Flat rate feeding ewes.

[daithi]

The ewes are 6 weeks out from lambing now so time to start meal feeding. The ewes are all housed and being fed ad-lib 70-73 dmd(D value 67-69, 11-12% protein) silage. I have always fed them on the stepped method gradually building them up over the weeks so that they are on 0.7-0.8 kg/hd before lambing. This year I was thinking of just doing it flat rate for the 6 weeks pre lambing . Just wondering if anyone else on hear is doing the same and would you recommend it or tried it and reverted back to step feeding.
The main advantage I see is only having to meal feed once a day on the run up to lambing but I am concerned the ewe might not be getting enough protein or energy in the 2 weeks before lambing.
Thanks

 

[ShooTa]

if your indoors could you not do a Body Condition score on a sample (trips say) and use that to incease the ration if its dropping?

 

[Sheep92]

I started doing it last year mainly due to trying to lessen the workload, worked out far better than I ever imagined far less prolapse, loads of milk, twin bearing ewes just fed .5kg once a day, the triplets do get fed twice a day as they get closer to lambing though ewes are getting good hay for roughage

 

[Agrivator]

The benefits of flat-rate-feeding, apart from being much simpler, is that if ewes of varying lambing dates are fed together, it gives a far better distribution of concentrates between earlier than expected lambers and later than expected lambers.

The original work was done by SAC in Aberdeen in the seventies, so it's now a well established method. The same original work compared three methods of concentrate feeding - increasing, versus flat-rate, versus decreasing. The decreasing method worked perfectly well, and increased the confidence with which a flat-rate, as opposed to the traditional increasing rate, could be recommended.

One modification is to increase the protein level in the last three weeks before lambing is expected to start

 

[Old Tip]

I have flat rate fed for years, simplicity is the answer to most farming questions

 

[Old Tip]

Read many years ago in the NSA magazine of an old chap who started farming in the depression of the 1930s when times were really hard, he said folk thought him mad but he started feeding six weeks before lambing with 25kg of corn and two idiot bricks of hay a day for fifty ewes. the ewes were all kept in fields of fifty and the hay and corn brought daily so he could see if anything wasn't right and they wee in small enough groups not to make a plough. He was still doing exactly the same forty years later and thats because it worked and was a simple thing to do.