Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

After the 'backwards' mating from one of our male ducks the other day (see 7th March), it was great to see that a week on he has pretty much got the hang of it now. It may look wrong but actually the photos show one of the best ways for ducks to mate and that is in the water. This way the female doesn't have the weight of the duck on her back and it is much easier for him to balance. The only downside as you can see is that the female's head can get pushed under the water a fair bit (the male holds on to her neck) and unfortunately in the wild if more than one drake mates with a female like this, there is a risk she can drown.
In most domesticated settings such as ours, it is easy to control the numbers of males and females you have. We have three of each, we actually only 'need' one male but as long as we don't have MORE males than females and we keep an eye on what is going on, our females should be fine. At the moment our drakes are all quite 'gentlemanly' and when not mating, the six of them wander around in a contented little group.
We hope that with all this mating going on (the geese have been mating too, as well as the turkeys of course) we should soon start to get some eggs and then we can begin to plan our hatching programme. And talking of hatching, we gave our broody bantam six eggs back on the 6th and FIVE of them are fertile: so come 27th of this month we may have our first chicks of the year!!
Finally, the lambs are doing okay and we think we are very close to Mrs White giving birth now: her udder is huge and she is laying down a lot!!!