When you need to manage worms within lambs, using anthelmintics routinely isn’t viable anymore. Wormer does have a place, but you need to preserve products to use at the right times to halt the development of anthelmintic resistance. There are a few management factors you can introduce to lower a lamb’s exposure to worms. This will help to inform you when to treat and what product to use.

Grazing management

Firstly, there’s grazing management. This involves understanding the risk of worms on pastures. Map your fields according to previous usage. High-risk pastures are ones that have carried lambs and ewes within the same year. As for low-risk pastures, they’re those that have been for grazing by cattle or growing crops. Lowest risk pastures need targeting for weaned lambs. Rotational grazing can also help dilute the worm burden alongside mixed grazing with cattle. This will help lower pasture contamination.

Worm monitoring tools

Faecal egg counts (FEC) can work as an efficient way of pinpointing worm problems in lambs. This is before clinical signs show up. Samples need taking from every grazing group once a month at least. Do this during the risk period, which runs from around spring onwards through to autumn.

Forecasting tools are useful for keeping abreast with local dangers and upcoming concerns. They can work as an excellent base to begin conversations with an animal health care provider about risk management and wormer use.

Then there are growth rate changes. These can provide an early indication worms might be a problem in a flock. By using this data together with FEC, you’ll have a powerful tool. It will help to target the correct treatment for particular animals.

Managing lamb exposure to worm eggs

Finally, there’s managing a lamb’s exposure to worm eggs. Worming ewes using long-acting moxidectin around lambing has been discovered to stop the spring rise. If you don’t know, this is when ewes late in pregnancy have a higher chance of shedding eggs as their immunity goes down. This can work as the primary source of pasture contamination for lambs later in the season. Selectively worming ewes during this time can work to lower pasture contamination and danger to lambs.

However, it’s essential that not all ewes get wormed. Multiple-bearing and thin ewes shed more eggs. These are the animals you must focus on with wormer. Single bearing and fit ewes are better left untreated, with 10% of a group at least being left untreated.

With persistent products, you should use them with care. Year on year use in all ewes is something to avoid. Talk to your animal healthcare supplier for more details on the correct treatment strategy for your farm.

Conclusion

Investing money and time into planning and utilising those tools above can work to save you money in the long term. This could include stopping a loss of production from worms. You can make savings on treatment costs too. Plus, they will help to improve animal health and wellbeing.

Talk to us about wormer

At JS Hubbuck Ltd, we have several wormers available to buy. This makes it easier for customers to find solutions that suit their specific needs. More importantly, we can provide information to ensure you use them effectively. There’s also plenty of other merchandise to help improve animal health.

So, if you’d like to do business with us to order wormer or anything else, please get in touch. We’re a family company and work to ensure all clients get a friendly service.