Blackie wethers pay through thick and thin

For many breeders, Blackie wether lambs have become a bit of a conundrum of how to take them from being something of an afterthought, into something of value.

But you only have to ask Cumbrian farmer, Calder Fenwick, for his thoughts, and you will get some positive answers – but with a few points to ponder too. He’s been buying Blackie wethers for his Calder Farm (yes, it’s the same moniker that he has) for more than 30 years and he loves them. He’s made money from them year in, year out … and all off grass, with no hard feeding.

For himself and his wife Sarah, the annual purchase of around 400 (and sometimes more), Blackface wether lambs has become one of the mainstays of their farming business which sits cheek-by-jowl with the vastness of the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing facility in Cumbria, on the county’s west coast. The Blackies share the 240 acres with about 180 feeding cattle, 20 sucklers based around Shorthorn genetics and some grain crops to feed them.

With their sons living and working off the farm, the Fenwicks need to keep things simple and easy, and that’s what they hope to get in the management of their annual crop of Blackie lambs which they buy in September and start selling from about the end of April. Calder makes the long trip to Dalmally to get his annual consignment after various expeditions to the likes of Fort William, Dingwall and Stirling, but now preferring the true hill lambs in big numbers which still come out of the Argyllshire mart.

He cites sheep with a bright eye and good coat, and because he usually goes for the third or fourth draws for his long-keep system, size is not a problem, but the teeth and feet have to be right.

“I like buying at Dalmally because of its open-sided set-up which allows you to get a good look at the lots and they dry up because the wind blows through the pens. It also means there’s no sweating of the sheep,” he said.

Last year, he bought 440 head and said he likes to buy stock in big lots which have not had a long journey to the market as they subsequently face a seven or eight-hour shift in a float to get to his farm at Seascale. The current intake bought in autumn 2024 cost £51 per head, which he felt wasn’t that much more than the £44 he paid the year before and the £50 in 2022.

On arrival back home, his experience leads him to give a vitamin B jab, plus the start of a two-stage vaccination programme. “We tried without the expense of a vaccination once,” he pointed out, “but the loss of 10 or 12 lambs soon put that supposed saving down to not being a saving at all.”

Another little tip he has is to pick out the smaller lambs from the batches right away, which reduces bullying and leads to a much better growth rate for the ‘little ‘uns’. In time, these are then re-introduced to their bigger lots without much trouble.

What has become trouble has been an increasing trend towards having to deal with in-growing horns. “What the breeders don’t realise is that feeders like me have the lambs longer than they do, so they rarely get this happening but it’s now becoming a big problem in wethers,” said Calder. “This winter, we’ve had to cut the horns off about 20% of the bought-in lambs and that’s an unnecessary addition to our workload, as well as being a welfare issue. In the past, we’ve finished up to 1000 Blackie wethers and never had to bother cutting off any horns, so that’s a clear message we can feed back to breeders.

“What we have found, though, is that if we look after them, they will look after us. Our main costs are wormer, vaccinations, pour-on, then dipping and clipping, not forgetting that it is about £3.80 to have them delivered here, which is well off the mainstream track. Dipping is important as we are also experiencing an increase in tick-borne diseases in recent years.”

Coping with foot rot is also an added expense and one that has been especially bad this year. Calder and Sarah have found that running the lambs through the cattle footbath of copper sulphate does not work for them. “We’ve gone back to the good old remedy of formalin, and it is working really well again for us,” he said.

“In the not too distant past, it was thought that a huge proportion of Blackie wethers from Scotland came to Cumbria, but now we only have about two or three who finish them in this locale. So the message for breeders is clear, the wethers they sell must be easy care but still be able to add value for their purchasers by having the ability to thrive,” argued Calder.

That said, Calder reckons he has never lost money on his Blackie wethers, though some years have been much better than others. Last year was a case in point, with the 485 outgoing lambs being bought in for £44.18 on average and being sold for an average of £150, with some at up to £180 per head dw. They all head to Morrisons supermarket, via Woodhead Brothers and go off the farm at 65 head at a time using their own lorry to be slaughtered at Colne, in Lancashire, with the aim of hanging up at about 21kg dw.

So, the Blackies have stood the test of time at Calder Farm … as will Calder and Sarah’s very own home-made ring of standing stones which they built a few years back on a whim. “They’ll certainly outlive us as our legacy project and we hope that the Blackie breed will do too,” they said!