When I came home 2010, what Dad was running with the first cross ewes and the
merino ewes wasn't enough income for two families.
13/14 were pretty bad droughts. Sold a lot of stock. We had two age groups and
wethers that went down to none and then after for 2014 we really had to start
to focus on rebuilding and how we're going to rebuild.
Rick came home after doing a lifetime ewe course and said there's pretty big
genetic gains in merinos, big maternal Merinos, they've got so many advantages.
They're highly fertile and he probably prompt me for three years and I didn't
take much notice, I guess that's how it is for old blokes. And then he took
me to the Best Wool conference in Bendigo and I walked out of that
conference and I said, “Um, I reckon some of this can work, Rick.” He said, “I've
been trying to tell you that for three years, dad.”
Purchasing expensive rams still shocked Dad. If I remember rightly, he spent
about seven grand on rams. In through in about five or six years, I went and put $60,000
worth of rams through the account in one year, so it had to be a fair
justification, and because we did that, we went to two joinings so we could use the
rams twice. EIDed all the ewes to get not individual sires but bloodline sires and
straight from marking, we had him marking weights of lambs weaning weights
and getting a growth rate that way. And we said we might as well measure the fleece
as well, so we started fleece weighing as one and a half throughout the lambs to make
sure, to see if the ASBVs were working.
As soon as Rick started bringing these new genetics in, as soon as the
lambs hit the ground, they just grew - even when we got them into the lamb marking cradle and
they were bigger and they were growing quicker right from conception I reckon.
Big gains, big improvements - just a genetic thump really, yeah, that's what it is.
His knowledge of the physical features
in the wool on the ram were perfect, so I did the numbers, he did the phenotypic
stuff and it was just the combination of two which narrowed down to the rams we
were going to purchase.
We never got weaning weights at 20 kilos at 12 weeks, and we're
hitting 25 kilos at 12 weeks and fleece weights of one and a half year olds up
around four and a half kilos. When it was three like that, that's the peak end of
it - not the averages - but it's just quite impressive to see where what the top
end of it was doing really early on.
As an old bloke you don't really realise you're so far behind the modern ideas. Yeah I didn't think I was too bad, or cocky,
but you know it was a big learning curve for myself. And yeah, and then Rick
did a grazing management course which I used to run a mob in each paddock sort
of thing, and he started doing rotational grazing and mobbing up mobs, and yeah, and I could
see it benefitting growing pasture that way. And now he's into growing pastures
and sowing annuals every year and I can see the benefits of it.
After that first year, he - we haven't hesitated. The next three years after
that, we invested similar each year on rams to keep it going while changing
the breeding objective a little bit. Focusing on the fat, muscle and growth
but putting staple length in there too for fleece weight and plainer bodies,
which was the transition. For the lamb survival, we've started to focus on
number of lambs weaned now the seed stock produces – give me some good data on that.
The change in our genetic focus has helped me out with the wethers as well. It wasn't a
direct goal out of the results going into sheep genetics, but we used to retain our
wethers until they were two tooths and get a full shearing out of them
because it was the only way it could make money, but now we're - they're hitting
prime lamb market grids at six, seven months of age, so it just opens a whole
new window of selling into that grid and offload them earlier for a good
profit. Another one for the early growth, which is a tick, is being able to join new
lambs successfully - same as the wethers selling, but we're joining the new lambs
hitting those forty kilos at seven, eight months of age and lambing down lambs at
thirteen, twelve, thirty months of age as lamb, which is basically we're getting
that genetic gain a lot quicker due to young genetics having lambs.
So what we've seen is what we hoped to get out from the day dot. The genetics just really
covering it off on the growth rates. They have helped with the fleece weights, they
have helped with the lamb survival and the biggest one for us with our dry
spells is the genetic fat just holding those ewes in the right condition in the
tough times. And if I'm not feeding them, then I'm saving money, so it's - that's the
biggest tick we've found and you know just stoked with the
results we've been getting.
My advice is you've got to use these modern things – ASBVs - you know, if
you really want to make money out of sheep, just use them. They're out there,
the tools are out there, use them.
I wouldn't be where I was today if it wasn't for dad’s advice, I'd have some pretty ugly sheep coming through.
You may have spent the last 10 years, 15 years picking awesome physical sheep but
how do you know what they produce? It’s sheep genetics, ASBVs, they're not
the silver bullet but they are a massive percentage of the tick list of helping
out. Like it's just another tool in the toolbox to help with the sheep genetics, so
you take your experience with your ten years of picking the best ram and then
narrow those ten best down to three best by using the genetics because you'll get
a lot better result out of it.