Start with the sheep: mouths and backs
Before you price a single bale, handle the sheep. Run a hand along the spine and over the loin of each old ewe: the fleece hides a remarkable amount of loss, and condition you can feel is the only honest starting point. Then check mouths. A ewe with worn, gappy or broken teeth cannot crop short winter pasture to the ground or chew her way through coarse, stemmy forage, whatever the calendar says she should manage. On that evidence, split the flock before winter: the genuinely old run as their own group, fed to their mouths and their condition, not to the flock average. Note who is in the old group and why, while it is fresh in your mind — the ewe with the broken mouth needs different watching from the one who is simply thin.
Hay quality beats hay quantity for old mouths
An old ewe standing before a mountain of stalky, late-cut hay is not well fed; she is busy going hungry, picking out the leaf and leaving the stems her teeth cannot process. Reserve your leafiest, softest, early-cut hay for the old group, shake out the dust before it goes in the rack, and keep it in front of them around the clock — short winter days give slow eaters little time, and competition shortens it further. Where hay alone will not hold condition, the leafy bales are the ones that earn their storage space. Smell a bale before you buy it for them: sweet and leafy is right; musty or dusty bales are refused by sheep who cannot afford refused meals.
The energy top-up, little and often
Old sheep who need more than hay get it as a modest concentrate feed, introduced gradually over a week or more and given in small daily amounts rather than a feast twice a week: a rumen handles steady supplies well and lurches at sudden loads of grain. Feed it on a clean, dry patch or in troughs with genuine room for every ewe in the group, because the oldest are exactly the ones pushed to the end of the line — and a ewe who misses her share three days running is on the slope you are trying to prevent. Fresh water beside the feed matters as much as the feed; sheep eat less when drinking means breaking ice with their noses.
Condition checks, shelter and stores
Re-handle the old group every couple of weeks through the cold months, not just at the start: winter is long, and the ewe who held condition in the first frost may be losing it by the last. Their shelter need not be a building — a windproof hedge line or open-fronted shed with deep dry bedding where they can lie out of the wind does the work — but lying dry is non-negotiable for animals whose reserves are thin. Order feed and hay for the old group early and store it under cover and off the ground; the worst time to discover your merchant is out of the good bales is the week the whole county wants them.
Written down as a plan, all of this is easy to run and easier to hand over. Loading the winter rota into KinsLe as Care Teams duties — feeding rounds, fortnightly condition checks, ice-breaking at both ends of the day — means each job has a name against it and a timestamp when it is done.