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February 2026
Posted Sunday 1st February, 2026
A wintery flurry hit the farm in the middle of January, a generous foot of snow fell in the space of a few hours, which made the farm very picturesque. It did make it make trickier for our sheep and cattle to reach the pasture underneath the snow, being purely pasture fed does have its challenges and doing so even in the depth of winter is one of the biggest challenges for us. Hay bales had to be taken into the field so that the grazing animals had something able feed to sustain their intake requirements. We were lucky that the snow quickly melted and didn’t leave too much damage on the fields.
Lambing time is nearly upon on and this is made quite clear with the yearly job of scanning of pregnant ewes. Ewes are scanned to dertimine the number of offspring they are expecting which gives us an idea of the number of sheep to expect over the course of March.
Ewes scanning with potential 3 lambs need to be intaking more pasture at this point in their pregnancy so we’ll keep these separate and give them the field with the very best pasture and protein in it (this tends to be the clover richer fields).
After scanning we are given the total number of lambs we are expecting (336!) and this is turned into a % for the whole flock 192%. That's 167 who are pregnant; 33 of whom are expecting a single lamb, 99 expecting twins and 35 expecting triplets! So as an average we are expecting just under two lambs per ewe, which is great news as each ewe has only 2 teats.
It looks like this year we’ll be rearing more sheep than we have for a fair few years. With the demand from the farm shop being at an all time high. It’s a good job the rams have done such a good job! It’ll be a busy few months for the team on the farm but we’ll keep you up to date with how its all going!
You may have seen on social media we had a very healthy litter of 11 piglets born in the middle of the snow blizzard. The mother sow which gave birth is a particular favourite as she regularly gives birth to health strong litters of piglets, which all grow up very quickly with belly's full of milk!
Follow us on Facebook (@fordhallorganicfarm) and Instagram (@fordhallfarmshop) for more real-time updates across the month.
