Sounding out farms' mums-to-be

Roger Hards spends the midwinter months scanning ewes to find out whether they are expecting and how many lambs they are carrying. "On the days in the middle of the season you're looking at probably a minimum of five farms a day, anything up to seven or eight set-ups," says Roger. Each farm visited could involve scanning several hundred ewes.

Roger Hards runs Dalescan, based in Leyburn, but he's not from a traditional farming background. He grew up in Kent and at 16 went to agricultural college.

From there he moved to Wensleydale taking on a contract as a shepherd. "I wanted to live and work in a very rural area and that was certainly what I got. The farm where I ended up was probably two to two-and-a-half thousand acres, approximately 1,000 maybe 1,200 sheep, at Castle Bank at Redmire."

Ultrasound scanners have been around for 20 years, but in the early days they weren't sophisticated. "Each sheep had to be caught, had to be tipped over, the wool clipped on its belly and then it could be scanned. So it was an extremely long, laborious, time-consuming job, that involved quite a bit of labour."

Today it is simpler. The sheep are scanned as they pass through a special "race", it is done standing up, and only takes seconds.

The ultrasound equipment isn't cheap and requires skill to interpret the black and white image. This is why contractors are much in demand.

The monitor costs about 6,000 and the probes about 2,500. That is too much for all but the biggest sheep farms. Roger reckons it isn't worth it if there are fewer than 10,000 sheep. The farm workers will also have to be trained to use the probe and interpret the image on the screen.

Firstly the probe has to be placed into the crotch of the ewe, close to the udder, just to the right hand side of the teat. Wearing protective gloves I discovered it difficult to find the correct patch of bare skin. The probe has to be pushed quite hard against the ewe to get a reading and gel is applied using a foot pedal.

My ewe was in-lamb with a large "single". "Another 10,000 and you'll start to get the hang of it," says Roger.

"When you first start scanning it's extremely difficult, because you're looking at a moving X-ray picture, you're looking at skeletons."

Roger's son, Andrew, is following in his footsteps.

But why bother with scanning at all? "The first thing it can help them with is winter management feed costs," says Roger. "There's no need to feed a sheep carrying one lamb the same amount of good quality concentrate as you would give to a sheep carrying two or three."

It also makes lambing easier if you know how many to expect from each sheep. The farmers pay 50p per sheep but probably save that much, and more, on feed costs.

Roger spends the summer in New Zealand with his scanner. "We're out there for two months, which is their winter, June and July."

The New Zealand work came via Richard Chandler, the Welsh farmer who trained Roger to use the scanner. Out there, he's paid for a two-month contract.

"Basically you're working as a sub-contractor for a veterinary company. It is intensive, it's different, because you're looking at a bigger volume of sheep, on any one given farm, or a station as they call them. Quite often on one station I would scan 3,000 to 4,000 sheep and that's all I'll do in one day.

"There are people out there who scan. But that season peaks in the same way that it peaks in the UK around Christmas round to the end of February. Out there during July there are just not enough scanners to cope with the volume."

The only downside is having to spend nearly a day outside and a working year that has two winters, not that Roger is bothered.

"People say it's a permanent winter, but we have some good springs, we had quite a good autumn this time. Out there, yes the days are shorter and the nights are long, but it's not severe winter."