Small ‘tweaks’ Can Dramatically Improve Lamb Survival

3 weeks ago
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Posted
6th January, 2026 19h15

Author
NoBACZ Healthcare

A renowned sheep vet is urging vets to encourage farmers to make small, but significant ‘tweaks’ to lambing management procedures to dramatically improve lamb survival.

Just eight years ago, 68% of sheep farmers were using oral antibiotics ‘just in case’¹ and a quarter were dosing every lamb born². Additionally, one in four farmers were also using injectable antibiotics routinely¹. The new Veterinary Medicine Regulations has finally and decisively removed routine prophylactic antibiotic-use and the farming industry needs to rapidly come up to speed on the many alternative tools available.

Dr Fiona Lovatt from Flock Health Ltd is urging vets to encourage farmers to fine-tune their lambing practices to help improve and safeguard lamb survival and encourage stronger lambs.

The move follows a challenging year that has seen some farmers facing drought over the summer that has a significant effect on forage, leading to short supplies and forage of questionable quality. Dr Lovatt is advising farmers to follow these top tips focusing on pre-lambing diet, colostrum, good hygiene and navel protection in the up-and-coming lambing season to underpin good lambing management procedures.

1. Pre-lambing diet - when things are tight it is more important than ever that the pre-lambing diet is given with precision and calculated with care, so that there is sufficient energy for every ewe in her final eight weeks and optimum protein for the last fortnight of pregnancy. Data collected from 1,295 colostrum samples from Welsh ewes in 2022 emphasised the importance of feed space, forage protein levels and appropriate supplementation of ewe diets³.
2. Colostrum – colostrum is not new or innovative; it is a concept that is as fundamental or basic as every lamb birth. However, new to some, is the appreciation of its liquid gold value and the importance of the three essential factors to ensure passive immunity transfer in newborn lambs - ‘quality, quantity and quick delivery’. The availability of hand-pump ewe milking devices makes harvesting colostrum easier than ever, and many farmers will collect and store their own reserves rather than relying on powders, which are both expensive and inferior to the real deal. Powders vary greatly in quality, but even the very best is only half as good as the colostrum that can be harvested from a ewe in the flock.
3. Good hygiene - joint ill is one of the most challenging diseases faced at lambing time and one where attention to detail is paramount. The odds of joint ill are dramatically increased in larger flocks and those where the staff fail to either wash their own hands or use good hygiene when applying ear tags⁴. There is evidence to suggest that shavings may make better bedding for lambing pens than straw, but with joint ill no single thing will be the answer for every flock. It is always worth the farmer and vet taking a focused look at all the lambing procedures to ensure that every risk factor has been considered.
4. Navel protection - one of the most recent lambing innovations is the use of NoBACZ Navel instead of iodine for treating navels and ear tags. This was demonstrated in the largest ever navel protection study in lambs which revealed that the mortality in all the lambs that had the barrier solution applied to their navels and ear tags was 6.5% while mortality across all the control lambs that had iodine applied was 8.36%⁵. These figures suggest that if a thousand lambs had the barrier solution used on their navels and ear tags at birth, instead of 10% iodine, there would be more than 18 more alive at eight weeks old. The study also revealed that navels should be dipped, not sprayed, and ears and tags should be treated at the point the skin is pierced.

Dr Lovatt comments: “There are plenty of new and exciting tools for farmers to use at lambing time as an alternative to the routine use of antibiotics, some of which are just tweaks to traditional routines. Vets should be encouraging their clients to pick up just a few of these new habits, such as using NoBACZ Navel on lambs’ navels and ear tags, to help ensure that farmers are doing all they can to improve lamb survival.”

For further information on NoBACZ Navel contact www.nobacz.com.

References

1. Douglas, F., & Sargison, N. D. (2018). Husbandry procedures at the point of lambing with reference to perinatal lamb mortality.Veterinary Record, 182(2), Article 52. 
2. Lima, E. (2020). A data driven approach to the evaluation of ewe, lamb, flock and farmer factors that influence productivity of UK sheep farms (Doctoral thesis, University of Nottingham). 
3. Page, P., Sherwin, G., Sampson, R., Phillips, K., & Lovatt, F. (2022). Ewe colostrum quality on commercial Welsh sheep farms. Livestock, 27(1)
4. Jackson L.P., Higgins H.M., Duncan J.S. A cross-sectional survey of farmer reported prevalence and farm management practices associated with neonatal infectious arthritis (“joint ill”) in lambs, on UK sheep farms. Front Vet Sci. 2024 Dec 23;11
5. Lovatt, F., (2025) 'A randomised controlled trial to compare the use of a novel solution versus iodine to protect navel and ear tag sites of neonatal lambs' International Sheep Veterinary Conference, 27 - 31 October, Wollongong. Australia.

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