by It’s 5.30am on a damp Thursday morning in Brecon, Powys, and as the sun rises over Pen-y-Fan, the barn on Tylebrythos farm is abuzz with activity.
About 20 ewes are laying down in the hay, their newborn lambs milking around them, and farmer Stella Phillips, 42, is helping by giving a bottle to some of the weaker ones.
As we watch, one sheep – the straggler of the season – begins to have contractions, shuffling around its pen trying to get comfortable and shoo away other sheep that come close. Half an hour later, her lamb is born, and she fills it all before it stumbles, like Bambi on its feet.
It all seems so easy. But Phillips says this lambing season has been plagued by difficulties, creating one of the worst seasons on record.
“[The sheep] he shouldn’t be in this barn at all,” she says. “They should be out on the hill fields.
“We have a grass-based system in Wales and we want them to be out there grazing as they should. But the rain was so terrible, that couldn’t happen. We don’t have a year like it. It was a disaster.”
Of course, Wales is famous for its rain. But Met Office statistics show that its winters are getting wetter and milder. Five of the 10 wettest years on record were in the last decade, with February and March 60 per cent wetter than average.
The impact on the Phillipses’ 200-acre farm was devastating. As we ride a quad bike over their land, it is clear that many of their lush green fields have turned brown from the mud, with deep ruts and pools of water.
For his 650 newborn lambs, most of which were born outdoors, this caused huge problems. Some had hypothermia from lying in the wet mud, while others contracted joint disease, a bacterial infection that thrives in wet conditions.
With the weather so extreme, Phillips, like many farmers across Wales, has taken her lambs into a large pen close to her farm buildings. But this also created problems.
“When they are together like this, the animals are more likely to catch disease,” she says. “We got a sore joint, which causes swelling in the joints, so the lambs can’t stand drinking.
“We have to treat it with antibiotics, which we don’t like to do. [Antibiotic use is avoided where possible in animals to prevent the drugs entering the food chain, lessening human resistance.] We managed to save most of the stricken lambs but we lost a few.”
It is not only the unnatural conditions and the risk of disease associated with indoor lambing that is a problem, but the cost of providing straw for the animals’ bedding and also grass to eat.
Stella’s husband Andrew, 47, says: “I’m a fifth generation farmer and I’ve never known anything like it.
“Straw is in short supply, again due to the bad weather, but we had to buy it at £160 a tonne, and a bale only lasts a day. We also have to pay for antibiotics, vets and disinfectant.
“It’s not just the lambs. The calves are also inside, because we can’t risk the cows walking in the fields in this weather. They will do too much damage [to the pasture that livestock relies on for food throughout the year].”
Aled Jones, president of NFU Cymru, says: “Agriculture is at the mercy of extreme and changing weather patterns.
“This winter and early spring saw a tremendous amount of rain, which affected farming businesses. Farmers had difficulties planting crops, cattle could not be let out on grass, lambing was very difficult, and this put a huge cost burden on farmers.
“This continued wet weather demonstrates once again the need for the Welsh government to recognize the strategic importance of domestic food production.”
The milder weather has also seen an increase in Schmallenberg virus (SBV), which occurs when midges bite ewes when they are pregnant in the Autumn, resulting in deformed or dead lambs.
In January, the Phillipses lost several lambs to SBV, and according to sheep farmers’ body the National Sheep Association, some farms in Wales and England have lost 25 percent of their early flocks to the disease.
A spokesman said: “The number of lamb losses is not required to be reported, so we do not have an exact figure. But we don’t have a Schmallenberg vaccine and we know he’s been hit hard this year.
“The mild autumn contributes to longer whale activity, so lambs born in January were hit hard.”
Forty miles away in Pendeulaith, Vale of Glamorgan, 35-year-old farmer Tom Rees had his worst lambing season ever.
The county has seen 238 percent more rain than last year, leaving many of its parks under water.
Rees says: “Almost 1,000 lambs have been born this season. But on our busiest days, 30 lambs were born in the barn and we barely had any room left. We couldn’t turn them because it was so wet, so we were trying to make pens in any corner we could.
“It’s been wet before, but not for long like this. It’s been almost every day since last summer.”
Many of his lambs had scourge – basically sheep diarrhoea.
He says: “A lot of them have had a scourge because it’s a warmer environment and they’re not out in the open. They weren’t going far or moving around, so not using the milk they had, so it was going straight through.
“We’ve lost a few more things than usual, but we’ve managed to smooth it out.”
Another farmer, Mathew Isaac from Ynysybwl, 15 miles north of Cardiff, has lost 30 lambs this year to the weather.
But this is not a situation that only affects Wales.
According to Joseph Henry, a practicing vet at Black Sheep Farm Health in Rothray, Northumberland, and president of the Sheep Veterinary Association, this is one of the worst years for loss and disease.
He says the problem started in early winter, when the ground was too wet for farmers to feed their grazing sheep with extra feed, such as pellets, silage and molasses, which farmers carry daily to the fields. “They couldn’t get out to the sheep,” he says. “Not on quad bikes or tractors or even walking, because it was so muddy.
“So the lack of nutrition was the sheep’s curd [first milk] the levels were low, which lambs suffered, especially the twins.”
Some had watery mouth, a disease that makes lambs lethargic and sluggish. Others had bluetongue, a bacterial infection that could cripple them.
He says: “Farmers have worked well in recent years to reduce antibiotic use, but there is definitely more pressure from infections this year.
“Lambs are out in the mud, or in damp sheds, so the bacteria are more common.
“Some farmers I know are reducing their sheep stock to manage them better, or thinking about changing their timing so that it is later in the year, when it should be the weather would be better, but if all the farmers start lambing in the summer, many farmers in Scotland already, this will affect supply.”
A Defra spokesman said: “We are very aware of the impact that bad weather can have on the farming community. We have protected over 900,000 acres of agricultural land from the impacts of flooding since 2015, and are investing £5.6 billion to better protect communities from flooding and coastal erosion.
“We have launched the Farming Recovery Fund, which provides grants of up to £25,000 to eligible farmers to restore their land to the condition it was in before the exceptional flooding caused by Storm Henk.
“In addition, our environmental land management schemes are paying farmers to take action that will reduce the risk of flooding and help their land adapt to our changing climate.”
Farmers currently harvest lambs to provide a stable 12-month market, but clustered lambs may flood the market, leading to food wastage and erroneous pricing.
Back in Wales, farmers are also looking ahead to what they can do to improve their position next year.
“I’m investing in drainage so the fields don’t get so wet,” says Rees. “I should be planting crops, but it’s more important to put in drainage. But obviously this costs money in terms of pipes and stonework.”
Meanwhile, the Phillips family have decided next year to keep their sheep away from the river Usk and other water sources, where the risk of midges is worst.
As their lambs grow and the weather improves, they will move towards planting their crops – oats, wheat and barley – which should be in the ground by now. This will be used to feed their sheep for the coming winter.
Stella says: “We’re so dependent on spring planting, and it’s not even in the ground because it’s been so wet.
“This spring was a disaster, but I’m actually more worried about next winter’s supplies.
“Our son, who is only eight years old, heard us talking about all the problems we had recently and left us a note saying: ‘Please don’t stop farming’.
“It’s heartbreaking. We love this work. But with the weather getting wetter and more extreme, everything feels out of our control.”
