winter feeding

By the fourth week of December there is little grass on which the ewes can graze, and I certainly don’t want the flock to go hungry in mid pregnancy, so most years the Christmas week is the week in which I start to feed the ewe flock with silage. However when I offered the first flock their first silage of the year they walked away hardly giving the bale a sniff. It’s easy to detect  good silage with the human nose, but it’s sometimes hard to predict what sheep consider to be unpalatable. The bale that I had offered them came from the second cut of silage during the summer, and had been well and truly rained upon, and although it smelt ok to me the sheep had other ideas!

This leaves something of a problem as I know that the first batch of silage that we made during the fine June weather is so good that the sheep will gorge themselves, and in all probability finish the lot with half the winter still remaining. It’s also highly nutritious so it will be ideal for feeding over the lambing period. What’s the answer? well before I resort to buying a months supply of silage I think we’ll have to try a few more bales of the substandard stuff, it might just be that they were being over fussy at the beginning of the season… After all it smells alright to me!