Breeding plain-bodied Merinos for condition and profit

The Mumblebone team and operation

Thanks very much. That's got to be up there with the best introduction I've ever had. It's wonderful to see a shed full of people like this. Information days, which today is focused on, are very much a part of what we need to do. We're really heading out into some pretty rare space at a genetic level, so if we're out there with no one understanding what it's about, we're not talking to many people. To see a shed filled like this with a really switched-on looking crowd is a big part of what we're doing, and it's very much appreciated. So thank you for making the effort to be here.

Well, that's a great slide to start with, and a bit of a surprise to me, but here's a bit of a rundown on our team. I'm happy to say I could not be more proud of the team we've collected around us to drive this ship forward. Gloves has been with us for about four and a half years. He's very much my right-hand man and a big reason behind why there have been so many innovations and so many changes made here. So it's wonderful to have you on board, Gloves, and thanks for getting the day rolling like you have. Gloves has introduced most of the team.

As I said, I couldn't be more proud of the team we've got here. It's as good as I've seen, and there are some seriously good things going on behind the scenes. What you see on the surface today is the genetics, the rams, that side of it, but there's a huge amount that goes on behind the scenes, and that takes the whole team. They're a cracking bunch.

A quick overview of Mumblebone. This is the layout of the land. The country highlighted in blue is the country we own, about 4,000 hectares. The country in yellow is the country we lease, about 1,400 hectares. So in the old school, there's about 13,000 acres under management.

It's a mix of commercial and stud sheep, and it's all Merinos here. There's a bit of sideline cattle on agistment, but it's Merinos that really absorb my headspace. It's a mix of stud and commercial operations. We're currently lambing down 2,400 stud ewes, looking to grow that to 3,000 as quickly as we can to try and keep up with the demand for modern genetics. We complement that with commercial ewes, and we're looking to grow those numbers as well. So it's roughly 8,000 ewes at the moment, looking to grow beyond that depending on what sort of country comes up in the district.

What skin wrinkle really costs

And genetics. This is where it gets interesting, I reckon. This is a graph Ferg put together for me about 12 months ago. I asked him to tease out how skin wrinkle affects all the other traits that are important in a Merino operation, and needless to say everything's interconnected, particularly with skin, so it seems. I'll take you through a few of these. Don't feel you need to understand this graph as it is; I'll simplify it into a much easier version in just a minute.

But while we're here, have a look at this green line across the page. Up the top, that's clean fleece weight. The axis down the bottom is increasing breech wrinkle, so skin wrinkle increasing from left to right, and that green line is fleece weight. The old school was that we need skin to cut wool, and there are still a lot of people in the industry promoting that sort of information. But this is why I keep going back to data. The data is telling us that there's now a very weak correlation between skin wrinkle and fleece weight. That may come as a bit of a surprise to some people in the room, but that's just what the evidence is telling us.

The other one I'll draw your attention to is this grey line here, the one that's falling pretty quickly. That's weaning weight. Growth rate and skin don't seem to mix very well. As we increase skin wrinkle we're slowing the growth rate of our sheep, and that's a really strong correlation. In the modern world, with growth and reproduction, surplus sheep and lamb sales being so important, we need to keep a really strong eye on the growth rate of our sheep, and an easy way to do that is to start winding back skin wrinkle.

I'll take it on to the next slide and break this down into the positives and the negatives of skin wrinkle. That previous slide was not so easy to understand, but if we look at it this way it'll make more sense. Again, down the bottom we've got breech wrinkle increasing from left to right. The positive of more skin, more wrinkle, is just a little bit more wool, and I mean just a little bit more. That line may well have been steeper many years ago, but modern breeding is putting a lot of wool on a plain-bodied sheep, so the correlation between skin wrinkle and fleece weight is now only very small.

The other one that caught me a bit by surprise was micron. I realise there are probably people in the room who have seen a bit of this information before, but I think it's important to bring everyone up to speed together, so we'll go through it from the beginning. It's actually easier to reduce micron with a little bit of skin in the game, but there are some other antagonisms that we'll get to. Not surprisingly, when fleece weight and micron were the major drivers of profitability in a Merino enterprise, it made sense to select for these traits very heavily, and to allow skin wrinkle into our flocks, or even select it in, to accentuate the benefits for fleece weight and micron.

But the game now is quite different, and there are some significant downsides to accepting skin wrinkle into our flocks. It starts with condition score. Fat and muscle form 70% of condition score, and condition score underpins just about everything important in a modern Merino enterprise, so they're critically important traits in my eyes. Staple length is another big one. We'll cover six-month shearing in more detail later in the day, but length is critical to a six-month shearing program, and there's a whole heap of flow-on benefits from shearing every six months. Staple length is hit very hard as soon as we accept skin wrinkle into the mix.

Reproduction, one of the big profit drivers, is also hit very hard. There's not a lot of upside in having skin, and repro to me is one of the most important traits to be focusing on in a balance of traits. It's hit very hard as we allow skin into the mix, so we need to be very conscious of that. Then there's growth rate, which I mentioned on the previous slide. For those finishing wether lambs, if it takes an extra month to finish your wethers, there's a cost involved in that. Getting ewe lambs up to weight, all of those modern, high-value profit drivers, weight and growth rate are a key component, and they're all heavily compromised by the old-school sort of skin wrinkle.

Flystrike is another one. A couple of wet years are a great chance to find any sort of susceptibility in the flock. It only takes a little bit of skin to hold the moisture at skin level and let the flies in under those conditions to start causing all sorts of issues, and that's a big cost of production factor.

Having our cake and eating it

So that's a semi-negative way of looking at things, and we'll spin it to a positive in just a sec. To me, all of these traits that are negatively correlated with skin wrinkle are very easy to combine when we wind the skin wrinkle back to a plain body. It's very easy to have fat and muscle, condition score, long-stapled wool and heaps of lambs that want to grow, and to take the flies out of the equation. It's a pretty simple recipe if we start with the skin first.

So if we do that, and change increasing wrinkle to decreasing wrinkle, effectively putting it around the other way, it's very easy to put all these traits together. It's then a simple matter of selecting an appropriate amount of wool at an appropriate micron. This to me is the recipe to have our cake and eat it. If we get all these important traits together first, and they're the majority of traits in a modern Merino enterprise, they come together very easily. And keep in mind that high reproduction then gives us the selection pressure to select fleece weight and micron into the mix as well.

So that's our chance to have our cake and eat it, and that's what we're doing here. It's quite a bit different to what most of the industry is doing, still focusing on the wool traits first, but that's why we're heading off in a direction that's quite different to most other operations in the industry, and it's quite deliberate. That's just a bit of the science behind why our sheep look as plain as they do. Breech wrinkle is the trait we select on very closely, so we're a good score below the industry on average.

Condition score and stocking rate

Condition score is the one I want to bang on about for a minute now. It's critically important, I think, and we've got Fergie in the mix with us. He's the doctor of fat and muscle, and he's the one we've taken a lot of our cues from to select the sheep we do and set the direction we're heading in. Condition score is heavily compromised by a lot of the other production traits, particularly the wool traits, fleece weight and micron. So we need to be conscious of how we combine these traits and put a balance of traits together that combines them all at valuable levels.

Just out of interest, this is a ewe lamb that conceived at nine months, is weaning twins, is maintaining herself in very good condition, and is doing it all in very commercial conditions. So it's a good picture of what we're about.

Here's another graph Ferg put together for us, showing genetic condition score and how it affects stocking rate. I dare say some of the more switched-on people may see this quite differently, and we haven't got time to dive into the depth of it at the moment, because it's quite a big space. Genetic condition score is what we're measuring, and if we have sheep that maintain a higher genetic condition score under similar conditions, then we've got the opportunity to increase stocking rate. And stocking rate, again, has a massive impact on profitability.

To take this a step further, some of you may have seen the results out of the Trangie sire evaluation. It's a lifetime production evaluation that we're involved in, and they measure all sorts of traits, but one trait they unfortunately didn't measure was condition score. When we were out there, we could see a range of condition score from two up to probably five. But if we assume it varied between score two and score four under the same conditions, that's an enormous variation in the potential stocking rate of those animals.

To put a bit more science behind this: say we've got sheep that are two scores different in condition under the same conditions. Standard reference weight is body weight measured at condition score three. To take the score-two animals up to condition score three, we need to reduce their stocking rate, putting the same amount of feed into fewer animals to increase their condition score. It's the reverse for the fat animals, and these are the sorts of sheep we're aiming for. We have the opportunity to increase the stocking rate on the same feed, putting the same amount of feed into more animals, to bring their condition score from four down to three. So that's the stocking rate variation.

As the previous slide showed, it's 15% per condition score. So if we've got two scores' difference in condition across our flock, there's a 30% difference in stocking rate potential on condition score alone, assuming that's genetic condition score put on under the same conditions.

Shifting the goalposts

Any questions on that? I know I said hold on to the end, but this is a pretty big space. Is that getting a few nods?

Yeah, so it really comes down to measurement per head or per hectare. A lot of stud breeders, myself included, bang on about what our sheep cut per head, or all these different per head figures, but it's really per hectare that drives the business. If we've got more animals cutting wool per hectare, it's a great way of driving the business, by focusing on a per hectare return.

So I guess it's a question of goalposts, in a sense. The goalposts were set decades ago, focusing on fleece weight and micron. There was no point selecting for high reproduction. Surplus sheep weren't worth much and lambs weren't worth a lot, so fleece weight and micron were where the goalposts were set. But to me the goalposts are always going to be moving, and they're now in a very different position, including reproduction, lamb survival, the efficiency of feed conversion and all sorts of other traits that are critically important on top of the wool traits. The wool traits are not unimportant, they're still very important, but they now represent 25 to maybe 30% of a modern Merino enterprise. Dave Greig's here, and he'll take us through that in more detail.

But in terms of goalposts, this is intramuscular fat. It wasn't on our radar only a few years ago. Genomic testing, the DNA, has opened our eyes to what's going on with intramuscular fat, and it's almost accidental that we've found ourselves in a good position. I suspect it's linked to our selection for fat that has put us in a pretty good spot for intramuscular fat. Now that we have this information, it's just another adjustment in the goalposts. We'll use it to make some subtle selection towards IMF, to avoid the disasters and select the animals that have all the traits we want with better IMF.

And that's us. Thank you.