able to show in the spring shows, the wool isn't long enough to make a heavy competition fleeces.

Our solution is to select animals that we'd like to show and shear them now for a shorter fleece to be millspun into yarn, and those with top quality fleeces that are not necessarily going to be shown themselves can keep them until spring when they'll have a bit of weight for competition. The sheep that don't fit either category will also be shorn in spring for a good handspinning length and convenience.

We are now 6 weeks off the first lambs being due and Panda is expanding at a rate of knots. She had twins her first year, triplets the second, will 2026 be quads year?