Sheep farmers’ views on labour wanted

Sheep farming can be a very labour intensive enterprise. In an effort to identify the main challenges, areas for improvement and to influence future policy, the Teagasc Sheep Knowledge Transfer Department is asking farmers to complete a short survey.

Providing background to the Teagasc Labour on Sheep Farms Survey on a recent episode of the OviCast podcast with host Ciaran Lynch, Sheep Specialist at Teagasc Damian Costello explained: “There is lots of work with sheep, yet there’s loads of room for improvement on many sheep farms in terms of reducing labour.

“Our survey aims to identify some of the labour challenges – and there are lots of them – and where time is being spent on sheep farms.”

Along with pinpointing where time is being spent, the survey aims to quantify sheep enterprise scale, intensity, production system and the facilities available, with the latter focusing on housing, grazing infrastructure and the lambing shed.

Previous studies, Damian explained, have shown that efficient sheep farmers have really good handling and housing facilities, and this survey aims to identify not only the gaps that exist at farm level, but also to highlight areas for improvement that will make sheep farming a more labour efficient system going forward.

Through the survey, farmers will be asked to quantify labour input over the production year; light will also be shed on time inputted to more labour intensive periods such as lambing, a period of time which a previous Teagasc study showed accounted for 20% of the annual labour load on sheep farms.

Commenting further on the survey, Damian said: “This study is an important piece of work in identifying what’s out there and hopefully it can provide guidance on labour efficient sheep farming – what does that look like and what are the really efficient farmers doing – as well as influencing future policy in terms of support for sheep farmers in improving labour efficiency.

“We encourage all sheep farmers to complete it.”

Completing the survey

The survey, which is totally anonymous, takes 10-12 minutes to complete and is available in both online and hardcopy formats available from your local Teagasc advisor.

Click here to complete the Teagasc Labour on Sheep Farms Survey

For more insights on the survey, listen in to the full episode of the OviCast podcast below: