Beth Phalp 26 North Yorkshire
Beth’s enthusiasm for the UK sheep industry bubbled over in her interview to join the ambassador programme this year, stating that her passion for sheep started from a young age. Now, Beth farms on the border of the North Yorkshire Moors with her parents, running a mixed farm, primarily tenanted. Beth is responsible for the 500 breeding ewe flock on the farm and has ambition to expand the enterprise further in the next five years. She hopes involvement with NSA and the Next Generation programme will help her do this. She says: “I hope involvement with the scheme will help me improve my knowledge but also will allow me to be involved in the future of sheep farming and the work the sector faces to promote and protect our country’s fantastic sheep farmers.” Beth adds: “I am a firm believer in if you want to do something enough and are passionate about the subject you will always find the time and succeed. I am delighted and grateful to have been chosen as an Next Generation ambassador and am looking forward to meeting the other ambassadors and getting started on the programme.”
Beth kept a blog in 2022
March. As calving is nearing an end, with around 15 cows left to calve, we are now preparing to start drilling the spring barley and oats, following on from the stubble turnips and wintered stubble. We are also gearing up to make room in the sheds for the majority of the ewes to be housed in the next 10 days ready for their due date on 1st April. We find the two/three weeks before due date to be the most nerve-wracking in many ways. It’s always a relief when you get the first few healthy lambs born. A very busy April approaches us, with 600 ewes hopefully set to lamb in a two-week period. This year we aim to record our lambing data/figures in more detail with a new stock recording programme. This will include tagging lambs at a couple of days old so they can be linked to their mother, the ease of lambing and any issues. This will hopefully make for a more efficient flock in future years. This year we bought 50 in-lamb Cheviots which have caused a few problems in the last week when housed, due to going down with hypocalcemia. Thankfully, so far, they have all responded quickly to treatment with calcium and glucose, but we have had to check them frequently for early intervention. We have kept them on a separate yard to the rest of the flock, to minimise any risks of abortion, fluke, iceberg diseases etc being passed to our main flock. Although we had been advised in our flock health plan and regular chats with our vet of precautions that should be taken buying ewes in, my knowledge of such problems was massively broadened during our first NSA Ambassador meeting, from Philippa Page’s talk. I found the first meeting very interesting, informative and enjoyable. I came back to the farm with lots of ideas of how to improve our system and tips for lambing time, including maximising productivity and flock health. In addition to meeting a great group of like-minded young farmers! Away from the farm, in addition to the NSA meeting, I was fortunate to attend the NFU conference in February as an NFU North East YFC representative. This was very interesting and worrying at the same time, with speakers discussing some of the challenges the farming sector is facing in the coming years, but reaffirmed the importance of making our businesses resilient.
April. Lambing 2022 is nearing the end for us, with around 35 ewes left to lamb. It has been a busy three weeks lambing 600 ewes indoors. The shearlings have kept us on our toes this year and have been slightly disappointing compared to other years, with several having one large lamb and one smaller lamb leading to longer time in the pens and a few cases of mis-mothering when out in the field. This is something we will be looking into with our flock health vet in the coming weeks. However, on the whole, we have had a successful lambing time and I am excited about the strong pure Cheviot gimmers we have had born. We are also quite proud to be finishing with only two pet lambs, which is a record for us. We have managed to adopt triplets on to singles successfully, meaning the majority of ewes have turned out to grass with two lambs each. We were slightly apprehensive this year with the absence of Spectam. Although we have been wanting to cut down on our antibiotic usage (after our vet informed us we were the third largest user of Spectam in the practice last year!) the stop in production has forced our hand. We have been very conscious of keeping pens extra clean and ensuring all lambs had good quality colostrum as early as possible. After the last NSA meeting I ordered a refractometer after learning about the differences in colostrum quality and was pleasantly surprised all the ewes I tested had good quality colostrum. Thankfully our concerns were rectified with very few cases of watery mouth, proving we don't actually need Spectam! Once I have caught up on a little sleep I will be looking into the data we have recorded from lambing time and will continue to monitor the lambs progress as we move towards vaccinating them for pasteurella and clostridial disease in a few weeks’ time. I am very much looking forwards to the next NSA Next Generation trip to Wales next month.
May. It was nice to catch up on a little sleep and social life after a busy lambing time, when it is literally sheep, eat and a tiny bit of sleep! Shepherding duties every morning take a fair while longer in May, checking all the fairly young lambs and trying to spot any that might not be thriving or issues with ewes, but it is lovely to see them skipping around in the sun and makes those long sleepless nights worth it! Mid-May marked our second NSA Next Generation Ambassador trip, this time in Welshpool. I found the live-to-dead sessions very interesting, as I’ve never been in an abattoir before or even done much grading of carcases previously, having always picked out prime lambs the way my dad and grandad have to send them to auction marts. I found the talks from ADHB incredibly useful and the fact they took us to the Farmers Fresh abattoir to follow the whole process. I now feel more confident picking out lambs and batching them into closer grades for live lamb pens, as well as looking into sending some of our lambs direct. Taking on board tips from these sessions I hope can make us maximise profit by sending our lambs to the correct place at the optimum time.
June. All lambs had their first vaccine by the end of May. We also treated all the lambs for tick prevention as, unfortunately, a couple of years ago we had a big problem with losing lambs with ticks at around one to two months’ of age. We now treat them when they have their first vaccine to try to prevent that, keeping them off grazing which we know is high in tick risk until treated. Thankfully no losses to ticks this year so we are hoping we have found the optimum time to treat them for our farm. We were also getting ready to start silaging but, due to a big lack of rain, the grass was very slow to grow. We’ve also put a reduced amount of fertiliser on this year due to the soaring costs, so we were a little later starting than normal and had much smaller crops. Thankfully we had some silage left from last year so that will hopefully see us through until next year. Away from farming I got my first little holiday in a while at the end of June for a best friend's hen do in Spain – miles apart from my normal day-to-day farm life but great fun and nice to get away for a few days.
July. In the last month we have been fairly busy with sheep work. Most of the batches have required worming from the faecal egg counts we carried out. We have also been footbathing the lambs when they come through the handling system to try to get on top of scald. Last year was the first year we have used a footrot vaccine on the ewes and it does seem to have helped the lameness a great deal, so we are hoping over the next couple of years it will decrease lameness in lambs too. The ewes have also all been in for shearing. A team of three shearers came and sped through them all in the day and I'm sure the sheep were very glad to get the fleeces off with the recent weather we have had. We will now wait a couple of weeks for some fleece growth before we dip the ewes and wean the lambs off. Apart from the sheep it has been an exciting month with the delivery of our new egg vending machine. We produce free range eggs on farm, having had to close our honestly box system in lockdown due to a small amount of not-so-honest customers! We were keen to look into other ways of selling direct off the farm as numerous customers were asking for this, so we did our research into vending machines and it arrived this month. It is now all set up in a shepherds hut that my dad has made from scratch, so fingers crossed for success with that, and hopefully it will develop in the future to sell other products produced on our farm.
August. We have the same complaint as nearly every farmer in England at the moment … we are desperate for rain. Although as I write this, we have just been rained off combining in our last field of corn with some very heavy rain. Hopefully, it’s the start of a good few days of rain and, for once, we certainly aren’t complaining about being rained off! Many of our fields are currently brown rather than green and we have had to start feeding cattle in the fields. We have managed not to have to feed sheep yet but it has got close. In the last month, we have dipped the ewes, ewe lambs and longer-stay store lambs. We have had a few more cases than normal with mastitis so we wanted to get them dipped before weaning them. At weaning time we also tried something new for us, suggested at our flock health meeting by our sheep vet. This was to bolus all the longer-stay lambs and ewe lambs, as we have previously had issues with low selenium and our vet advised this could be made worse with the drought conditions this year. We will see if it makes a difference through the rest of the year. I also weighed all the lambs at weaning time so it will be interesting to monitor weight gain. Now most of the cereal crops are safely in, we are getting ready to drill the stubble turnips and are looking into putting some new grass leys down for the sheep. I came back home from the last NSA session with lots of facts for my dad about grass! I am looking forward to seeing if we can reduce the amount of extra feed we normally use. As profit margins tighten, I think such improvements to our system will prove vital.
End of year comment. I have thoroughly enjoyed every part of the NSA Next Generation programme and feel very lucky to have been given the opportunity to be part of it. Each of the four delivery sessions was incredibly informative, looking into flock health, supply/food chain, grassland management and business management. I have taken new ideas and inspiration from them all, and gained some great friends and made fantastic contacts over the year. The most useful session for me was looking at different grass leys, including visiting farmers who are already using improved grassland management to reduce reliance on feed and, in doing so, reducing costs – something I’m keen to move towards at home. A couple of changes we have made at home include establishing new grass leys with red clover, sending some lambs direct for processing and looking into the viability of different practices on the farm.
Beth’s enthusiasm for the UK sheep industry bubbled over in her interview to join the ambassador programme this year, stating that her passion for sheep started from a young age. Now, Beth farms on the border of the North Yorkshire Moors with her parents, running a mixed farm, primarily tenanted. Beth is responsible for the 500 breeding ewe flock on the farm and has ambition to expand the enterprise further in the next five years. She hopes involvement with NSA and the Next Generation programme will help her do this. She says: “I hope involvement with the scheme will help me improve my knowledge but also will allow me to be involved in the future of sheep farming and the work the sector faces to promote and protect our country’s fantastic sheep farmers.” Beth adds: “I am a firm believer in if you want to do something enough and are passionate about the subject you will always find the time and succeed. I am delighted and grateful to have been chosen as an Next Generation ambassador and am looking forward to meeting the other ambassadors and getting started on the programme.”
Beth kept a blog in 2022
March. As calving is nearing an end, with around 15 cows left to calve, we are now preparing to start drilling the spring barley and oats, following on from the stubble turnips and wintered stubble. We are also gearing up to make room in the sheds for the majority of the ewes to be housed in the next 10 days ready for their due date on 1st April. We find the two/three weeks before due date to be the most nerve-wracking in many ways. It’s always a relief when you get the first few healthy lambs born. A very busy April approaches us, with 600 ewes hopefully set to lamb in a two-week period. This year we aim to record our lambing data/figures in more detail with a new stock recording programme. This will include tagging lambs at a couple of days old so they can be linked to their mother, the ease of lambing and any issues. This will hopefully make for a more efficient flock in future years. This year we bought 50 in-lamb Cheviots which have caused a few problems in the last week when housed, due to going down with hypocalcemia. Thankfully, so far, they have all responded quickly to treatment with calcium and glucose, but we have had to check them frequently for early intervention. We have kept them on a separate yard to the rest of the flock, to minimise any risks of abortion, fluke, iceberg diseases etc being passed to our main flock. Although we had been advised in our flock health plan and regular chats with our vet of precautions that should be taken buying ewes in, my knowledge of such problems was massively broadened during our first NSA Ambassador meeting, from Philippa Page’s talk. I found the first meeting very interesting, informative and enjoyable. I came back to the farm with lots of ideas of how to improve our system and tips for lambing time, including maximising productivity and flock health. In addition to meeting a great group of like-minded young farmers! Away from the farm, in addition to the NSA meeting, I was fortunate to attend the NFU conference in February as an NFU North East YFC representative. This was very interesting and worrying at the same time, with speakers discussing some of the challenges the farming sector is facing in the coming years, but reaffirmed the importance of making our businesses resilient.
April. Lambing 2022 is nearing the end for us, with around 35 ewes left to lamb. It has been a busy three weeks lambing 600 ewes indoors. The shearlings have kept us on our toes this year and have been slightly disappointing compared to other years, with several having one large lamb and one smaller lamb leading to longer time in the pens and a few cases of mis-mothering when out in the field. This is something we will be looking into with our flock health vet in the coming weeks. However, on the whole, we have had a successful lambing time and I am excited about the strong pure Cheviot gimmers we have had born. We are also quite proud to be finishing with only two pet lambs, which is a record for us. We have managed to adopt triplets on to singles successfully, meaning the majority of ewes have turned out to grass with two lambs each. We were slightly apprehensive this year with the absence of Spectam. Although we have been wanting to cut down on our antibiotic usage (after our vet informed us we were the third largest user of Spectam in the practice last year!) the stop in production has forced our hand. We have been very conscious of keeping pens extra clean and ensuring all lambs had good quality colostrum as early as possible. After the last NSA meeting I ordered a refractometer after learning about the differences in colostrum quality and was pleasantly surprised all the ewes I tested had good quality colostrum. Thankfully our concerns were rectified with very few cases of watery mouth, proving we don't actually need Spectam! Once I have caught up on a little sleep I will be looking into the data we have recorded from lambing time and will continue to monitor the lambs progress as we move towards vaccinating them for pasteurella and clostridial disease in a few weeks’ time. I am very much looking forwards to the next NSA Next Generation trip to Wales next month.
May. It was nice to catch up on a little sleep and social life after a busy lambing time, when it is literally sheep, eat and a tiny bit of sleep! Shepherding duties every morning take a fair while longer in May, checking all the fairly young lambs and trying to spot any that might not be thriving or issues with ewes, but it is lovely to see them skipping around in the sun and makes those long sleepless nights worth it! Mid-May marked our second NSA Next Generation Ambassador trip, this time in Welshpool. I found the live-to-dead sessions very interesting, as I’ve never been in an abattoir before or even done much grading of carcases previously, having always picked out prime lambs the way my dad and grandad have to send them to auction marts. I found the talks from ADHB incredibly useful and the fact they took us to the Farmers Fresh abattoir to follow the whole process. I now feel more confident picking out lambs and batching them into closer grades for live lamb pens, as well as looking into sending some of our lambs direct. Taking on board tips from these sessions I hope can make us maximise profit by sending our lambs to the correct place at the optimum time.
June. All lambs had their first vaccine by the end of May. We also treated all the lambs for tick prevention as, unfortunately, a couple of years ago we had a big problem with losing lambs with ticks at around one to two months’ of age. We now treat them when they have their first vaccine to try to prevent that, keeping them off grazing which we know is high in tick risk until treated. Thankfully no losses to ticks this year so we are hoping we have found the optimum time to treat them for our farm. We were also getting ready to start silaging but, due to a big lack of rain, the grass was very slow to grow. We’ve also put a reduced amount of fertiliser on this year due to the soaring costs, so we were a little later starting than normal and had much smaller crops. Thankfully we had some silage left from last year so that will hopefully see us through until next year. Away from farming I got my first little holiday in a while at the end of June for a best friend's hen do in Spain – miles apart from my normal day-to-day farm life but great fun and nice to get away for a few days.
July. In the last month we have been fairly busy with sheep work. Most of the batches have required worming from the faecal egg counts we carried out. We have also been footbathing the lambs when they come through the handling system to try to get on top of scald. Last year was the first year we have used a footrot vaccine on the ewes and it does seem to have helped the lameness a great deal, so we are hoping over the next couple of years it will decrease lameness in lambs too. The ewes have also all been in for shearing. A team of three shearers came and sped through them all in the day and I'm sure the sheep were very glad to get the fleeces off with the recent weather we have had. We will now wait a couple of weeks for some fleece growth before we dip the ewes and wean the lambs off. Apart from the sheep it has been an exciting month with the delivery of our new egg vending machine. We produce free range eggs on farm, having had to close our honestly box system in lockdown due to a small amount of not-so-honest customers! We were keen to look into other ways of selling direct off the farm as numerous customers were asking for this, so we did our research into vending machines and it arrived this month. It is now all set up in a shepherds hut that my dad has made from scratch, so fingers crossed for success with that, and hopefully it will develop in the future to sell other products produced on our farm.
August. We have the same complaint as nearly every farmer in England at the moment … we are desperate for rain. Although as I write this, we have just been rained off combining in our last field of corn with some very heavy rain. Hopefully, it’s the start of a good few days of rain and, for once, we certainly aren’t complaining about being rained off! Many of our fields are currently brown rather than green and we have had to start feeding cattle in the fields. We have managed not to have to feed sheep yet but it has got close. In the last month, we have dipped the ewes, ewe lambs and longer-stay store lambs. We have had a few more cases than normal with mastitis so we wanted to get them dipped before weaning them. At weaning time we also tried something new for us, suggested at our flock health meeting by our sheep vet. This was to bolus all the longer-stay lambs and ewe lambs, as we have previously had issues with low selenium and our vet advised this could be made worse with the drought conditions this year. We will see if it makes a difference through the rest of the year. I also weighed all the lambs at weaning time so it will be interesting to monitor weight gain. Now most of the cereal crops are safely in, we are getting ready to drill the stubble turnips and are looking into putting some new grass leys down for the sheep. I came back home from the last NSA session with lots of facts for my dad about grass! I am looking forward to seeing if we can reduce the amount of extra feed we normally use. As profit margins tighten, I think such improvements to our system will prove vital.
End of year comment. I have thoroughly enjoyed every part of the NSA Next Generation programme and feel very lucky to have been given the opportunity to be part of it. Each of the four delivery sessions was incredibly informative, looking into flock health, supply/food chain, grassland management and business management. I have taken new ideas and inspiration from them all, and gained some great friends and made fantastic contacts over the year. The most useful session for me was looking at different grass leys, including visiting farmers who are already using improved grassland management to reduce reliance on feed and, in doing so, reducing costs – something I’m keen to move towards at home. A couple of changes we have made at home include establishing new grass leys with red clover, sending some lambs direct for processing and looking into the viability of different practices on the farm.
