It is time to start advertising our lambs for sale – most will be six months old this month and so definitely old enough to leave their mums. Our plans are to try to sell all the ewe lambs and possibly one or two wethers and then keep two or three wethers for the freezer along with our Suffolk Mule. It was interesting to note the weights when we weighed them all recently for worming (accurate weights are important in order to get the doze right!). We mentioned back on the 9th August that 40kg is a target weight for lambs for the abattoir and we were delighted that our Badger face/Shetland ram lamb (Mrs White’s) was 35kg at five and a half months. We are not planning our abattoir trip till October and so by then, he should hopefully be in excess of 40kg. Our Suffolk/mule, at a whole month younger was 33kg! The Shetlands, by contrast, were all between 20kg and 30kg although the wethers were a lot nearer 30kg!
Talking of weights, we took delivery of our pork on Friday and were amazed to see that our carcass weights were a combined 131.2 kilos. We have not yet added up the actual amount of meat we got back but the joints alone (leg and shoulder) were about 1.5kg in weight each and there are 39 of them.... Pigs do provide a LOT of meat. Liveweight to butchered weight is around 64%, unlike sheep which is only around 33%.