How Mumblebone built its genetic value since 2010

Back to the 2010 ram sale

That whole fat story is just a space I love. We got pretty serious about the fat space 10 or 12 years ago, having been introduced to Ferg and what he was offering the industry. I've heard a lot of that before, but a lot of it I hadn't, so there's a whole new round of excited fat chat to come.

I'd just like to welcome you all. I know we're late in the day, but on behalf of Lou and I and our whole team, welcome to Mumblebone. These information days are a very important part of what we do, so we might just get into it. The Mumblebone path is a pretty distinctive one that we set years ago, and we've been going down this path, which is quite different to the majority of the industry, for quite some time. There's a lot of science behind why we set a clear path and why we keep going down it. But to understand the foundation we've built and where we'll go from here, I think it's probably easier if we take a little step back in time.

So I'd like you to come with me on a little journey back to 2010. This is a sale day, a pretty quiet affair really. I think we've only got one buyer from that day who's still with us. It was 82 rams and we sold most of them; I think we passed a few in. But it was one of the most miserable days. You can't quite see it in that photo, but it was sideways sleet and hail, and wind that blew like nothing else. It actually blew the marquee down the day before, so we were left selling out in the elements, with another day of wind and sleet and miserable weather to try and convince people to come to a ram sale.

So it was a pretty tough sort of day, and it's actually the day that prompted the dome that we built and have since extended. I can assure you it works a whole lot better in miserable conditions than a marquee. It was early days for breeding values. We only had four of them: post-weaning weight, yearling weight, fat and muscle. I used to be able to get around every ram with every client and look at every trait, which would be a daunting task these days, but I'm pretty sure we would have gone around every pen and thoroughly enjoyed it too.

Times have changed. This is the sale itself, on the Helmsman system, another pretty quiet affair. But it was early days, and we thought we were setting a pretty good pace combining breeding values with an animal that didn't need to be mulesed. It's really from this pretty simple foundation that we've built the foundation we're on now, and we'll continue to push forward, evolving what we're doing.

This was our super sire of the day, number 10. He had slightly positive fat and muscle figures, handy growth and 100 comfort factor, which was a big part of the selection back in the day, as we understand more traits now. You're smiling at me, boss, and you should be too; Ferg's a real advocate for comfort factor. But he was kept mainly because of his visual wool traits and some handy breeding values. He really was the best example of the animal we bred, with the figures we had to pick him from at the time. Of course that has evolved enormously since then, and it's that evolution that keeps breeding really exciting and keeps opening doors with really switched-on breeders to transform flocks around the country.

This is the top-priced sire of the day, for those who can read it. Comfort factor 99.9%, and I kid you not, that's probably the reason we sold that ram as opposed to retaining him. Zero for fat, 0.1 for muscle, which was pretty good at the time, handy growth and a good-looking animal. He seems a pretty modest sort of top-priced animal as we look at him from here. But in the day, breeding a plain-bodied sheep at all was a pretty big step. So to be breeding a plain-bodied sheep, helping people get away from mulesing, in the early days of breeding values, wasn't a bad place to be. He still looks pretty ordinary looking back that far, but at the time he was our best.

Then and now: what the data shows

If we take the data from 2010 and put it across the spreadsheet we offer now, with all the headings in place, it doesn't fill in many of those spaces. There's a little bit there on the animal itself. We knew the sire, but we wouldn't have had a clue who the dam was. There were only a hatful of breeding values, all the visual scores are missing, and there's a bit of raw wool data down the bottom.

But if we step forward to last year's top-priced ram, visually the ram himself probably doesn't look a whole lot different to the ram in 2010. The thing that separates this animal, who is a far superior animal to the 2010 one, is literally the data. The wool quality to me is probably on par, from memory, and the shape of the sheep is not all that different, but he's enormously different at a genetic level.

You'll notice too that there were a lot more people around last year's animal. There is an enormous amount of work that goes into collecting this data, and a whole lot of people. It's not just the team we work with directly on farm. It's the likes of Ferg and a whole lot of other people managing data, managing communication and managing a whole range of different spaces that need to come together to be able to offer this sort of information and put a sale together with these animals.

That's the data from last year's ram, clearly a far cry from 2010. It's this information that we go to a lot of trouble to communicate, to help people understand it and then use that data to make better breeding decisions for themselves at home. And fat plays a really critical role. Anything in purple up there is in the top 5%, including fat at 1.8. I just want to focus on that on the back of Ferg's talk; you got me excited about that. That's a lot of fat. Yeah, that's good.

Moving on. Data ain't just data. There was an old ad that said oils ain't oils, and the same goes for data. There are breeding values out there that really aren't worth the paper they're written on, and that comes back to the quality of the data being offered. So the data quality score is now being offered by Sheep Genetics, to their credit, and it gives people an understanding of where a flock sits. You can see where we are: round figures, 90. It certainly hasn't always been there.

I was at Bendigo the other day, and there were a lot of rams from studs I wouldn't have thought would be at all interested in breeding values that are now offering them, which I think is a great thing. But most of them didn't have an accuracy score with their figures, and they're not meant to display breeding values without an accuracy. Anyway, I suppose the first step is to get them aware of breeding values and offering a breeding value with their sheep. The next step may be to acknowledge the accuracy of that breeding value.

I just want to put that up there. If that was a terrible score, it probably wouldn't be a slide we'd be sharing, but at 90 I'm happy to hang my hat on the accuracy of the data we lean on.

Full pedigree, genomics and the index

One of the big things that's driven the accuracy of the data is full pedigree. You can see these blue boxes are full pedigree, and above that the red boxes are sire only. If we were to take this right back to 2010, there would be a lot of sire only and a lot of unknown pedigree. It's genomics that's really opened the door to efficiently collecting our maternal pedigree. Going back earlier than 2018, we had a lot of rams bred by syndicate mating groups. We might have had a syndicate of, say, five half-brothers of a similar type joined to a group of ewes. The progeny born from that would only have a hint of sire pedigree and no maternal pedigree, which produces a very low quality breeding value in terms of accuracy.

So the accuracy is just skyrocketing on the back of genomics, as we move out the older years with very low pedigree and replace them with a new generation of fully pedigreed ewes. We've reached a point where we're now at 98% full pedigree, and the missing 2% is probably down to the odd mismothering. I'd love to think we'd hit 100, but at 98 we're getting pretty close.

So the next step, once we've got an accurate data set, is to increase the size of that data set. Last year, the rams offered in the sale, 400 in the auction and another 300-odd sold after the sale, came from the 2021 drop, which started from just over 3,000 stud lambs, including dead at birth. This year we've had a massive step up to 4,200 stud lambs, including dead at birth. That just means we've got a much larger offering of animals with accurate data to offer the industry, and I'd like to think that trend will keep going.

Henry did a great job of explaining the index. Now that we're looking at so many traits, it had become quite confusing to assess them all, and this index is really opening our eyes. Just the other day we were going through the rams to pick out the ones to put on display today, and some really high-indexing animals came up on the screen with a row of figures that looked sort of innocuous. They really weren't the sort of animals we'd have wanted to be looking at. But because they had a high index figure, we looked at them more closely.

You could start to see that while they might not be shaded in blue for the top 10% of the industry, they might have been just out of the blue on a whole range of traits, the important ones and the semi-important ones. So the index is really honing our efficiency in managing large groups of stud animals, to provide higher genetic merit animals on sale day without putting in animals we should be retaining here. I think it's a win for the stud, I think it's a win for commercial clients, and I think it's great innovation that neXtgen Agri are rolling out, through Henry here particularly. It's a great step, and that's really got us to where we are now, which is pretty cool.

The power of the maternal line

So I just want to have a bit of a stint looking at where we go next. We've taken some big licks of genetic input from outside sires and some of our own, and spread them very quickly through AI. But it's proving to be much harder now to find those free kicks, those standout sires, to really take us to another level. So a lot of it is coming down to breeding internally, and that's put a whole new light on the quality of our maternal genetics.

I just want to walk you through the story of this ewe. She's a 2016 ewe, 578, and she twinned as a maiden. Just as a side note, if a ewe twins as a maiden she's two-thirds likely to keep twinning throughout the rest of her life, if nutrition is matched. Same with singles. Twinning is repeatable and singles are repeatable. Reproduction is not necessarily highly heritable, but this is a management tool we can use at a commercial level, selecting for twins at first joining. It's probably worth taking note of that if you weren't already aware of it.

Anyway, 578 twinned at her first joining. She was weaned and joined again a month later and had a second set of twins, which to me says she's a bit of a super ewe. She then had a single, which could have been nutrition not matched to her requirements, or it could be genetic. She then had another single, followed by another set of twins including a top auction ram. So a wonderful track record. She then had another set of twins including the top auction ram last year, a $24,000 top, as well as a stud sire that we thought was even better than the top auction ram. All by the same ewe; a pretty powerful set of twins.

Then another single, and interestingly this single ewe has a wonderful row of breeding values, including a fibre diameter of minus 1.3. So we're starting to see these animals combining all the traits we think are important, but we're now able to do it potentially a micron finer than we have been, and I think that'll be another step forward. And I can tell you this ewe is also out having another set of twins as we speak.

It's this sort of maternal power that we can tap into through the use of technology to really start driving the top end of the stud, matching these ewes to the top sires. There's nothing new about this in stud breeding, but that's the ticket to breeding the real next-level animal, the ones Ferg describes as never having been bred before. So that's pretty exciting.

Welfare, customers and keeping in touch

It's also a great way to accentuate the welfare traits. I thought it was brilliant listening to Howard kicking the day off today, and it's been a theme carried through by the girls from New Zealand Merino, talking about just how important customer perception is, and connecting what we're doing on farm with our customers' needs as well as driving our production goals. I think it's a really interesting message. We talked about it in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago, when Nicola and I were doing a trip around a lot of the South Island.

We have the opportunity to align our production goals with our welfare needs, and mulesing is a classic example of that. By simply breeding an animal that doesn't need to be mulesed, we're opening the door to fat, to growth rate, to higher reproduction, to longer staple length and to lower fly pressure. All these profit drivers align very neatly with the fact that we don't need to mules. So we've got two really important facets here: running production goals in line with our welfare needs, so we can keep our customer happy and also our bank manager. Shout out to you, Carly. I think it's the first time I've had a bank manager in the room; nice to have you here, and I hope it's going well.

I guess it's this message that's really starting to see Mumblebone genetics spread across the country. We had the team behind the scenes put this map together from a list of postcodes our genetics have gone to in the last five years, either rams or semen, so they're starting to get quite a spread. When people ask how I think our genetics will work in their area, I find I'm far more comfortable saying I reckon I can put you in touch with someone in your district, rather than just telling you I reckon it'll work. We've now got them across a fair bit of the country, a lot of high rainfall zones. I was actually interested myself to see this map, because it's only a new bit of work, and it puts it into perspective.

On the back of this, it's getting quite hard to connect with a lot of people. The tyranny of distance is really starting to work against the ability to stay in touch with people on farm, which I really like to do. So one of the ways we want to keep a connection going is a branded ewe sale, which we started last year for the first time. We managed to get 8,000 Mumblebone-blood, or pretty close to Mumblebone-blood, ewes into a sale and offer them to the industry. This is something we want to keep doing. If there's real support for it, I'd like to think we could double that, or potentially get to round figures of 20,000 ewes in the sale, to answer the calls we get from people looking for Mumblebone genetics by bringing all the sellers and buyers together in one spot. So this is a bit of a new thing we're looking to push out, and if there's more interest in it, please let me know.

As we saw before, as things get more of a spread on them it is getting harder to keep in touch with people. So days like this are an important part of sharing our message, and also gaining your feedback, around a drink this afternoon with a bit of luck. In terms of where we go from here, we may take days like this out on the road, take this information to new locations and see if we can connect with people that way. Social media is doing its thing, but if all else fails, just pick up the phone if you want to talk sheep. If you've got a problem, the sooner we deal with it the better, and if something's going well, I love getting those calls too. So please keep in touch with what's going on at your place.

What comes next

What's next is a pretty exciting space too. It's been covered today that the breeding values for fleece rot, colour and character will be available this year. That's information we didn't have last year. We can take the raw data for colour and character and turn it into a breeding value. The upside for commercial people is this: we might have a wool that looks white here, but if you're going to a higher rainfall area, there's a chance that wool won't hold up to the higher rainfall challenge.

Like every other breeding value, if we've got a breeding value for that trait and it's telling us that yes, this is a high rainfall wool, we've got the science and the accuracy of data to say that's the ram that's worth a shot. We've got plenty of rams going into high rainfall areas, and there are families that do it better than others. We live and breathe our sheep, so we can certainly steer people in the right direction if high rainfall is your thing.

Just a bit of a shout out to Ferg here. What's coming, I think, is just amazing. I remember talking to my grandfather decades ago, when we'd just installed a fax machine in their house. It was pretty big technology at the time, but he looked at me and said, "So how do they get all those words down that tiny little wire?" I didn't have the answer, and I thought he might have missed the point a little bit. But I had a bit of a chuckle to myself, thinking imagine if I was trying to explain to him now that it's not the fax machine that's going to kick us to the next level, it's facial recognition that's going to breed better sheep. It would just blow his mind.

I think it's this sort of innovation that is really driving our industry forward. So a shout out to you here, Ferg. The innovation you're bringing to the industry has made an enormous difference to our business and to our stud. I'd like to put it on public record that it takes people like this to go out on a limb, to really risk their career and put so much energy and life effort into the work you're bringing to this space. So if you wouldn't mind joining with me, everyone, in a quick round of applause.

That's awesome. So I think that's the day, people. I'll hand back to you in a minute, Josh, but please, if you can, stick around. There'll be a drink and a bit of food around, and it'd be great to catch up with you now the pressure's off. Thanks for coming.