Farm of the Week: Loyalty to Lleyns reaps the rewards

ONCE the Lleyn was a Welsh sheep, as the spelling implies – named after a peninsula which sticks into the Irish Sea south west of Anglesey. Say it Lin with a gargle on the L.

Its popularity has spread spectacularly but Graham Fort was early on the trend when he bought his first tup 15 years ago.

Now he is chairman of the North & East Lleyn Breeders Club, which has 80-odd members in its quarter of England. And he and his family team are about to sell off the last of their other sheep – a prize-winning flock of Suffolks – in order to concentrate fully on the Lleyns, which have pulled them through some hard times to what they are beginning to cautiously acknowledge as a fairly comfortable position.

The turn-around on sheep prices over the past three years has been a return which Mr Fort and his wife, Mandy, put a lot of work and waiting into. When they met, he was the son of a small dairy farm, working in the former Silentnight bed factory in Keighley, and she was an office worker with a similar background. They bought a milk round for him and then another for her and saved until they could borrow enough for five acres with a pig unit at Brighton House Farm, Whitley Head, near Steeton, halfway up the hill from Airedale to Ilkley Moor.

That was 1981. This year, they added 95 rented acres to make their total holding 400 acres, including about 100 owned.

Mr Fort, 54, says: “The market picked up just in time. We couldn’t have gone on much longer on £28-£30 for a lamb. I know a fella who had 100 acres when I started and ended up with just a pig unit. For every one who goes in the right direction, there is one going the other way.”

When he first got sheep, somebody said he could do worse than regard them as woolly pigs. It was not entirely serious advice but there was a point to it – good stockmanship is transferable. He managed with the pigs because of what he knew about dairy cattle.

He started with Suffolk tups on Mules, then moved on to trying out Lleyn sires for better productivity. He kept his own pedigree Suffolk flock going because by that time he was doing well as a breeder. But the Lleyns made their case by performance year on year. And during 2001, with normal business on hold because of Foot & Mouth, he decided a thoroughbred Lleyns flock, which would more or less sustain itself, with only occasional buy-ins, was the key to making a comeback.

He comments: “You get conformation comparable to the Suffolk crosses, plus great skin, and they are prolific. We get just over two lambs per sheep on scanning and about 190 per cent on weaning. You can run three Lleyn ewes on the ground you would need for two Mules. There is even a small premium on the wool.”

He employed a man until 2001 but since then his children have become his team. Gemma, 29, has moved up the road to bring up children and Miniature Schnauzers but still comes back to help. Beverley, 27, and Terry, 25, both left school at 16 to become full-time hands and pupils. Their mother works with them and runs the office and the four of them still share a house. Between them, they run 850 breeding Lleyns and still close to 100 Suffolks – plus the pig unit. They rear 1800 gilts at a time – young sows – from weaning to readiness to work as breeding stock for Yorkshire pig moguls JSR, on a bed-and-breakfast contract. They earn a premium for high health, so it helps that this is not pig country. “It probably costs £10 a tonne extra on feed, for haulage from the arable areas,” Mr Fort estimates. That would be too much in the fattening business. But in the niche they are in, the location is not a problem. And pig muck is great for grass. Terry has become grassland manager and Mr Fort acknowledges the value he gets out of family labour.

“Terry will think nothing of starting at 6am and going through to 11pm to get the muck spread,” he says. “If you got that done by a contractor, it would cost you the same as buying fertiliser.”

They reseed 20-30 acres a year. With that and the boost from the slurry, they get enough haylage for winter. The only supplementary feed is a pound of concentrates before lambing for ewes with twins.

The Lleyns would survive on rough grazing alone, they say, and could lamb outside too. They are gaining great respect as a hill breed and last year the Forts sold a top tup, for £5,000, to the Orkney Islands, northernmost land of the UK.

As it is, with the farm going up to a thousand feet and wet, and all lambs being worth something on this scale of farming, and farm practice being to tag the lambs at a day old, the ewes are all brought in for lambing and one reason for giving up on the Suffolks is to free up shed space.

“It will be a wrench,” says Mr Fort. “But we are so pleased with the Lleyns, we want to move up to a thousand and it’s a question of focusing our resources.”

The Suffolks market is a competitive one. But the Forts have prided themselves for some years in never coming back without a win of some sort, in certificates or prices, from any sale or show. They used to take the Suffolks around the Yorkshire show circuit. They have only ever taken the Lleyns to pre-auction shows but have been consistently successful in those, too.

They usually buy and sell in at least four Lleyn Society shows, at Ross-on-Wye, Ruthin, Carlisle and Skipton, and last year got three supreme championships and a reserve out of those four – plus top prices at Newark and Kelso and a £1140 average for tups over the year. Most of their animals are kept or sold for breeding but a few go to butchers, through Bentham and Skipton, and they make the same prices as purpose-bred crosses, says Mr Fort.

He has signed up to the Signet system, for recording bloodline performances, because it matters to some customers, but he and Terry reckon they can pick better animals by eye ... “There are people who think it all comes down to figures but the real test is how sheep perform on the ground.”

The family have several dozen shearling Lleyn tups ready for sale this autumn, including some of their best home-bred sire lines becoming available for the first time. The Suffolks dispersal sale is scheduled for October 29 at Skipton Auction Mart. Viewings and direct sales can be arranged meanwhile. Call 01535 654739 or email [email protected]/

Beverley Fort had just bagged www.lleynsheep-forts.com as the farm’s new website as these pages went to press. Meanwhile, the Brightonhouse & Fort flock has a page on the Lleyn Club site.

A sheepdog specialist

BEVERLEY FORT has also made the family name a respected one at the Skipton working dogs sales. She started breeding sheepdogs at 15 and had some success as a trialist.

But now she mainly sticks to breeding and selling young dogs with some work experience and trials potential – mainly sired by her well-proven best dog, Ben, aged eight.

“Bloodlines are important but so is appearance,” she says. “You want a dog that not only does the job but looks a bit stylish. Some dogs gallop around. Some kind of glide and that’s what sells.”