FARMER Pippa Burr is used to early wake up calls and standing in rainswept fields checking tiny lambs.

The 30-year-old daughter of Roves Farm owners Rupert and Joanna Burr has been lambing on the family farm since she was a small child.

Despite the late nights and early starts, the sheep farmer says it is the best part of the job.

The farm has two lambing seasons, ensuring a year-round supply of meat for the Roves Farm shop. This month, 60 ewes are expecting lambs and in March a further 330 ewes will lamb.

“This is the warm up,” Pippa joked, stood in the lambing shed.

The first lamb had been due on Saturday, but came two days early. By Sunday lunchtime, two dozen ewes had given birth and the lambing shed was full of stumbling animals taking their first tentative steps or snoozing on the mother’s woolly back.

Pippa said: “It’s a very busy time, but great fun and very rewarding – especially if you have a lambing coming out wrong. If you can sort it out, you’ll have a happy lamb at the end.

“It’s always special when the lambs are born. If you didn’t enjoy lambing, you wouldn’t be a sheep farmer.”

She can remember helping with the lambing season as a young child. Her own daughter, one, comes into the sheds to stroke the sheep, but is not yet old enough to carry around the heavy straw bales used for the animals’ bedding.

"She likes coming down, seeing the sheeping and stroking them," said Pippa.

Roves Farm’s meet the lambs events will begin daily next week. For more, call 01793 763939 or visit www.rovesfarm.co.uk.