18/08/2026
‼️Lamb prices explained‼️
A little bit of the behind-the-scenes costs of lambs 🐑
From the outside a lot think theres a lot of profit being made which in reality that’s not the case.
It’s much more about the sheep kept for breeding, because they are the ones that produce the lambs — and they are what cost the farmer money throughout the year.
🐑 Starting with the sheep
Feed:
Yes, they eat grass, but many of us have to pay to rent grazing elsewhere if we need our own land to make haylage/bales for the winter. This can average around 50p–£1.50 per sheep, per week.
Then they come inside for lambing, which is when they will eat haylage bales — and these cost a lot to make or buy in.
Straw for bedding during lambing.
Throughout the winter they get mineral buckets, corn and haylage, especially during snow or poor weather.
Then there’s:
* Worming treatments
* Fly treatments
* Vaccinations
* Injections and medication for illnesses
* Shearing once a year
* Dipping
🐑 Then we have the lambs
* Vitamin drench extra boost at birth (optional, depending on the farmer)
* Rubber rings for castration/tail docking
* Spray markers to identify them
* Injections or medication for any lambing or feeding problems
* Vet bills for difficult births, including, in the worst cases, caesareans
* Grazing, whether at home or rented elsewhere
* Corn for the ewes to help support good milk production
* Optional creep feed/corn for lambs from the start through to finishing
* Worming treatments, often more than once
* Optional mineral/vitamin drenches
* Ear tags for every single lamb
* Slaughterhouse fees for every lamb
* Butchery costs
* Packaging
* Diesel for at least three journeys
And that’s before we even include the labour involved at every stage.
👩🌾 The labour
Lambing time alone involves long hours and hard work. Farmers don’t get paid extra for the night shifts 🤣
A lot of farms have to employ extra help during lambing because there simply aren’t enough hours in the day.
* Transporting sheep and lambs around in trailers — which themselves cost money to buy, run and maintain
* The time spent gathering sheep to carry out jobs, which happens regularly
* Using working dogs — and a good working dog costs a lot of money to buy, train and maintain
* Using quad bikes and other machinery
* Foot trimming — a real back-breaker if you don’t have a crate that turns/holds them over for you 🤣
* Dealing with frozen water during winter
* General maintenance and repairs
💀If you have livestock, you have dead stock.
Sheep can die at any time of year for all sorts of reasons — during lambing, from getting stuck on their backs, illness, or sometimes for reasons you simply can’t explain. 🙄
Every death is a loss of money, but it also costs money to dispose of the dead stock.
Those losses have to be absorbed into the overall cost of farming and can also mean having to spend more money replacing breeding sheep.
📋 And then there’s the paperwork
There is a huge amount of paperwork and record keeping that comes with keeping livestock.
* Recording every birth and tag number
* Recording any medications or worming treatments given
* Recording every movement from farm to farm or to an auction
* Completing the paperwork for every trip to the slaughterhouse
🚜 Land and maintenance
Then there are the costs of looking after the land:
* Replacing fencing and buying new materials — because sheep are fantastic escape artists!
* Pasture management
* Topping old grass
* Chain harrowing
And there are plenty of other costs I haven’t even mentioned.
Farming is hard work, and it takes up a huge amount of your time.
Farmers don’t receive a weekly or monthly wage. We put money into the animals, land and business for 12 months before we see any return from it.
Yes, it might look like a farmer is getting £200, or whatever amount is being charged, for a finished lamb. But when you actually sit down and work out every single penny that has gone into producing that lamb, the profit can sometimes be less than £50 a head — and in some cases as little as £20.
And that can depend on whether a ewe has a single or twins, how many lambs survive, how many problems you encounter, feed costs, vet bills and countless other variables.
So when you’re paying for a finished lamb, you’re not just paying for the lamb.
You’re paying for the year of work, feed, land, equipment, fuel, veterinary care, labour, paperwork, losses and everything else that has gone into getting that lamb from birth to your table.
There is so much more behind the price than people realise. 🐑❤️
And then I wonder why I do it 🤦♀️🤣
But I enjoy having the animals and I like people supporting British farming buying direct from farmers😁
