Moving to the lambing beat

Every morning during lambing Alistair Bird heads out with his binoculars and a Go Pro camera to look for newborn lambs and birthing ewes that are struggling.

He uses the GoPro to record the highs and lows of farming for his Kiwi Farmer Youtube channel.

Most of the early lambs are born on a 65-hectare,  flat, dryland block on the other side of Oxford from his farm at Ashley Gorge.

"We have a split lambing so we lamb from August 1st here, about 380 ewes, and then at home on the hills, we lamb in the 3rd week of September, it's a bit later because of the altitude, we go up to 660 metres where we lamb and there can be a lot snow up there," he says.

Across the whole farming operation, he's aiming to have 1800 lambs on the ground by the end of the season.

Lambs account for about 60 percent of the farm's income. Wool on the other hand doesn't even cover his shearing bill.

Most of the ewes are perendales and so far he has been impressed with the lambs they've given birth to.

"They seem to hit the ground with a lot of vigour and they jump up and feed pretty easily," he says.

On the day that Country Life went on the lambing beat with Alistair, he had to pull a stuck lamb out of a ewe.

"It's been struggling for too long so the poor thing's dead."   

All the other newborn lambs in the paddock are fine.

"That's the nature of farming you don't get it right 100 percent of the time. You always feel disappointed and think what could I have done to have changed the outcome."

In a converted shed in the farmyard, teacher Genna Bird, is being a foster mum to at least 30 lambs. The number is likely to increase when lambing hits its straps.

Her plan is to on-sell some of them. They are mainly orphans from the farm and the rest are surplus to requirement, males from her parents' sheep milking farm.

"As an industry what do you do with the boy lambs?" she says. "So we chipped in and said we can take a few off your hands, as well as any orphans, so that's why you see some funny little goat-looking lambs!"

The earliest you can wean them off milk is when they are about 15 kilograms she reckons.

"Then for us, it will be putting them onto good pasture and raising them to be store (sold somewhere else), or some might be finished (for the freezing works) or sold back to the sheep milking operation."

In the meantime, no expense is spared for the lambs.

The smaller ones bounce around in designer woollen coats made by the Birds' daughter Millie.

She charges one dollar a coat and has successfully convinced Genna that more of the lambs need jackets.