Smallholder Services
We pride ourselves in offering a comprehensive smallholder service. We have experienced vets who are passionate about looking after smallholder clients. At Shepton Vets we have developed a greater understanding of what our smallholder clients want. We offer compassionate care for sick or injured livestock.
We enjoy looking after a range of commonly kept smallholder livestock species these include sheep, cattle, pigs, lamas and alpacas. We are aware that even though these species are all considered livestock, they are all very different. We enjoy the challenge of ensuring they remain healthy as well as being there for them, providing brilliant care for them when they are sick.
*NEW*
Healthy Smallholders Club
In 2025 we are launching a New Healthy Smallholders Club. This is to reflect the needs of our growing smallholder client base. Our new scheme helps owners to spread the cost of their preventative health care for their animals.
To become a member of our club, each month a £30 fee is charged. This is a set fee that covers all species and all numbers of animals.
(Definition of a smallholder: Less than 20 cows and less than 50 sheep).
Benefits of the club include:
- Annual 90 minute visit: When this visit is booked you will be asked to select a topic that you would like to discuss. For example, topics include Parasite control planning, vaccine calendar planning, how to optimize breeding performance or how to implement a biosecurity plan for your holding. During the visit this is an opportunity for the vet to inspect your stock and help to develop a bespoke report for the clients holding.
An annual visit is important to ensure that we can continue to prescribe throughout the year. During this visit we will also be able to provide the client with a Veterinary Attestation Number (VAN). This will be required by any keepers that are not Red Tractor Assured that sells livestock through the markets.
- As a Healthy Smallholder Club member, you will also be able to access competitively priced medicines. We will also make sure that we can prescribe smaller volumes of medicines and wormers. We want to make sure we are prescribing responsibly and when necessary. If you purchase your wormers through agricultural stores, you will have to buy a whole bottle. This can lead to over worming, wastage and not utilizing the appropriate product to burden that is currently causing an issue.
- 25% discount on in house worm egg counts. We aim to get your results back to you on the same day. Our vets will be able to help discuss whether treatment is necessary, what treatment you should use and dispense appropriate volumes for you.
- 10% of goat disbudding. We encourage you to bring your kids to the practice to ensure that we can weigh them accurately. We offer a set price for disbuds, which is subsidized with greater numbers.
- 25% off all training offered by Shepton Vets. We offer a variety of different courses, some of them might be of interest to smallholders. For example, mastering medicines, sheep parasite control planning. Lambing workshop.
- Free attendance to our new Smallholder open day. Charged to non-members.
- Healthy Smallholder club members would receive a quarterly newsletter, to help keep them abreast of current affairs and advise them about forthcoming training events that might interest them.
To find out more, email us at farm.animal@sheptonvets.com or call 01749 341761.
Meet your smallholder vet team : Bibby, Kate, Anna Hewison, Elly
We feel confident that we can cater for all types of small holders. We have clients that are passionate about breeding high quality pedigree animals for showing or selling, clients that are keeping animals for their own consumption aiming to be self-sufficient. We also look after lots of clients who enjoy owning livestock species as pets, aiming to keep them to an old age.
Bibby Thomas
Kate Travitsky
Anna Hewison
Elly Cockman
Services that we offer small holder clients:
- Routine health visits – planning biosecurity, sustainable parasite control, breeding management, nutritional advice.
- Disbudding of goats
- Castration of all livestock species
- Vasectomies
- Elective and emergency surgeries
- Fertility testing males
- Ultra sound scanning – pregnancy diagnosis
- Access to Xray
- In house Lab facilities
- Routine Blood sampling including harvesting plasma.
- Small holder events – Practical Lambing courses, small holder specific training courses, harvesting plasma from donor alpacas ahead of unpacking
A new smallholder monthly subscription service is coming soon.
Look out for updates in upcoming newsletters and watch our social media platforms for more information
Reproductive management
We have the knowledge and experience to help you reach your livestock breeding goals. For example, we can help you synchronise your small ruminants mating period, resulting in a compact lambing period. We can support you in utilizing AI and Embryo transfer in collaboration with other veterinary practices helping to speed up genetic improvement.
Health planning
We enjoy helping you to develop your knowledge and understanding of your own livestock, to help make sure they remain healthy and perform well. We can visit your smallholding and create a bespoke health plan and vaccine calendar to ensure you never miss any preventative treatments for your animals.
This health planning visit can be used to set up an appropriate biosecurity plan for your smallholding and we can make sure you are managing parasites in a way that is sustainable for your animals and our environment.
Onsite treatment facility
At our Shepton Mallet practice we have a small ruminant treatment facility. This gives us the ability to offer cost-effective consultations for sick animals. We can also hospitalise patients, with 24 hour care available when necessary.
Our treatment facility is used for disbudding goat kids, castrations and vasectomies, kiddings lambings and caesarian sections.. We also perform more complicated surgeries and hospitalisation, such as urethrostomies for obstructed weathers, plasma transfusions of cria with failure of passive transfer and intravenous fluid therapy.
Collaboration with the pets department
We work closely with our pets department when caring for some small holder patients, combining our knowledge across our two departments while benefiting from the use of their specialist equipment such as ultrasound and Xray. This has been helpful when dealing with complicated facture repairs for example. Small holder patients have benefited from the skill of orthopedic and soft tissue surgeons that work in the pets department, providing the very highest standards of care, without the need for referral.
Lab services
Clients benefit from a well-equipped, in house laboratory, that’s able to run a variety of tests quickly. Results will be reported to you by our experienced vets who can give advice on the best treatments.
Medicines
We supply fairly priced medicines to our clients from our large, fully stocked pharmacy in Shepton Mallet. We have daily deliveries meaning we can get anything not in stock within 24 hours. XL Vets membership supports our medicine procurement enabling us to source alternative products quickly should there be supply issues. Our delivery van is out on the road daily meaning we can deliver to your farm or drop medicines to our daily Wells practice drop off point. Clients can order medicines anytime of day or night via Whatsapp Whatsapp medicine order 07592 307 394
