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Lambing season is one of the most anticipated times in the UK’s agricultural calendar. It marks the beginning of a new cycle of life on farms across the country. Its significance is both economic and cultural. From seeing depictions of spring lambs on Easter cards, to eating a roast joint at a family gathering, lamb production has shaped British agriculture for centuries, contributing to both the nation's food industry and its landscape.

This time of year is crucial to a sheep farm’s success as the lambs born are not only sold for meat but also stocks are replenished to continue breeding, of both the mothering ewes and the well-bred tups or rams needed to maintain the quality of your flock.

As I type, many farmers are already in the thick of it. The start date of lambing varies and can depend on a number of factors; the breed of sheep you have and when they come in to season, the weather in relation to the geography of your location, whether you have the facilities to lamb indoors earlier or are able to do it outdoors later, and, quite critically, when you can persuade people to help you. The latter has always determined that we do the majority of the birthing during the Easter holidays. When I was growing up, my father was an agricultural lecturer so the time he was on holiday each spring from college, and my siblings and I were off school, was the focused period in which to do it. Although Easter is a moveable feast, putting the tups to the ewes around Nov 5th (bonfire night) each year seems to allow the 150 days or so gestation to complete in time for Good Friday.

I thought I’d write this piece to give a bit of an insight, from my perspective at least, into the fun and trauma of lambing, things you don’t necessarily think about or imagine could happen. Although lambing often attracts visitors, with some farms opening their gates to the public, not all aspects can be on display. Educational farm tours and hands-on experiences allow children and adults to witness the birth of lambs and learn about the care and management of livestock. But, in the day to day, when up to your elbows in various fluids, it’s often difficult to communicate to laymen how intense the lambing shed can become over those few short weeks. Witnessing a day on a farm can give people a connection to farming that helps them understand all the hard work that goes into producing the food they eat. Witnessing a night could give them PTSD. Here, I’ll offer you a small taste of what else might go on behind those bales and hurdles.

Prolapses!

In the run up to lambing there can be a few interesting snags. For example, one or two ewes every year decide that their cervix needs airing and promptly try to push the uterus to the exterior of their body. If you are a fan of the writings of Alf Wight, you may be aware of the granulated sugar trick. I deploy this method every time when reinserting the prolapse, much to the bewilderment of any onlookers, (not many people hang around for this one). Rubbing sugar straight from the bag gently on to the tissue reduces its size. With any luck, and with the use of a good strap and optional ‘spoon’, the ewe will go into labour a few weeks later and all will be well, but sadly her card is marked.

A more worrying problem is a ewe suffering from pregnancy toxaemia, or ‘twin lamb’. She will become vacant and stand away from the rest of the flock. If left unnoticed, she will go down and soon die. The lambs inside the womb are just taking too much out of her, literally. Getting her somewhere indoors and quickly administering a high energy drench containing concentrated cane molasses with added vitamins and minerals, she will soon be back on her feet. It can be surprising how quick.

Weather

While lambing may seem like an idyllic process, the weather in the UK is probably the greatest challenge to overcome and can cause chaos both inside the barn and out. If lambing outdoors, a harsh cold spell or prolonged wet conditions can pose a significant risk to both the ewes and lambs. If you lamb indoors, bad weather can prevent you from putting your newborns outside, cause a back log in the building and a risk to their health with bacteria multiplying in the pens, despite your best efforts to suppress them with clean bedding and disinfectant sprays or lime. A condition commonly called ‘watery mouth’, the symptoms being just that, can affect a lamb that hasn’t received enough colostrum immediately after birth, not building up their gut’s resistance and becoming susceptible to the bacteria. They can survive this if treated swiftly but sadly it is a common cause of lamb fatality. Being out in the fields sharply after mothering is the ideal. You must be vigilant however, ensuring that any lambs that are outside are kept full of milk, warm and dry, as young lambs can be vulnerable to hypothermia. Everyone has seen a picture of an adorable lamb sitting in an Aga oven. I think most shepherds would rather never be in that situation, although it makes a lovely snap. A heat lamp really is an essential bit of kit. I have an old Durham prison metal laundry bin (don’t ask) lined with straw that I pop any poorly or cold lambs in to. It’s amazing how quickly they can revive in the warmth.

When lambing commences, it is all hands-on deck, ready or not. You become the proverbial blue arsed fly, running around, picking up lambs, spraying their navels, constantly boiling a kettle, mixing colostrum powder, sterilising feeding tubes and bottles, looking for your coloured spray can that you left at the other end of the barn, filling water buckets and hayracks, checking tummys are full, checking teats are clear and udders are full too. You also become a ventriloquist, uniquely proficient in impersonating both ewes and lambs, throwing your voice to persuade one or the other to follow you. I consider myself a lamb whisperer, as my performances are particularly convincing, even if I do say so myself.

The Mix Ups

Imagine walking into a barn at 5 am after 4 hours sleep (if lucky) to find that 3 ewes have given birth. Sheep tend to lamb like dominoes, the first labour triggering her straw bed neighbour and then also the neighbour on her other side. The first girl drops a lamb and starts to lick it. The next ewe, overcome with hormones, starts to lick it too. The first ewe then lies down to have her second lamb. Meanwhile the first lamb has managed to stand up and is happily feeding from the second ewe. Then she starts to go into labour herself, and the first lamb, eyes still wet with amniotic fluid, blindly wanders off searching for more milk. He will get bumped by the ewes who are still in the grumpy stages of pregnancy and perhaps eventually settle under the hay rack. Back to the maternity corner, we have two ewes and potentially 3 lambs all milling around together. Add another hormonal ewe and another 2 lambs, all staggering between udders while being licked, it’s quite the melee. Eventually the dreamy glaze of new motherhood falls from their eyes and they start to sniff the lambs with more scepticism. That’s not mine, head bump away, neither is that one… She’ll walk around the barn bleating loudly in the hope her own lamb calls back. It’s completely futile. And then I walk in, to find 5 lambs and a pen of nonchalant ewes, looking at the barn ceiling, whistling Dixie. A quick bum inspection pinpoints the culprits, I have no idea who belongs to whom, or who are siblings even, they all look quite samey unfortunately. All I can do is gather the lambs and put them outside the pen, hoping the three mums will attend the school gates for collection. I put each ewe in an individual pen then start to play the game. Each ewe gets 2 cards, they can either stick or twist. Twisting involves spinning on the spot trying to prevent the lamb from feeding, so now that lamb/card is swapped with another players. It’s all good fun. Eventually they are happy with the cards dealt and you can relax, until you find a random lamb by the hay rack and realise one of them may have had unscanned triplets, or a fourth ewe has given birth and managed not to show any signs on her tail.

When they’re in their individual mothering pen, the story isn’t over. You diligently watch to make sure each lamb has worked out where the milk bar is. Some just can’t work it out and need guidance, some have trouble with enlarged teats, too engorged with milk to get their mouths around. A nice problem to have you may think, but the only solution is to physically milk her yourself and give the colostrum via a tube to the infant. Eventually they’ve fed and you can go and have a cup of tea. And when you come back half an hour later, the ewe is lying down, chewing the cud, her lamb dead beneath her, suffocated. Luckily this is fairly rare and sometimes symptomatic of another issue the ewe has but also it can just be that the ewe is a terrible mother. When tragedy strikes, it can be a good opportunity to adopt a spare triplet or orphan lamb to the ewe but a lady who sits on her offspring and can’t feel the lump underneath her bum probably shouldn’t be trusted with another dependant.

Tiny Hands

We monitor our flock very closely during this time, as labour often occurs at night or in the early hours of the morning. In the barn we are lucky enough to have cctv installed with a moveable camera operated from our phones. I am a midwife on call 24/7. Some ewes may require assistance during birth, and we must be prepared to intervene if the ewe is having difficulty delivering. Not all ewes cough and spit the lambs out easily, more’s the pity. Older ewes are generally easier but any lamb that isn’t presenting in the correct way can have real difficulty and need help. There are several possible issues. These include breach (tail first), head out on its own and swollen, or twins trying to arrive together.

I think I first put my arm up a sheep when I was about 10. My dad clocked that I had tiny hands and persuaded me to have a feel about to see if I could get a pair of legs to appear at the stage door. He taught me how to feel for the joints, to work out which leg was which from the direction they bend, to feel down the lamb’s shoulder to ensure you are holding the legs of one lamb and not one from each twin. He showed me how to gently push a head back so that the legs can be brought forward into the canal and always to pull steadily downwards away from the tail. All lessons I take for granted now that my hands are adult size, but invaluable knowledge lodged into my brain to use at 3am when not fully conscious. I remember one night, before a GCSE mock exam the next day, I was gently woken in the early hours, guided downstairs to the porch to find that my dad had reversed his Hilux truck as close as possible to the front door with the tailgate down and a ewe’s back end presented for me to extract a stuck lamb in my pyjamas. Character building, as they say. My exam results were dreadful but never mind, I got the lamb out alive.

Post Natal

It is common practice to dip the lamb’s navel in iodine or copper sulphate solution straight after birth to quicken the drying so that nasty bugs don’t enter their umbilical cord. Postpartum, a common problem for the ewe can be calcium deficiency, especially if she has produced a couple of strapping drinkers who can outstrip her supply quicker than she can replenish it. Like toxaemia, the ewe can go down quite quickly, and fast action is needed to inject calcium subcutaneously into her.

My sense of smell during the season becomes finely tuned to pick up the slightest whiff and as a result I can confidently say that I can sniff out a retained placenta from 50 paces. This is another condition that can kill her if untreated.

Every shepherd and shepherdess has a horror story, a tale of when they didn’t quite get there in time when a lamb was born with a too thick veil over its face and suffocated, or when a crow swooped in and pecked at eyes and tongues. When a lamb managed to fall into a bucket and drown in two inches of water. They’ll also have photos on their phones of natal abnormalities, mummified stillborns, partially reabsorbed foetuses, and the devastating deformities caused by the Schmallenberg virus. They’ll have seen lambs born with intestinal ruptures at their navals and tiny premature lambs with soft hooves that somehow survive but never thrive. Haunting stuff that would cause many people sleepless nights but must be taken in one’s stride as you’re likely to see it all again the following year. There is a plethora of other ailments and symptoms that can cause you to worry. Online forums and chat rooms can be an invaluable source of advice and answers if you don’t have an ancient shepherd to hand. If you can solve the problem yourself without calling the vet, you feel like you’re winning. However, there are instances where that phone call must be made for the welfare of the animal.

Multiples

Have you ever seen a social media post showing a photo of a ewe with 4, 5 or even 6 lambs by her feet? This is my worst nightmare. Triplets are bad enough! Although producing more lambs would seem a positive, the ewe only has two teats and is very unlikely to be able to physically feed all the lambs without help. That help can prove very expensive and time consuming as the price of powdered milk replacer is ridiculously high. Every year I end up with a small band of miscreants, usually the runty triplets, the lamb whose mother wandered off and pretended she had never given birth, the slow thick headed lamb who just can’t work out where to feed from. Although ideally, I would try to adopt most of these lambs onto ewes who have either sadly lost a lamb or only had one, it’s not as easy as you’d like it to be and I have to reluctantly place them in my pet lamb pen. Some shepherds sell these cades to farmers who are happy to raise them, but I take them on myself, often keeping the females to adulthood. Consequently I have quite a few ewes who expect head scratches and biscuits every time they see me.

Adoption

Trying to convince a ewe to accept another’s lamb as their own can be a challenge. It’s hard to imagine that one lamb could smell that much different from another but a ewe’s nose rarely lies and the moment she suspects that she is feeding someone else’s child, she will reject that lamb, sometimes violently. We have ways of making them take another lamb… an adopter pen where her head is held in a yoke, and she is plied with copious amounts of food to keep her entertained while a new lamb is placed behind her to feed. Once she’d urinated on the lamb a few times and her milk has passed through their gut, she will hopefully be fooled in to thinking the black lamb she gave birth to has turned snowy white overnight. Another method of instantaneous adoption is to collect the birth sack fluids in a bucket and place the lamb to be adopted in it for a bath. We farmers are fortunate that, although stubborn, sheep are not deep thinkers, contemplating the existential meaning of being, so can be quite easy to trick if you deploy some David Blaine mind games.

Loneliness, but you are not alone

The incredibly long days, and seemingly longer nights, in the lambing shed, can be very isolating. You may or may not have willing helpers. Personally, I usually end up on my own at 2am, just ready to switch off the barn lights, and out of the corner of my eye see a pinky brown balloon hanging from a ewe’s back end. I’m not going anywhere for a while. Likewise, in the morning, there is no motivation in the world that can get you out of bed like knowing something is probably going to die if you don’t.

It's not just the emotional cost that takes it’s toll this time of year. Lambing is one of the most expensive ventures a farm can undertake. The simple sundries needed along with medicines and other equipment, can really see your bank account shrink as you spend nearly all the money you’ve just made selling last year’s crop of lambs. Cans of coloured spray, rubber rings, powdered colostrum and milk replacer, feeding bottles and tubes, navel spray, gloves, supplementary feeds, the list is extensive.

The weird thing about lambing, I think, is that the process is almost completely incomprehensible to non-farming folk. The fact that you will nearly kill yourself to take care of these animals who barely bring you any income, and rarely much joy, as they frustratingly drop-down dead for no apparent reason or ungratefully knock you over at feeding time, just makes no sense to sensible people. Why do we care so much for these creatures, showing them affection and even keeping some of them as named pets, when ultimately we send them away to slaughter?

We are, for want of a better kind of reasoning, motivated by obligation and legacy. It’s bred into you. That’s not to say that anyone can’t find their way into discovering that same level of insanity when not born on a farm. There is often the slogan shared, ‘Thank A Farmer’, but personally I don’t feel like I need any gratitude, as it’s my choice, even if compelled by a sense of historical duty, I don’t have to do this. Producing food is the final product, but a sense of doing something worthwhile is also part of the end result.

The Future

As we tread cautiously into uncertain international political security, it seems the opposite of insanity to keep going with our agricultural traditions to provide stability for the nation. As we are seemingly dragged towards the government’s Net Zero goals, it feels counter intuitive to try to decrease our food production capabilities in favour of importing the same products from abroad with the associated carbon footprint cost.

Everyone’s lambing is different. You may read this as a seasoned lamber and have completely opposing experiences and feelings. We all have alternative techniques, set ups and outlooks, but ultimately the end result is the same. I feel there is an unspoken camaraderie between farmers who rarely interact with each other but can give a knowing nod to a fellow sufferer. This has been profoundly compounded since the autumn 2024 budget.

If by the end of lambing all I have to show for it is chapped hands and sleep deprivation, I can confidently say I don’t expect anyone’s pity for the waking nightmare we put ourselves through. For some unknown reason, we sadistically look forward to lambing even though we swore last year we wouldn’t do it again. However, for the first time in a long time, probably since the Foot and Mouth outbreak of 2001, I have felt a real sense that we are coming to the end, as external factors will dictate our future as a small family run farm. The only pity should now be reserved for those future generations who may never experience the sheer hell of lambing season. I know I would miss it terribly.

Emily Terry

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