“There’s no work with sheep,” a cousin told me a few years ago. He was right but he forgot the second half of that sentence: “If you’re set up properly.”

You need paddocks divided by solid sheep wire, good handling facilities, adequate housing for the winter and a breed of ewe that suits your system. Once all these elements are in place and you operate a mid-season lambing enterprise then yes, the workload with sheep is relatively small.

It only took me the bones of four years to get my head around this simple idea.

Unfortunately, it will take longer to get each of these elements in place. And I fear that by then, other insights will have dawned on me and there’ll be more apparently simple elements to put in place.

Future paradise

Between now and that future paradise, we have to manage with what we have. The biggest issue at the moment is a lack of paddocks.

In the first instance, they’d help better control grass quality for growing lambs, as well as allowing us to take out silage where growth got ahead of the animals.

Currently, the sheep are drifting around one big field in particular and the situation is more like grazing them on a mountainside than on a lowland farm.

This puts us under pressure to save silage (or hay) for winter. We’ll inevitably have to buy in some again.

Another ongoing issue is the lack of time available to get set up better. It’s a catch-22 situation: no time to get set up properly meaning everyday jobs take longer, and when everyday jobs take longer, we’ve no time to get set up properly!

Slightly vs full part-timer

Pain forces us to change, as I read somewhere, and the current stresses around the yard are pushing me towards the conclusion that unless you’re set up properly, farming on a slightly part-time basis is just not worth it. I’m not about to jump in full-time—you’d need to go milking cows for that anyway—but becoming a full part-timer looks like being the only option if we’re to keep the sheep.

Reducing hours at the off-farm office job will hit the pocket initially, but thankfully the option is there to increase them again if the sheep don’t start rolling in the millions. Such a move will mean more day-time and less evening-time work, when it feels like you’re fighting off midgets more than dosing and dagging the animals.

A positive move then and I’m currently rehearsing how I’ll break this good news to herself: “You know I said, I was thinking of getting rid of those oul sheep? Well, there could be a slight change of plan there, love…”

Kieran Sullivan and his brother farm part-time in Co Waterford. You can follow him on Twitter: @kieran_sullivan

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