Bleat tweet: Farm uses Twitter to welcome spring lambs

New-born lambs at Cannon Hall Farm, South Yorkshire

IF YOU want to experience the round-the-clock working that comes with lambing time, one Yorkshire farm and visitor attraction has been using Twitter to keep everyone informed about the life-and-death dramas of the latest arrivals.

Cannon Hall Farm, near Barnsley, has been welcoming lambs at the rate of around 20 a day over the past few days and one of the brothers who runs it, Robert Nicholson, has been letting armchair farmers share in the hard work.

Mr Nicholson has been keeping the South Yorkshire farm’s 15,000 Twitter followers up to date with messages like: “@RobNicholsonCHF. Right the voice is over. Wellies on let’s see if we have any lambs born.”

And: “Right that’s it I’m exhausted. Here is a photo of the quads. They have all fed and are doing well.”

Cannon Hall, which attracts up to a million visitors a year to its site and around 300,000 to the farm itself, will have seen around 800 new arrivals by the end of the spring.

Mr Nicholson’s brother David said they are just getting to the end of the current batch of pregnant ewes but they are preparing for another 200 to give birth in the run-up to Easter, when the farm runs a Lambing Live event.

Mr Nicholson’s father Roger, who first opened the farm to visitors in 1989, said the lambing gets shared around the family.

He said: “The last three or four days have been really, really busy.

“It’s not quite 24 hours. We have to sleep sometime. But we go to bed late and get up early and we share the responsibility out.

“The weather isn’t helping at the moment because we need to get some lambs out very shortly and turning them out into this isn’t the greatest.”

Mr Nicholson said the children who come at this time of year love the lambing and the main question they always ask is whether it is a boy or a girl.