Docking in Action

Emily and Anders (our fabulous hosts) came out to docking on Monday to weigh some lambs and ewes that are in pastures involved in a nitrogen study. Nitrogen has been heavily abused as a fertilizer in Europe, and New Zealand is considering banning it because of the potential environmental danger. The Crofoots, as well as other NZ farmers, are part of a study to assess correct use of nitrogen that will not damage groundwater. This is why more data are needed about these lambs and ewes than others around the farm. Regardless, we had someone who could take pictures of docking!

Below are the lambs in the pen before the process begins.

Willy and Phillip are loading lambs into the cradle. This is a rough job because the lambs weigh between 10 and 70 lbs. Vicky did this for a morning and almost collapsed.

The lambs then move down the cradle to Megan who clips their ear depending on gender (girls on the left, boys on the right), Sarah is injecting B12, Vicky vaccinating for scabby mouth, and then down to Greg and Steve for the actual docking. We also treat the lambs for pink eye and worms when necessary and determine which lambs and ewes are fit to continue breeding.

Greg sears the tail off while Steve holds down their powerful little legs.

After the tail is seared off, Steve sprays to keep flies away and then the lambs get to finish off with a fun little flip, so they land on their hooves (sometimes anyway).

In a day, we average a lamb every 25 seconds or so, but this includes time spent travelling from place to place within the property, building yards, mustering sheep, eating morning tea and lunch, etc. When we are actually docking, we average a lamb every 10 seconds or better. Through 5 days, we have docked 6,988 lambs (out of about 22,000). We have not been able to work the past couple of days because of poor weather conditions (rain and hail). We hope to start again tomorrow and finish after about 10 more work days and before the lambs get much bigger!