- Location
- Fife
f**k me that's interesting
Sheep bolus
- Thread starter TexelBen
- Start date
- Location
- Fife
Trace Elements
Funny story there....
i'd never pay tuppence extra for the sulphur in NPK.
Last year - likely the final application here - i had no choice.
So the 15 tonnes - or whatever it was- had sulphur.
Several acres of mowing were still stocked with couples, as is always the cases, and the contractors lad just drove thru them.
2 weeks later, and there's loadsa lame lambs. Examination reveals a puncture in the skin between the claws, just the size of a fert prill.
Neat as you like, all clean, and just as if you'd got a leather punch in there.
- Location
- Fife
Were you able to detect the prills within the flesh?
- Location
- Montgomeryshire
I’ve no doubt that you could easily select sheep that are less effected by any TE deficiency on any one block of land. Whether that would ever economically outweigh the relatively low cost of supplementing deficiency is a very different matter though.
Is not having to supplement for known TE deficiencies more important than potential lost production? It’s fairly easy to run ewes with no inputs but producing only 100% or so.
but the point will be for the future is will those te's and mins /vits stay as cost effective as they are up to now .
genetic 'improvement' takes a day or 2.
no...by the time we turned them up -thinking it would be a touch of strip- there was nothing but a neat clean puncture hole...pink flesh under the healthy looking skin.
bit of blue spray, and some went on fine. Some were bollixed
For some of our ewes- or more pointedly, some of the hill- it's the make or break.
£1 a bolus is a no brainer.
What the ceiling would be i couldn't say.
This is proper use of technology. Had big resistance issues with triclabendazole when I started here a few years ago, but what was interesting, despite being told that there is no immunity to fluke like there is to worms, some ewes were dead on their feet, yet plenty were ok running on the same ground, I’ve always thought there had to be some level of natural immunity.
Are you involved in this kind of work?
ringi
Member
Not involved in this work, I saw an article a few weeks ago about that Ireland is doing and have enough understanding of science to know its importance. There is no edvidance of any complete immunity to fluke, I expect the possibly improvement from breeding will be similar to worms resistance.
Think how long it took going from counting worm eggs to having a test that gives a semi repeatable number that represents the level of worm resistance a sheep has. Seperating the level of resistance from the randomness of environmental exposure when both contribute to the same measured number will never be easy.
(Thankfully as the size of datasets increase the ramdom numbers tend to cancel each other out, hence the importance of the Irish data collection process. )
Sequencing of DNA and what can be data with the data is nothing new, however what costed hundreds of thousands of pounds to do a few years ago can now be done for under £20 using the new sequencing chips. The price is likely to drop a more over the next few years, I don't know if the cost will become low enough to sequence every candidate replacement ewe.
Likewise the data processing has been understood for a long time, for example BLUP is from the 1950s.
Think how long it took going from counting worm eggs to having a test that gives a semi repeatable number that represents the level of worm resistance a sheep has. Seperating the level of resistance from the randomness of environmental exposure when both contribute to the same measured number will never be easy.
(Thankfully as the size of datasets increase the ramdom numbers tend to cancel each other out, hence the importance of the Irish data collection process. )
Many people mix up research not having yet been done with something not being possible and hence will assume something can't be true if no research papers have yet found it.
Sequencing of DNA and what can be data with the data is nothing new, however what costed hundreds of thousands of pounds to do a few years ago can now be done for under £20 using the new sequencing chips. The price is likely to drop a more over the next few years, I don't know if the cost will become low enough to sequence every candidate replacement ewe.
Likewise the data processing has been understood for a long time, for example BLUP is from the 1950s.
hill breeds will be bred to withstand mineral deficiency that’s why most mountains have a type that suits/selected to thrive in that environment in some places you only have to go across the valley and sheep from one side will not do on the other side it’s the same grazing and wether so not an environmental change it’s the soil/ mineral changes
- Location
- Isle of Skye
We have extremely flukey ground here. I reckon It's pretty obvious that some animals are far more susceptible than others. My personal experience is also that some breeds are more susceptible than others, running blackface, cheviot and also some texX on the same ground and on the same system for some years now, and when fluke is an issue then it will affect the blackies the least, the texX the most and the cheviots somewhere in the middle. Although this is what I see for the sheep that happen to be here, of course I accept, these are rather small gene pools to make sweeping assumptions about breeds from.
Not so sure about the theory of differing levels of immunity to fluke, but perhaps differing capacity? I like mutton so naturally, over the years, I've slaughtered and butchered quite a few of each breed that are here. I still clearly remember the first texX I processed, On removing the liver, very much looking forward to a big lunch, I then spent a few seconds searching for the rest of it... turns out it was just a much smaller liver than what I'd come to expect from butchering blackies... a breed trend I've noticed to varying extents since. Again, it's maybe just traits confined to the particular sheep that are here, but from this, I speculate that quite simply, the size of the liver may be a major factor, with some breeds bred in flukey environments for the longest having evolved larger livers over years, and therefore able to carry a greater fluke burden as they still have sufficient healthy liver tissue to maintain function.
Not so sure about the theory of differing levels of immunity to fluke, but perhaps differing capacity? I like mutton so naturally, over the years, I've slaughtered and butchered quite a few of each breed that are here. I still clearly remember the first texX I processed, On removing the liver, very much looking forward to a big lunch, I then spent a few seconds searching for the rest of it... turns out it was just a much smaller liver than what I'd come to expect from butchering blackies... a breed trend I've noticed to varying extents since. Again, it's maybe just traits confined to the particular sheep that are here, but from this, I speculate that quite simply, the size of the liver may be a major factor, with some breeds bred in flukey environments for the longest having evolved larger livers over years, and therefore able to carry a greater fluke burden as they still have sufficient healthy liver tissue to maintain function.
- Location
- North Yorkshire
We do ours in a modulamb dagging crate, fluke then bolus,i dont have a combi clamp and won't be getting one .
interestin @exmoordave 's comment once about the position of clamp action with regards the animal ie different size in where/how the clamp acts on it and how doing lambs in the Tepari wasnt very good .pushing the diaphragm /lungs in cant be helpful to the job infact the reverse you might think?
Immobilising the beggars in some way
job done.We used to do it in the shedding race, but it was bloody hard work
- Location
- Highland
Very interesting! I wonder if anyone has looked at this? Also just proves once again when we start breeding for specific narrow traits, things that we can't see, or don't think to look at, suffer.
We've talked about the number of sheep a given area of ground can carry, and that it will always return to that. Along the same lines I wonder if any given sheep can only produce so much "body". So if the emphasis is on producing meat - a long back and a huge rear end - who would have thought the innards would have suffered for it. The mouth can only eat so much in a day, and the digestion and nutrient processing must be within a narrow set of parameters regardless of the breed. Defo not survival of the fittest.
ringi
Member
One option would be to only take replacements from the oldest ewes while using proformance indexes to select the rams and culling hard all ewes that give problems.
ORC research 2020 ''The requirement for cobalt is 0.2mg per kg of dry matter. Willow leaves had around 3.5mg of cobalt per kg of dry matter in the September leaves, 17 times the requirement, and tenfold the requirement at just over 2mg in the spring sample.
Willow also produced the high concentrations of zinc (five times the requirement at 200mg per kg of dry matter) while alder had 50mg and oak around half that.''
ORC Willow Minerals?
Willow also produced the high concentrations of zinc (five times the requirement at 200mg per kg of dry matter) while alder had 50mg and oak around half that.''
ORC Willow Minerals?
We had exactly the same result after using the same bolus. What are you using to raise the iodine?Interesting. Were either groups particularly deficient in anything according to bloods? We've tested recently and found the 4in1 is working for everything bar iodine (which we're now treating seperately)....not that I ran a control group to know whether we were deficient for other things without the bolus...
We had exactly the same result using the same bolus. All ok except iodine. What are you using to raise the iodine?Interesting. Were either groups particularly deficient in anything according to bloods? We've tested recently and found the 4in1 is working for everything bar iodine (which we're now treating seperately)....not that I ran a control group to know whether we were deficient for other things without the bolus...