Hands-on workshop provides clues to young stock losses

Coming up with a reason for unexplained stock losses can provide sheep and beef farmers with another weapon in their fight to increase on-farm profitability.

If farmers know why a lamb dies, then they can take steps to mitigate the cause and ensure the survival of others.

A recent series of hands-on workshops run throughout the region by Northland Sheep and Beef Council and AgFirst Northland equipped farmers with the necessary skills to perform post mortems on their own farms to determine why stock had died.

At Dan Burchett’s Topuni Creek farm, Kaiwaka, around 30 farmers observed Northland vet Hugh Black demonstrate how to conduct a post mortem, before getting the opportunity to put into practise what they had learned. Participants used dead stock from their own farms.

Between five and 25 percent of lambs are lost around birth and lamb mortality represents a significant financial loss to the average farmer; even a small reduction in stock losses can have a major influence on the bottom-line. If farmers perform post mortems on as many dead lambs as possible, they can then start to build up a picture of any underlying problems and set about correcting them.

Major causes of lamb mortality include dystocia, starvation/exposure, iodine deficiency, navel infection, still births and congenital conditions.

One farmer said she found the workshop “really valuable”. “This sort of thing is exactly what we want from our farmers’ levies,” she said.

Image: Northland vet Hugh Black demonstates how to carry out a post mortem on farm stock.