🌱 This week at Red Ants Farm
Lambing's behind us, and the jobs that follow are already stacking up.
The block's into that busy-but-good stretch — grass is starting to move, longer evenings, enough light after work to get something done rather than just checking on things by torchlight.
The chooks have noticed the daylight too. I'm pulling August's egg numbers off the app to see what a month of extra light did to my cost per egg. July's figure wasn't a good one and I posted it anyway; if August has gone the wrong way I'll post that too.
But what I keep coming back to is how much lands on you at once in the six weeks after the lambs arrive. My first year I knew there were jobs coming and had no idea what order they went in. So that's this week.
🐑 This week's topic
The spring lamb checklist — the first few months, in the order they actually happen.
This isn't a how-to on any single procedure. It's the timeline — because the thing nobody tells you is that the jobs have an order and each has a window, and if you know the shape of it you can plan around a working week instead of reacting.
Days 1–3: is this lamb actually all right?
The whole game here is feeding and bonding. You want a lamb that's up, active, with a full-looking belly, and a ewe that's claiming it. You're watching for the opposite: a lamb hunched with its head down, one crying and following anything that moves, or a twin left behind while its sibling gets the milk.
Mismothering is the one that catches people, because it shows up as a lamb that's alive and technically fine but never quite thriving. The earlier you spot it the more options you have — a bottle lamb decided on day two is a very different animal from one decided on day eight. And write down which lamb came from which ewe while you still know; in three months it's a guess.
Weeks 2–6ish: docking, and castration if you're doing it
Docking reduces the muck that builds up around the back end, which is about flystrike, which is about summer. Castration is about avoiding unplanned mating in a small mob and, for some people, how the meat eats.
MPI's Code of Welfare: Painful Husbandry Procedures is the rulebook. Two things worth knowing: for a lamb under six months, a non-vet may dock using a hot iron or a rubber ring and nothing else, and the tail must be left no shorter than the distal end of the caudal fold — in plain language, long enough to cover the vulva on a ewe lamb, similar on a ram. Rubber rings are also the standard castration method, and the research puts them among the least painful options, more so with local anaesthetic.
"As young as practical" isn't about convenience. It's a smaller procedure on a smaller animal that recovers faster — and as animals get older the rules tighten and a vet gets involved. If you've inherited older lambs, that's a phone call rather than a guess.
⚠️ And because it's the most common confusion on a small block: this "tagging" isn't NAIT. NAIT covers cattle and deer only. Sheep tags are your own system, which is exactly why they're only as useful as what you write down beside them.
Vaccination: it starts with the ewe, not the lamb
This is the part that surprises people, so it's worth getting straight.
A lamb isn't born with its own immunity. It gets antibodies from the ewe's colostrum in the first hours of life — which is why the pre-lamb booster you may have given your ewes matters so much. That borrowed protection is real but temporary: the figure NZ vets and animal-health suppliers generally quote is around six to eight weeks, depending on the ewe, the vaccine, how much colostrum the lamb actually got and whether it was competing with a twin for it.
So the lamb's own programme is designed to pick up roughly where its mother's leaves off. A first shot (the sensitiser) then a booster a few weeks later — commonly at docking and then pre-weaning, or at weaning and four weeks after. One shot alone doesn't do the job; it's the second that makes the first worth having, and it's the step most often missed on small blocks because nobody wrote the date down.
Exact products and timings vary, and that's a conversation with your vet or farm supply store rather than a newsletter. The concept is what's worth carrying: borrowed cover first, own cover second, and a handover in between.
And if you didn't vaccinate your ewes — you're not stuck, but the timing changes
Plenty of people on a small block don't manage the pre-lamb booster — the ewes came already in lamb and you inherited the situation, or the ram runs with the ewes year-round and you're never quite sure when the lambs are due. That second one is a timing problem rather than an oversight: a pre-lamb booster has to land a few weeks before lambing, and you can't hit a date you don't know.
The practical difference is that there's no borrowed cover to hand over from. Those lambs don't have the colostrum antibodies to carry them through the early weeks, so the handover described above never happens — the lamb's own course isn't picking up from anything, it's starting from scratch. Which makes it matter more, and sooner. And the important bit: there's no protection until after the second shot. A sensitiser on its own leaves a lamb effectively uncovered, so one injection given in a hurry and never followed up is close to no vaccination at all.
Normally that means a sensitiser shot followed by a booster four to six weeks later — but check the instructions on the vaccine you're actually holding, because products differ and that's the number that matters.
And the same goes for the ewes and rams themselves. If they've never been vaccinated, or you bought them in and the history is unknown, they need exactly the same thing: a sensitiser, then a booster four to six weeks later. MSD Animal Health and Zoetis both publish good New Zealand guidance if you want to read up, and your vet or farm supply store will point you at the right product for your situation.
Then put next season's pre-lamb booster in the diary while you're thinking about it. It's the cheapest version of this entire conversation.
Weights: the number that quietly tells you everything
If you only monitor one thing, monitor growth.
A lamb that keeps gaining is a lamb whose feeding, worm burden and health are all fundamentally fine — one number that quietly audits everything else. A lamb that stalls is telling you something well before it looks unwell. "Is this lamb actually thriving?" is a far better question than "does this lamb look all right?", because by the time the answer to the second is no, you've lost weeks.
You don't need scales worth more than the lambs. Rough, consistent weights taken the same way every few weeks will show you a trend, and the trend is the point.
What to write down
Every job above produces a fact you'll want later and won't remember: birth date, dam, sex, docking and castration date, vaccination dates (both of them), treatments, and weights over time.
Three months from now, "which of these did I do the second shot on?" is a genuinely hard question, and the honest answer is usually a guess dressed up as a memory.
📲 And where the app fits
You already do the work. You shouldn't also have to be the filing system.
This is exactly the sort of information that becomes surprisingly hard to reconstruct three months later. My Block Hand holds it against the animal itself — dam, birth date, the jobs you did and when, treatments, weights over time — so the second vaccination is a reminder that comes to you rather than a date you're supposed to be carrying around, and "is this one growing?" is a line on a screen rather than an argument with yourself at the gate.
🛠️ What's new
A few real fixes, and both phone apps back up to date.
🥩 Meat and production records now open for everyone who asked for them. Sixty people ticked "Production" at signup and the section was hiding from nearly all of them unless the app decided you had the right kind of animal. Fixed — if you asked for it, it's there.
🌱 Today's Brief now nudges you into your first paddock move. If you'd set up paddocks, animals and a herd but never recorded a move, the Brief just said "no grazing data yet" — a statement of the obvious rather than help. It now shows you how to make the first one.
📱 The iPhone and Android apps are both up to date again. Version 1.4.4 is live on both stores and carries everything above.
🌤️ Weather: it can find your town now. A user in Oxford told us the closest he could get was somewhere in England. He was right, and it was worse than it looked — the search had been quietly looking worldwide the whole time, so any small town sharing a name with a bigger one lost. It now searches your own country first. Live on the web; on the phone apps with the next update.
🍼 Breeding records now count down to the due date, and cite where the figure comes from per species rather than using one generic number. Also web now, phones next.
🔜 Still coming: a proper Help Centre with screenshots for every section · a vet-ready PDF of an animal's treatment history · a NAIT-friendly movement log you can export · a block biosecurity checklist with a 14-day quarantine countdown.
🗓️ On the block this month — NZ, September
What's worth doing while the grass is coming away.
NAIT levies go up on 1 September — cattle and deer only. Tag levy $1.35, slaughter levy $1.91 (ex GST, up from $0.97 and $1.49); "unsafe to tag" stays at $13. OSPRI says it's funding the NAIT system replacement and recovering a historic shortfall. On four calves it's about a dollar-fifty more than last month — small money, but a decent prompt to check your NAIT account still matches the paddock. Calves: tagged and registered before 180 days old or before their first movement off-property, whichever comes first.
This is an El Niño spring, and a strong one. NIWA's September–November outlook: drier than usual for Northland and Auckland, Taranaki through Bay of Plenty, Hawke's Bay–Gisborne, Wairarapa, Marlborough, Canterbury and eastern Otago; wetter for Westland through Southland; windier for most of the country. On the dry side of that split, the spring surplus coming at you is feed worth conserving.
Watch the round, not the calendar. Growth accelerates hard this month, and a rotation left on its winter setting a fortnight too long is how you end up chasing pasture that's got away from you.
Chook season proper. Laying picks up with the daylight. Expect broodiness and the first chicks, and keep new birds separate for a fortnight before they join the flock.
Windy month: walk the fence lines and check anything with a roof on it before the first decent blow, not after.
💡 A practical tip
Book the second vaccination the day you give the first one.
The most common gap in a small block's animal-health record isn't a missed first shot — it's a missing booster. The first one feels like the job. The second is the one that makes the first work, and it falls due four to six weeks later, which is exactly long enough for a busy spring to swallow it.
So make the booking part of the first job: give the shot, and before you leave the yards put the follow-up date somewhere that will come and find you. Phone reminder, note in the app, circle on the wall calendar — the mechanism matters far less than doing it inside the same five minutes. Same goes for anything with a withholding period. The moment you're holding the bottle is the only moment you reliably know the date.
💬 A community question
What's the lamb job you found hardest to get your head around the first time?
I'm curious where the confusion actually sits, because I've watched three different block owners get stuck on three different things — one on the vaccination handover, one on how young was too young for docking, one on simply deciding whether a slow lamb was a problem.
And a specific one, because I suspect more people are in this boat than admit it: did anyone miss the pre-lamb booster on their ewes this year, and what did your vet tell you to do about the lambs? No judgement here — I'd rather publish the real answer than let people quietly guess at it.
Hit reply. I read every one, and the useful answers end up in a future issue.