Often, this is put down to the storm that inevitably comes through in the middle of lambing every year, but are there other areas where we have some more control over this wastage?

By performing simple post-mortems on 10-20 lambs – collected across the lambing period (and stored appropriately) – that were either born dead or died soon after birth, you might find there are some levers you can pull to reduce this.

In many cases, lamb deaths are multifactorial, but understanding the main drivers enables farmers and vets to put plans in place to reduce losses in future seasons. In just 10-15 minutes, a lamb postmortem can often determine whether death occurred before, during, or after birth, and whether it was from birthing difficulties, starvation and exposure complex, infection, congenital abnormalities, or trauma.

We look at a few key areas to give us these answers:

• Birth weight

• Swelling under the skin and/or around the navel

• The size of the thyroid glands vs. the rest of the body

• The umbilical vessels

• The lungs, heart, stomach, liver, kidneys and intestines

• Any fluid present in the body cavities.

Looking at all of the above will give us clues as to what factors caused the death of the lamb being examined. Once these are identified, we can dig into wider contributing factors, such as ewe nutrition, ‘litter’ size, trace element status, shearing time, and infectious disease challenges within the flock.

While post-mortems may not prevent further losses for the current season, they can provide valuable information to help improve survival rates next season.

This is a big topic to unpack, so if you’d like to learn more about investigating lamb losses on your farm, have a yarn with your KeyVet.