How many ewes can a top tup tup?

 Things I have learned:

1. It doesn't take long.
2. The ewes probably prefer it that way. 

This week has been a bit of an eye opener, if I'm honest. Ivie was watching This Farming Life the other night (because, obviously, when he's not farming he's thinking about farming or watching other people farming). There was a segment all about tupping. 

[There's something quite pleasing about a noun that's also a verb. For example, a tup tups. And I'm told that a bull bulls. It doesn't work for all animals, though. An elephant doesn't elephant. But I digress...]

So, anyway I watched in slight horror as the tup on TV was let loose in a field of ewes and proceeded to do the deed. Or tup. Now, obviously I didn't expect him to take each ewe out to dinner, send her a bunch of roses and send flirtatious texts before getting to know her better but I did expect each 'interaction' to last longer than a couple of seconds. 

Form an orderly queue, ladies

One thing I did know about before this year was the rather fetching harness a tup wears during tupping season. (Think lederhosen from the Sound of Music crossed with the Village People). I was pretty confused the first time Ivie told me he was off to change the crayon.

For the uninitiated, a tup wears a harness when he's tupping. It has a coloured crayon attached to the front that marks a ewe's rear end when it's been on a date. It serves two purposes: firstly, it lets Ivie see how many are still left to 'do'; and secondly it lets him see when the lambs will be due, as each batch will have a different colour. 

Closer to lambing time, the ewes are scanned and get another colour sprayed on them, depending on how many lambs they're carrying. It makes the lambing shed full of coats of many colours and now I'm wondering what happens if you're a colour blind farmer... 

I was curious about how many ewes a tup can tup. Let's do the maths:

Number of ewes	220
Number of tups	7
Ewes per tup	30+

Jim Smith puts it better than I ever could....