Tim’s take:
Lambing kit is one of those expenses where the gap between a tidy list and a tidy shed is mostly discipline. Most of us have opened a store catalogue in mid-January, convinced we need half of it, then found the unopened boxes still cluttering the tack room at turnout. The smarter approach is to split what you buy into three piles: what you will reach for every season, what you only need if things go wrong, and the bigger items where opinion genuinely splits down the middle.
What matters most is the obstetric basics, the colostrum and tube gear, iodine for navels, and enough hurdles and pens to separate problem ewes from the rest without improvising at 3am. NADIS’s recommended kit list has not changed much because the job has not changed much. The new bit of kit everyone is talking about is the lambing camera, useful for spotting a ewe in the early stages and saving you a midnight walk to the shed, but a luxury rather than a necessity on most units.
Watch this space for the debate on lambing trailers, where the arguments get louder and the price tags longer. If you only buy one thing off the back of this guide, make it a spare stomach tube and a functioning thermometer, the rest is dressing.
A lambing equipment list for UK flocks: the obstetric kit NADIS recommends, hurdle pens, colostrum gear, navel iodine and whether a camera earns its place.
Why a lambing equipment list beats a trolley dash
Walk into any farm store in January and you can spend several hundred pounds on lambing kit in twenty minutes, half of it on things still in the wrapper come May. Go in with a list and you will spend less — and, more usefully, you will not discover at two in the morning that the one item you actually need is a stomach tube you never bought. This guide covers the kit that earns its place in a UK lambing shed: the obstetric basics, hurdles and pens, the colostrum kit, navel dressing, and the two bigger-ticket items — lambing cameras and lambing trailers — that divide opinion wherever sheep farmers gather. The husbandry side of the job is covered in our lambing season guide; this page is about what should be on the shelf, in the bucket and in your jacket pocket before the first ewe bags up.
The obstetric kit: lambing ropes, gloves and lubricant
The core of a lambing kit fits in a bucket, and the bucket itself is on the list. NADIS’s lambing guide sets out the essentials for assisting a ewe: arm-length disposable gloves, a clean bucket of warm water with soap or an approved surgical scrub, lambing ropes, a lambing snare and obstetrical lubricant. None of it is expensive, and together it is the difference between a controlled assist and a scramble.
Lambing ropes do the pulling work. Buy soft, washable ropes with loops already tied, ideally in two colours so you know which leg is which once both are inside the ewe. A lambing snare does the same job on a head that keeps slipping back, and NADIS notes various designs are available — pick one and practise the loop before you need it in the dark. Gloves are not optional: joint-ill and watery mouth both travel on hands, and AHDB’s advice is blunt — wear gloves when lambing ewes and wash hands regularly.
Lubricant is the item almost everyone underbuys. A difficult presentation can use half a bottle on its own, and running out mid-assist is exactly the situation the kit exists to prevent. On timing, NADIS is specific: a ewe making no progress after 30 minutes of straining should be gently restrained and examined, and where more than an hour passes between multiple births, intervention should be considered. The kit only helps if it is beside the pen when that half hour is up.
Lambing hurdles and individual pens
Lambing hurdles turn any corner of a shed into individual pens, and individual pens are where mothering-up happens. Interlocking galvanised hurdles are the standard choice because they store flat, hose down properly and survive being trodden on; wooden pallets do the same job on a budget but are far harder to disinfect, which matters more than it first appears.
Hygiene between occupants counts for more than pen design. AHDB’s joint-ill guidance is specific: “change straw bedding and disinfect individual lambing pens between ewes”, the guidance says, and remove placentas and afterbirth from pens. The bacterium behind most joint-ill, Streptococcus dysgalactiae, persists in straw bedding and soil — a quick fork-out and fresh straw on top is not enough once a case has appeared. That makes disinfectant and a sprayer part of the lambing equipment list in their own right, not an afterthought.
How many pens? Work back from your scanning result and the shape of your lambing block. A compact lambing off a tight tupping window will have more ewes holding pens on the same night than a spread-out one, so it needs more pens per hundred ewes. Hurdles are also the item most worth buying secondhand — farm dispersal sales are full of them, and galvanised steel does not care who owned it first.
The colostrum kit: bottles, teats and a stomach tube
No item on this list earns its keep like the colostrum kit. AHDB’s colostrum guidance is precise: a lamb should receive 200 ml of colostrum within two hours of birth, and the equivalent of 200 ml per kilogram of body weight across the first 24 hours — a full litre for a 5 kg lamb. The window is unforgiving, because after six hours the lamb’s ability to absorb immunoglobulins into its bloodstream has already reduced. A lamb that cannot or will not suck needs that first feed by tube, which is why the stomach tube is the single most important purchase on this page. Buy two: one will crack or go missing on the worst possible night.
Around the tube sit feeding bottles and teats, a jug for harvesting from the ewe, and clean storage. AHDB advises harvesting with clean hands or gloves into clean containers, labelling containers with the collection date, and using fresh colostrum within an hour or storing it in the fridge or freezer. Flock case studies in AHDB’s watery mouth guidance mention freezing colostrum in ice-cube trays and carrying a thermos to keep it warm in the field — cheap tricks that work. A bag of powdered colostrum belongs in the cupboard as backup, though ewe colostrum is best.
Colostrum is also the front line against disease: AHDB calls getting enough good-quality colostrum into every lamb quickly the most important and practical way to prevent watery mouth, with 50 ml per kilogram as soon as possible and no later than four to six hours after birth.
Navel dressing: iodine in the first fifteen minutes
A wet navel is an open door to the bacteria that cause joint-ill and navel-ill, and closing it is the cheapest disease prevention on the farm. AHDB’s guidance is to disinfect navels in 10% iodine within 15 minutes of birth and repeat the application 2–4 hours later. Fifteen minutes means the iodine lives in your lambing-jacket pocket or clipped to the hurdle, not on a shelf in the feed room.
A purpose-made dip cup gives full coverage of the navel with less waste than spraying, which is why most shepherds dip the first application and keep a spray bottle for the repeat. Buy more iodine than you think you need — like lubricant, it is the consumable that runs out during the busiest week, and unlike hurdles it cannot be improvised.
Lambing cameras: fewer night checks, earlier catches
A lambing camera will not lamb a ewe for you, but it changes the economics of the night shift. A 2 a.m. walk through the shed wakes every ewe in it and costs you twenty minutes of sleep whether anything is happening or not; a camera check from the kitchen or the bedside costs thirty seconds and disturbs nothing. Over a four-week block that difference is measured in whole nights of sleep.
The stronger argument is the timing rule from the obstetric kit above: you can only act on a ewe that has made no progress in 30 minutes if you know roughly when she started. A camera turns “she looked restless at the last check” into a time-stamped answer.
On the buying side: choose a camera you can pan and zoom remotely over a fixed lens, because a fixed camera always ends up pointing at the wrong pen. Infrared night vision is non-negotiable in an unlit shed. If broadband or wifi reaches the building, a standard security-style camera is the cheap route; if it does not, cameras with a 4G SIM slot solve the problem for the price of a data plan. Mount it high in a corner with the whole pen area in frame, and test the feed on your phone before the first ewe is due, not after.
Lambing trailers: moving ewes without the fight
A heavily pregnant ewe should not be wrestled across a field, and a freshly lambed one should not be separated from her lambs to get everyone under a roof. That is the case for a lambing trailer — typically a low, quad-towed trailer that carries the ewe with her lambs beside her, keeping the family together so mothering is not undone by the journey.
For short moves, many shepherds still walk the ewe and carry the lambs low, where she can see and smell them; the trailer earns its place on longer hauls, in bad weather, and for outdoor lambing systems where the shelter is a field away. As with hurdles, the secondhand market is the first place to look, and a trailer that hoses out easily beats a fancier one that does not — the hygiene logic from the lambing pen applies to anything a wet newborn lamb touches.
When to have the kit ready
Work backwards from tupping. Ewe gestation runs 143 to 147 days according to NADIS, so a raddle mark in mid-October 2025 is a due date in March 2026 — our lambing calculator turns each tupping date into an expected lambing date you can plan the shed around. Aim to have the full equipment list bought, found or mended two to three weeks before the first due date, and do a restock check midway through the block: lubricant, gloves, iodine and colostrum are the four consumables that run out mid-lambing. If you keep ewes year-round, the quiet answer is to restock in the week after lambing ends, while the gaps are still fresh in your mind — next year’s 2 a.m. self will be grateful. For the wider flock-year context, our UK sheep farming guide covers where lambing sits in the calendar.
The lambing equipment list in full
Print this, stick it on the feed-room door, and cross items off as they go in the bucket:
- Obstetric kit: arm-length disposable gloves, lambing ropes, lambing snare, obstetrical lubricant, clean bucket, soap or surgical scrub
- Pens: lambing hurdles, fresh straw, disinfectant and sprayer
- Colostrum kit: two stomach tubes, bottles and teats, harvesting jug, labelled storage containers, powdered colostrum as backup, ice-cube trays for the freezer
- Navels: 10% iodine, dip cup, spray bottle for the repeat application
- Worth their place: lambing camera, heat lamp or warming box, lambing trailer
Everything in the first four groups costs less than one dead lamb’s worth of trouble. The last group is where judgement and budget come in — and where a night’s unbroken sleep starts to look like farm equipment too.
Frequently Asked Questions
What equipment do you need for lambing?
The core kit recommended by NADIS is arm-length disposable gloves, lambing ropes, a lambing snare, obstetrical lubricant and a clean bucket of warm water with soap or surgical scrub. Around that sit hurdle pens with disinfectant, a colostrum kit with a stomach tube and bottles, and 10% iodine for navels.
How much colostrum does a newborn lamb need?
AHDB guidance is 200 ml within two hours of birth and the equivalent of 200 ml per kilogram of body weight in the first 24 hours — about a litre for a 5 kg lamb. Absorption of immunoglobulins falls away after six hours, so early feeds matter most.
When should you step in during a lambing?
NADIS advises examining a ewe that has made no progress after 30 minutes of straining, and considering intervention where more than an hour passes between multiple births. If you hit real difficulty delivering a lamb, call for assistance immediately.
What should lamb navels be dipped in?
AHDB’s joint-ill guidance is to disinfect navels in 10% iodine within 15 minutes of birth and repeat 2–4 hours later. A dip cup gives better coverage for the first application; a spray bottle does the repeat.
Are lambing cameras worth it?
For indoor lambing, usually yes: a camera replaces shed walks that wake the ewes, and it lets you time how long a ewe has been straining, which is what the 30-minute intervention rule needs. Pan-tilt-zoom and infrared night vision are the two features worth paying for.
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Source: NADIS Animal Health Skills
