Shantron & Shemore Farms, Loch Lomond

The Lennox family have been farming at Shantron & Shemore Farms for over 200 years. They run a flock of purebred Blackface sheep, providing prime lamb to Marks & Spencer and Aldi supermarket chains. 

Alongside their farming, the Lennox family has been offering Agritourism with farm stay accommodation for over 50 years. They recently branched out into farm tours throughout the year, and the lambing experience has proved to be particularly popular, with around 900 people touring the lambing shed over lambing time!

The introduction of Numnuts to Shantron & Shemore was an easy choice for Bobby Lennox, who has always focused on the welfare of his animals. When marking lambs with Numnuts, Bobby noticed a big difference in the behaviour of his lambs and wouldn’t want to go back to using rings alone. With just rings, lambs would regularly lie down for 3-4 hours after marking and couldn’t be moved back to the hills for at least 24 hours to give them time to recover and mother up fully. However, when using Numnuts, Bobby doesn’t see the same pain behaviours, and his lambs move about and mother up right away. The result is the farm team can move lambs back to the hill the same day as marking them, making flock management easier and saving crucial time at a busy time of year.

Bobby says that using Numnuts doesn’t take his team any longer than the traditional ringing process, and he actually prefers the Numnuts ring applicator to standard ring pliers. The engineering of the device means that once a ring is open, you don’t have to use as much force to keep it open, and at the end of the day, ringing 500 lambs makes a big difference in how tired your hand is. 

For Bobby, lamb marking using Numnuts results in a much easier day than traditional ringing, and he highly recommends it to other sheep farmers, regardless of flock size.