NSA Central Region farm walk at Edale National Trust Farm

On Sunday the 9th November wNSA headed to Hardenclough Farm, a National trust farm run by James Metcalf and family. He talked attendees through his system and how it has changed over time adapting to new environmental schemes and regulations. 

An area that once ran 700 ewes now runs 400 and 10 Luing cows. The sheep breed has also changed over time, moving to cheviots initially park type, but now moving over to a flock of smaller hill cheviots. Although the scanning is higher for the Park sheep, the number of lambs weaned virtually the same across the types, with the Hill type requiring fewer inputs. 

Showing is an important part to the flock to achieve the high profile and recognition for their quality, but also provides quality family time together and helps to enthuse the next generation. 

Lambing is planned to match with the school holidays and kept compact, with most sheep lambing in the first cycle. Lambing inside helps to minimise the challenges associated with farming in the shadow of Mam tor, with large numbers of people accessing the landscape. 

More change is coming to the farm with talks in process for the landscape recovery scheme to replace the current higher level scheme, the schemes will be more long term, and while some changes will be needed to access the funding, these are deemed very achievable. To intensify the system, store lambs are bought in small batches for a short term finishing on a grain diet in sheds. Lambs are bought and sold in similar numbers most week, with the aim of keeping 300 on the farm to help spread the risk on the 1000 that are finished annually. 

Mark from LLM vets gave the visiting group an informative talk on how we can prepare for lambing, with the countdown already on with the rams running with the ewes. Mark highlighted the importance of ewe nutrition and condition, and how these interact and lead to most of the common problems we see on farm. He highlighted a key resource in AHDB's Feeding the Ewe manual and some top tips on how to handle common problems seen around lambing. He also highlighted the importance of looking at what information we have and starting to record KPIs from data we already have access to; lambs sold, time, number of ewes, to work out if we are on target and where we can make improvements. 

These events wouldn't be possible without our sponsors; Thank you to Minexcel, SWLF and LLM Vets.