Persistent Drenches Give Ewes Longer Protection

Starting your lambing with healthy ewes is a good position to be in. Healthy ewes in good condition will have more vigorous lambs and will produce more colostrum and milk. This results in faster-growing lambs that are off the farm sooner. 

Now is the time to ensure your ewes are as healthy as they can be. All ewes should receive at least a 5-in-1 vaccine 3-4 weeks before lambing to protect against clostridial disease. Previously unvaccinated ewes require two vaccinations prior to lambing to build their immunity. This protects them from death caused by these clostridial bacteria during lambing.

The ewes pass their boosted immunity to lambs via colostrum, giving them short-term immunity to tetanus, pulpy kidney and three other deadly clostridial diseases.

It may be too late to improve body condition score in ewes at this point but light, twin-bearing ewes and those on less than 1400kg/DM/ha may benefit from a parasite treatment. If ewes are stressed with low condition, low feed covers or disease (such as worms), this can impact their lactation performance as well as increasing the number of eggs onto pasture. This makes the lambing areas more contaminated for lambs once they start grazing.

Short-acting clean-out drenches have little impact on ewe performance at lambing. They will remove the parasites in the ewe at the time but once back out grazing they will continue to ingest more larvae, which impacts their health, resulting in decreased efficiency and productivity.

Drenches with persistent activity, such as Eweguard®, protect the ewes for longer against the infective parasite larvae. This protection enables their valuable energy reserves to be used for colostrum manufacture or milk production production, rather than trying to fight off a constant parasite challenge.

Eweguard continues to kill incoming Teladorsagia circumcincta larvae for 35 days and Trichostrongylus colubriformis larvae for 7 days. These are the two main parasites that affect ewes over lambing. 

The other benefit of Eweguard is that it is an injectable drench and vaccine combined. It protects against the five key clostridial diseases and also aids in the control of cheesy gland, a disease that can result in significant trimming or carcass condemnation in old ewes. With Eweguard, multiple jobs can be done with just one easy-to-give injection. It also comes with or without selenium. Trials with Eweguard showed treated ewes had fewer dags and were heavier at weaning, as were their lambs.

As with all drenches and especially those given to adults, thought should be given to minimising parasite resistance. Hence, targeting the animals that really need a drench rather than blanket treatment is a more sustainable and profitable approach. Additionally, consider an Exit treatment for treated ewes, given at tailing, as this can prevent any resistant worm survivors spreading their eggs.

Monitoring drench efficacy is a key management tool and this should be done in lambs every season with a cheap and easy drench check and less often with a full reduction test.