Regerative grazing sheep breed?

Wood field · Jul 4, 2022

Al R said:
The term regenerative ag seriously boils my pi55. Why not call it traditional methods?
I’ve got some 39 year old leys here which would make a mockery out of anything that could actually be sown. Wild white clover, wild red clover, dandelions/plantain in abundance, loads of purple fog type grasses, it’s very seldom that there isn’t something in flower or seeding. Just like most of the hills. The land is bared off over winter and then reduced stocking rate as the grass growth appears giving an abundance of wildlife etc.
We had a dung beetle survey done by a leading dung beetle scientist years ago who’d travelled the world and actually discovered several totally new species of dung beetles on the farm here

Ours is similar, red and white clover etc
I am a bit old fashioned in the way I farm it
I tend to call it traditional, most of you will have farmed far longer than me although I am classed as an old fart I worked in industry until 10 years ago , so I am in no way trying to teach anyone how to suck eggs, but whatever terminology chosen, surely we all try and farm in the best way to suite the ground we have

Henery · Jul 4, 2022

An organic farming friend on the south coast with a flock of Romney’s, all grass system, is convinced that pour on fly treatments like Clik will be banned sooner rather than later.
He is trying to manage without….. sounds like a nightmare to me.

Romney’s will make an excellent job of converting grass into meat and are very hardy… Shedding sheep ( we have a few ) will do the same … tho ours don’t seem as sound in their feet …..
Both lamb out, live on forage , etc etc….. take your pick…. Selling NZ Romney ewe lambs is not difficult

Regenerative farming…. What my old Dad practiced and always said we would have to go back to….. he was right …as usual!

Frank-the-Wool · Jul 4, 2022

The chemical in Clik is Dycyclanil which binds with the Lanolin in a sheep's fleece and is in fact an IGR (Insect Growth Regulator). It won't kill flies! It does however prevent the maggots from growing so they just die off, providing it has been applied before the eggs are laid.

The withdrawal periods are very much related to keeping the chemical out of water courses as it does have an effect on bugs and beetles if they get polluted by it. So you don't want wool or sheepskins being processed with a lot of the chemical on them.

As a Postscript I have yet to find out what Regenerative Farming actually is.

I am sure it is all I have ever know!!!!!!

Bury the Trash · Jul 4, 2022

CopperBeech said:
The issue is ivermectin, other groups are ok with regard to the dung beetles etc.

I think all sheep farmers should be striving to reduce the number of drenches, regardless of that system that you run.

On clean ground with a sensible rotational grazing system etc it should be possible to get down to pretty much no drenches.

On sheep only ground that’s not so easy, but the right kind of sheep and grazing system should be able to drop some.

I can’t comment on shitty tails because we don’t have them.

me neither but Nemo caught me out back along with a knock effect done a bit late and with ivermectin as i wanted to be sure.
Best doing sheep so far avoiding have been the flock on a new Westerwolds ley after Barley and oats , nice (actually ) clean ground ,interestingly as it went to seed infront of them they ate the seed heads off which i hadnt really observed sheep doing enmasse before, bit stemmy but its lowering gradually as the dry is not bringing too much new green up, set stocked on the one field for my sins will stay there until its eaten down and a more 'comprehensive' ley drilled in .

Not trendily 'regerative'

i guess but not 'rogerative'

either ,cant be because weve been doing it long enough and withoiut huge inputs.

CopperBeech · Jul 4, 2022

It does make me laugh how threatened some people apparently are, by something which isn’t being forced on them and doesn’t stop them doing anything

Regenerative agriculture is pretty much what it says on the tin - a form of agriculture which seeks to regenerate the soil and natural biodiversity on many levels through certain practices. Some of these are pretty traditional ways of doing things and some quite new.

Lots of folk already do these things but some could benefit a lot by adopting some of them. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing the distance travelled on a very large arable estate over the last decade and it’s quite impressive.

CopperBeech · Jul 4, 2022

Bury the Trash said:
me neither but Nemo caught me out back along with a knock effect done a bit late and with ivermectin as i wanted to be sure.
Best doing sheep so far avoiding have been the flock on a new Westerwolds ley after Barley and oats , nice (actually ) clean ground ,interestingly as it went to seed infront of them they ate the seed heads off which i hadnt really observed sheep doing enmasse before, bit stemmy but its lowering gradually as the dry is not bringing too much new green up, set stocked on the one field for my sins will stay there until its eaten down and a more 'comprehensive' ley drilled in .

Not trendily 'regerative' i guess but not 'rogerative' either ,cant be because weve been doing it long enough and withoiut huge inputs.

It is possible to create similar cleaner grazing systems on heavily ‘sheeped’ PP. Well I hope it is

because I’m just about to try to do just that

Bury the Trash · Jul 4, 2022

CopperBeech said:
It is possible to create similar cleaner grazing systems on heavily ‘sheeped’ PP. Well I hope it is because I’m just about to try to do just that

We also have fields of never (as far i know,) ripped or reseeded proper PP and haven't had any Cattle for 15 yrs or so (bTB hotspot main being the reason) infact i was complimented yesterday by someone on the state of one of our low lying river meadow fields , which i think looks a bit of a rank jungle

...anyway its a small area of Culm measure and its the rushes they were after ,a group of rush basket weavers

..... me quietly says " youre welcome "

Money for them ? no thats ok guys just a donation to Charity will be fine ,

................ then in a day or 2 we will whack a load of weaned ewes on it lol.

Of course really tight grazing can be achieved healthily at times with sheep but they dont have the ground pressure / foot area to tread in like cattle.

Let us know how it goes.

Humble Village Farmer · Jul 4, 2022

Doesn't regeneration mean just that? It's more a question of what you want to restore. (Presumably you have to first believe what you are dealing with is degraded). it really means what you want it to mean. But for me (and I wouldn't claim to be particularly regenerative, I'm not clever enough), it's more a question of thinking about everything you put on and everything you take off, and what the long and short term effects are.

Bury the Trash · Jul 4, 2022

Yes Its Just another tagline ,call it what you like.

Guleesh · Jul 4, 2022

Bury the Trash said:
Yes Its Just another tagline ,call it what you like.

Yes, quite right. When we mess about with the electric fence here, trying our best to regenerate our degraded land, then rather then calling what we do 'regenerative grazing' I like to call it 'Superior grazing' to let all other graziers of the world know that their grazing systems are inferior to mine and basically sh!t in comparison.

Bones · Jul 4, 2022

CopperBeech said:
The issue is ivermectin, other groups are ok with regard to the dung beetles etc.

I think all sheep farmers should be striving to reduce the number of drenches, regardless of that system that you run.

On clean ground with a sensible rotational grazing system etc it should be possible to get down to pretty much no drenches.

On sheep only ground that’s not so easy, but the right kind of sheep and grazing system should be able to drop some.

I can’t comment on shitty tails because we don’t have them.

I'd cut well back on drenching, until it caught up with me this year with my old friend the barber pole worm,

Kiwi Pete · Jul 4, 2022

Al R said:
The term regenerative ag seriously boils my pi55. Why not call it traditional methods?
I’ve got some 39 year old leys here which would make a mockery out of anything that could actually be sown. Wild white clover, wild red clover, dandelions/plantain in abundance, loads of purple fog type grasses, it’s very seldom that there isn’t something in flower or seeding. Just like most of the hills. The land is bared off over winter and then reduced stocking rate as the grass growth appears giving an abundance of wildlife etc.
We had a dung beetle survey done by a leading dung beetle scientist years ago who’d travelled the world and actually discovered several totally new species of dung beetles on the farm here

Traditional methods and modern methods are as re/de-generative as the other, is the unfortunate truth of it

Because despite the appearance that production methods make all the difference, that's not really the case at all.
The current centralised food model is fragile, and rolling this turd in glitter doesn't make it anything other than a turd rolled in glitter.
One part breaks down and the whole thing stops... that aint regenerative, is it.

Who wants "truth" when we can pretend that some sunflowers in a paddock somewhere more than makes up for giving away produce to a supermarket who doesn't know or care about your profitability, if you succeed or fail, or even if you're alright that they handle the marketing and keep most the value added.

Regenerative really has so little to do with producing good commodities to be fed into a mechanism, that it's odd that it was ever linked to the word agriculture in the first place.
Makes me scratch my head too.

Modern production ag. is quite literally what makes modern degeneracy so possible

and what are we going to do [at our end] that changes that fact....??

Moan about prices, other people, weather, and everything being "a new fad"?
Or take on that that's pretty much degeneracy defined?

Kiwi Pete · Jul 4, 2022

ilovebalingtoo said:
What breeds of sheep would suit a regenerative grazing approach, obviously a shedder but is an easycare the answer or something like a wiltshire horn more suitable for a hardy type grazer of more rough pasture?

Pretty much any breed that's functional within the system you design.
Less functional animals single themselves out, more functional animals create more functional animals. Just know which is which

neilo · Jul 5, 2022

Bones said:
I'd cut well back on drenching, until it caught up with me this year with my old friend the barber pole worm,

That’s exactly what I experienced last winter too, which I’m sure was exacerbated by following ‘best practice’.
After years of hardly worming anything per-lambing, and certainly avoiding LA Cydectin inj, that’s exactly what they had this year, in an attempt to hoover up as many of the heamonchus population as possible.
Lambs will be wormed less as a result I expect, but I’ll only do it as a one off.

Global ovine · Jul 5, 2022

Kiwi Pete said:
Pretty much any breed that's functional within the system you design.
Less functional animals single themselves out, more functional animals create more functional animals. Just know which is which

Great post.
The "just knowing which is which" is the key.
Breeders goals are the answer, if they are striving to produce functional sheep they need to impose some challenge on their flocks. For those faults and disease susceptibilities that are visually easily recognised its a doozy, like leg and feet problems, difficult lambing, dagginess, mastitis, teat size and placement etc. But for disease resistance such as susceptibility/resistance to worms a science based protocol of measurements need to be undertaken.
In short, find a breeder that has low tolerance to the faults that cause you hassles and cost.

If your so called regenerative farming system relies on any form of rotational grazing involving mobs concentrated on small areas and moved frequently, then sheep bred under any system of rotational grazing where ancestors had to be competitive grazers are best suited. Sheep derived from flocks of small mobs supplemented with high energy feedstuffs lead to sheep less capable of competing in a mob.

Finding a suitable breeder to your system is more important than breed, as breeders can make or break a breed.

Kiwi Pete · Jul 6, 2022

Global ovine said:
Great post.
The "just knowing which is which" is the key.
Breeders goals are the answer, if they are striving to produce functional sheep they need to impose some challenge on their flocks. For those faults and disease susceptibilities that are visually easily recognised its a doozy, like leg and feet problems, difficult lambing, dagginess, mastitis, teat size and placement etc. But for disease resistance such as susceptibility/resistance to worms a science based protocol of measurements need to be undertaken.
In short, find a breeder that has low tolerance to the faults that cause you hassles and cost.

If your so called regenerative farming system relies on any form of rotational grazing involving mobs concentrated on small areas and moved frequently, then sheep bred under any system of rotational grazing where ancestors had to be competitive grazers are best suited. Sheep derived from flocks of small mobs supplemented with high energy feedstuffs lead to sheep less capable of competing in a mob.

Finding a suitable breeder to your system is more important than breed, as breeders can make or break a breed.

Thank you.
My first real exposure to "know which is which" came from an anecdote - our near neighbour had great hoggets, as good as you'd see anywhere - and declining lambing /flock performance.

His great big hoggets, as it turned out, were all the early singles, hence their liveweight at tupping time and the drop in lambing %, as he was quite literally breeding fecundity out of his flock.

Easy to play tricks on ourself, which loosely defines much of "the regenerative agriculture movement" at the moment

Bury the Trash · Jul 6, 2022

Kiwi Pete said:
Pretty much any breed that's functional within the system you design.
Less functional animals single themselves out, more functional animals create more functional animals. Just know which is which

Thats where,
In the early days particularly, tagging at birth and Eid recording from then on is a good modern tool for that , bit more detail initially than the ear notch ,if youre a techy sort is better i suppose as theres that could help with motivation in using it.
and if youre buying in buy from somewhere that you can trust / look at figures or flock ,is doing the same thing.or more or less the same .

CopperBeech · Jul 6, 2022

Kiwi Pete said:
Thank you.
My first real exposure to "know which is which" came from an anecdote - our near neighbour had great hoggets, as good as you'd see anywhere - and declining lambing /flock performance.

His great big hoggets, as it turned out, were all the early singles, hence their liveweight at tupping time and the drop in lambing %, as he was quite literally breeding fecundity out of his flock.

Easy to play tricks on ourself, which loosely defines much of "the regenerative agriculture movement" at the moment

It would take a while though wouldn’t it. For selecting singles to have an over all flock effect.

CopperBeech · Jul 6, 2022

Bury the Trash said:
Thats where,
In the early days particularly, tagging at birth and Eid recording from then on is a good modern tool for that , bit more detail initially than the ear notch ,if youre a techy sort is better i suppose as theres that could help with motivation in using it.
and if youre buying in buy from somewhere that you can trust / look at figures or flock ,is doing the same thing.or more or less the same .

Interestingly it’s only with SIG that you can look at a breeders figures, you can’t on Sil to my understanding ? Figures should really be for the breeder to use in selection, not the ram buyer really.

unlacedgecko · Jul 6, 2022

CopperBeech said:
Interestingly it’s only with SIG that you can look at a breeders figures, you can’t on Sil to my understanding ? Figures should really be for the breeder to use in selection, not the ram buyer really.

What's the logic behind that?

Regerative grazing sheep breed?

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