We were sort of running all the sheep together and you get them in at scanning and some would
be twins and some would be dry and you just sort of think you know why does that happen?
I’m Clayton South I farm with my partner Polly and three young boys 30k’s east of Wagin.
We've got a mix cropping and livestock farm on 4000 hectares with myself
and two full time employees.
Probably cropping 65 to 70 percent of the farm each year with the remainder being livestock.
We mate six and a half thousand adult ewes annually and then a thousand ewe lambs on
top of that as well.
Two and a half years ago we were looking at moving into EID.
So we went and purchased the Tepari Racewell sheep handler,
with an EID panel reader and weigh scale.
We've also bought a Gallagher stick reader.
So we can actually read tags at the yards where we don't have to cart the handler around.
We wanted to record each animal’s preg status each year so twin, single or dry and then
be able to sort of follow that through and see if our twins were becoming sort of repeat twinners.
These are the tags we're using they're just made by Allflex.
They are completely NLIS compliant.
Tracking the growth rates on the on the young sheep probably there is no way we would even
attempt it without the tags.
These Eyes activate and close the clamp.
On the back there's the panel reader so that will actually read the animals tag and send
that up to this little box which will then Bluetooth it across to this this box so that
will recognise the animal.
And then we can have whatever data you know on that animal previous data that we've captured
all stays in here.
So we're actually recording the weight and growth rates while still doing our normal
husbandry operations.
It's just finding out those better performing animals.
I mean they come in they have been running the same paddock same feed same everything
and some cut you know five kilos of wool and some might cut two kilos of wool.
So try and find those better performing animals - one breed from those and two remove those
poorer performing ones from the flock.
We think it's giving us value so to sit down with Peter and really go through it.
It was good.
It was an interesting challenge because there's really three separate components to what they're doing.
First of all you had the pregnancy scanning then you had the lamb weighing and then finally
you had the fleece weighing.
And we had to build all three of them together.
So from the South’s investment of thirty four thousand, five hundred dollars they were
getting a return of about ninety two thousand dollars over 10 years.
Or three dollars fifty for each dollar they invest.
And the payback was occurring over about six years.
Looking at it economically it makes sense for the Souths to invest in EID.
It’s probably lambs on the ground for us.
This is the key.
We want a high fertile animal that can produce two good lambs really.
The technology and stuff that is going to be around in the next sort of five or ten
years is sort of fairly exciting around EID.
So I think it's been a good investment.
The Department of Primary Industries and regional development.
Through its Sheep Industry Business Innovation project.
Made possible by Royalties for Regions is supporting and sharing new technologies in
the sheep industry.
This is improving labour efficiency in the sector and making it easier all round to run sheep.