It must be winter : We started feeding the ewes today

November was mostly dry and sunny shortening the winter by a month

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Today it all changed, there's snow forecast and its driven by north westerlies so the ewes have been given their first bale of haylage. We can afford to do this because we ended up with 50% more bales than last year and its all good quality thanks to the fine summer.

Its important that the ewes don't suffer a nutritional setback at this stage. When the tup went in at the start of November they were all in good condition and were all mated in two weeks. This suggests  that
they have a good number of fertile eggs implanted and at this stage we don't want them to be reabsorbed because of nutritional stress so we feed them at bit of oats and haylage. The more eggs shed,

implanted and then taken to full term means a higher lambing percentage; more lambs to sell and more to choose from for future breeding stock.

Lambing percentage ( percentage of lambs sold to ewes mated) is the most important single factor in the profitability of a sheep enterprise.