Breeding for growth, fat and worm resistance

Chad Taylor: Thank you, Josh. If I could just reiterate Josh's words at the start there and welcome you all. I know quite a few of you have come from some distance, interstate in a few cases, to be here. So thank you for making that effort. It is a big effort to cover that sort of distance, and we really do appreciate you taking the time to come today.

I didn't, in my wildest dreams, expect that when we sent out our first round of invitations for people to speak, we'd get yeses from our three top picks. So thank you very much, Will, Angus and Fergus, for taking your time to join us today. You really are speaking to a critical part of the whole picture that we're building here across the meat, the wool and the genetic space, so to have the three of you in the room is a real buzz for us. It was great to have you here, and I hope you all enjoyed what they had to offer.

No doubt this is the one you've been waiting for. "No wrong turns" is a simple story I'd like to talk to in a very unscientific kind of way.

Just to put some numbers around what we've just had presented to us, there really is very little true innovation in a population, and this graph shows that it's only 2.5%. So to have three people I would consider genuine innovators, all really relevant to our industry, kick the morning off is a bit of a buzz. But I'd also like to point out that the simple fact you've made the effort to be here today to hear these speakers, have a look at these sheep and understand the data says to me that, by default, you have to be in the front half of that bell curve. So well done, all. Good start.

Finding the holes in the bucket

There's another simple picture that I think really sets up what I'd like to talk about. I do like pictures; they're a lot easier to talk to. When we have potential in whatever it might be, the potential of a bucket to hold water or the potential of a commercial ewe base to be profitable, we need to know what's going on.

It was touched on before, with visual classing. There are a lot of things we can see, but there's a lot of stuff that we can't see, and what we think we know from what we're looking at can often be quite deceptive. So we need a better understanding of what we're really dealing with at a genetic level, and that's where the power of breeding values comes in.

A flock profile is something that can give you that base understanding of your commercial ewe flock. It's probably less relevant if you've been buying rams from a stud that's offering breeding values, because your ram average across the years will give you a reasonable understanding of your expected ewe base across the traits that are important to you. But if you've been using sires from a stud that hasn't been offering breeding values, it's going to be a real shot in the dark as to where this range of traits sits.

A flock profile will effectively show us where the holes in the bucket are, or where the holes in your commercial flock's potential might be sitting. A lot of the time we might have fleece weight as a strength, if we continue with Ferg's lead on fleece weight. Let's assume fleece weight is one of the higher holes in this bucket. If we continue to select for that trait, we may be lifting that hole to a higher point near the rim. But if we're lowering one of the bottom holes, in the form of reproduction or condition score, we're really not making any genetic gain.

So we need an understanding of the whole picture to make true genetic gain across all of the traits. And if you think of what's behind the bucket, we can't even really see that. We need a proper map, a genetic map, to know where we're starting, so we have the best indication of what we need to introduce, and at what levels, to make true genetic gain across the traits that are actually important to us, not just the ones we like looking at. There are people here who can help with a flock profile if you want to talk to people out the front.

Early growth with a moderate adult

The growth curve is something we wanted to talk to. I had a question on growth curves this morning from Doug, which was very good of you, and it prompted my awareness a little bit more. These are two lines that Harry and I have drawn. Harry's put this presentation together, and a whole bunch of others. He does a wonderful job on this front; it's really not my strength.

These curves highlight how we want to approach selecting growth into our flocks. The red curve is the curve we're looking for. We want all the benefits of early growth, but we want our mature adults to cap at a moderate level. We're not looking for the black line, where we have lambs that take a little bit longer to get going and then continue growing into 70, 80, 90 kilo massive adults over time.

They're the sorts of sheep we have to compromise our stocking rate to manage. It's also very hard to wean a high percentage of lambs from these high adult weights. So a lot of inefficiencies creep in if we take our adult weights up to really high levels. The trick is that the correlation between early growth and adult weight is high, so we need to find a way of tapping into all the benefits of early growth while also tapping into the benefits of a moderate adult.

I want to take you a bit deeper into that, and we'll talk about genetics quite a bit in the next 20 minutes or so. What we've got here is a bell curve across weaning weight, which is the trait we start our growth curve with. We go from weaning to post-weaning, yearling, hogget and adult. This major bell curve across the page is the spread of weaning weights in the 2025 drop: the rams, the ewes, the culls, the sires, the auction team, the whole lot. The average of the whole drop is the dotted blue line down the middle.

This bell curve in dark blue is the top 30% of the drop selected on index. Keep in mind our sires will be coming from that top 30%, probably well inside it. The average of that top 30% is the green line. The point of this graph is to look at the distance between the average of the drop and the average of the top 30%, which on this particular trait is quite significant. It suggests that if we continue to pick our sires from the top 30% of this drop, we're going to make a significant improvement in the weaning weight of our stock.

If we then put weaning weight in context with a range of other traits important to the growth curve, we can see the gap at weaning weight is quite significant. There's still a significant gap at post-weaning weight, but by the time we get to adult weight the gap is near enough negligible. That gives us the confidence that the science we're using and the breeding direction we're heading in will give us all the benefits of early growth while capping our adult weight.

That allows us to run more of those animals per hectare, cutting more wool per hectare and producing more lambs per hectare, while we've got the benefits of early growth: hitting our target weights for wethers to turn them off early, getting our ewe lambs up to weight to join them, and on and on the benefits go.

But it's not just the growth curve. If we look at all the traits we consider in our breeding program, and I won't take you through them individually, everything is moving in the right direction: up if we want it to go up, down if we want it to come down. So there's some real depth to the breeding that's going on here. When we combine the science, the tech and the advice from people like Ferg to steer us in a direction that is clearly mapped out, we can make really accurate steps every single time we have a joining.

This drop is significantly better on paper than last year's, as that one was on the year before, and I can say with confidence that next year's drop will be significantly better on paper than this year's. That progression will continue because of the accurate information we have to map out our breeding program, combining traits that are often hard to combine and putting together more of the profitable traits along with the traits that save us money. It's a lot of fun.

Breeding for worm resistance

Worm resistance is another trait that's come up in conversation quite a bit in the last little while, particularly since the presentation at LambEx. We've been paying a lot of attention to worm resistance, and this will give you an indication of where the industry sits compared to us.

Consider this scenario, which is the one I ran at LambEx. Say we have a flock that hasn't been selecting sires from studs offering a breeding value for worm resistance, so no worm resistance has been introduced to the flock. Let's assume they're not quite as good as the industry average, which is now at minus 18. They're sitting somewhere around zero.

We want to make a big change, so we introduce a sire team of minus 50, which is only slightly better than the average of this line-up. This line-up of rams here is averaging minus 42, so a sire team slightly better than that, at minus 50, is very easily done. The simple maths says that if we cross a team of rams that is minus 50 for worm resistance over a ewe base at zero, the mid-parent is minus 25. That's 25% fewer worms in just one generation, which I reckon's really cool. And we continue to multiply that gain if we keep chasing that trait down to lower and lower levels.

One of the major benefits we've seen here on farm is that we haven't had to drench our stud ewes in over 20 months. That's a significant cost saving and a significant labour saving. It's also a great boost to our team, knowing we're not running ewes into the yards to do a job that no one really wants to do. It opens the door to scaling the operation, because we're spending less time on the jobs that no one wants to do, so we can effectively run more of these animals with the same labour base.

The thing that really excites me about that stat is that it's in a district where a lot of stud and commercial producers have been talking about having to drench every three to four weeks. That's a significant difference, achieved by targeted breeding. And you can multiply that benefit across whatever range of traits are important to your flock. Worm resistance is important to us, along with a range of other traits. There'll be people here who hardly ever drench anyway, so this example won't have a big impact for you. But combine that sort of genetic gain with targeted breeding across the traits that make a difference to your flock, and you can see how we can really start to stretch the benefits of this modern type of breeding.

A quick story before we go on. We've been using FEC tags, and the FEC tags are out the front, to monitor our worm egg counts. We used to trigger a drench at around 400 eggs per gram. Through monitoring, we've seen these ewes let their egg counts climb up to 400 or 500 eggs per gram, only to see them bring their worm egg counts back down. That would be a combination of things. Worm resistance and genetics is probably part of it. The grazing rotation they're in would no doubt be part of it. It could be a lighter worm burden for whatever reason. But we've seen the ewes' egg counts climb, only to see them bring them down over time.

That's given us the confidence to allow our egg counts to go up to higher and higher levels. Our ewes have just gone out for their second lambing with an egg count, taken on the FEC tag just prior to lambing, of 800 eggs per gram, way above the levels we would ever have had the confidence to let our sheep reach. Curiosity got the better of Josh, in his astute manner, so three weeks into lambing he took another test, and we found that the worm egg count of those ewes in lactation had come down to less than 500.

We took another series of tests from those ewes at marking, keeping in mind these mature ewes have just marked 140% of lambs, and found the results ranged anywhere from 400 eggs per gram down to zero. So they've come right back to manageable levels while they've been lactating, which I think is getting pretty close to a breakthrough in terms of managing sheep. That's the sort of stuff that will keep me well and truly fascinated with breeding, when we multiply these sorts of gains across the range of different traits.

Fat, condition score and a bigger fuel tank

Fergus covered this really well. One of the other things that goes in conjunction with worm resistance, I think, is the resilience of the sheep we're aiming to breed, and that comes with high fat. I'll touch on the meat aspect of this in a minute. There's so much energy stored in a kilo of fat, and if we take the time to lay down that fat when the season allows it, we can combine that genetic condition score, with eight times more energy stored in a kilo of fat, with the worm resistance, with the grazing rotation, with the pasture on hand, and with the brilliant stockmen we have on our team keeping an eye on this whole space.

We can then use this combination of traits to put sheep out into serious periods of challenge, or have them inadvertently move into a serious period of challenge, and handle it. It's a great way of saying these sheep become far better at running themselves. Again, that opens the door to scaling these operations, running more sheep with the same labour.

Ferg's covered the science far better than I can, so let me put the benefits of fat into farmer speak. Picture two Land Cruisers driving into a fuel station when fuel is cheap. We fill these two Land Cruiser utes up with cheap fuel at 50 cents a litre, knowing we're going from the really cheap time of the year out into the expensive times of the year, from spring into summer and into autumn, where we know the fuel is going to go from 50 cents to four bucks, five, six bucks, who knows. It could be 10 bucks in a really bad year. But having filled these utes up, we work out that one ute's got a 5-litre tank and the other one's got a 200-litre tank.

You're probably working it out: 5 litres is not going to take us very far. As we drive out into that expensive period, the 5-litre tank has to be filled up every time we get to a fuel station, even if it is eight or 10 bucks a litre. The 200 litres, by comparison, takes us way out into the summer and autumn period, potentially right round through that challenging time and back into the cheap feed and cheap fuel once we get into the winter and spring period. If we have sheep with a massive fuel tank, we have the ability to ride out those periods of challenge, whatever they might be: nutrition, worms, lactation.

I just think this is a fundamentally important trait of the modern animal we're breeding, and it's a trait that's antagonistic with fleece weight. If we let ourselves get drawn to fleece weight and the wool traits without paying attention to the other holes in the bucket, we lose this one. But this is a critically important one to bring along for the ride, in conjunction with the range of other traits.

A little example. This is John Nicholas. I thought he might have been here today, but he couldn't make it. He's over in the mid north of South Australia, in the Southern Flinders Ranges. Terrific guy. We captured his story earlier this year, and he was talking about the diabolical season in 2024, right across most of South Australia as I understand it. With this new type of sheep, in conjunction with other variables like being a good manager and probably a few other things, he was still able to mark 110 to 115% of lambs in a diabolical year, with next door down as low as 5%.

I'm not suggesting it's all genetic. There's a range of different factors there, but often the people who are looking to understand the genetics, and what's available with this sort of stuff, are also looking to drive their businesses at higher levels of management. There could be other changes going on, but I think it's a stark difference in the capacity of these sheep, played out in terms of reproduction in this particular case.

I spoke to John last night. He was telling me he's just had one of the best markings he's ever had: he's just marked 140% across his maidens and mixed-age ewes. It's a rip-roaring season over there. But the other comment he left me with was that the next best marking rate he's heard of in that district so far is 121%. So he's shooting the lights out when it's terrible and shooting the lights out when things are good. That's the sort of consistent result we'd love to see produced.

One of the final points I'd like to leave you with is that fleece weight is such an important part of our mix, but it's not the only thing. We need to combine fleece weight with a range of other traits. If we have a view to increasing fleece weight across our flock, it is antagonistic with condition score. Condition score is often made up of fat and muscle, but it's the energy stored to help us ride through those periods of challenge. When you're looking to drive your fleece weight, please keep an eye on condition score.

By all means, take them both up. But if it's just fleece weight, paying no attention to anything else, then we're going to put a hole in our bucket right down the bottom somewhere. So this is a really good combination to safeguard against fleece weight undoing the value of condition score in our sheep.

A 10-year contract with Icebreaker

It was wonderful to hear from Angus and from Will this morning, and we're really proud to be the first Australian grower to be offered a 10-year contract. This relationship started with two three-year contracts prior to this long-term one. The crux of this contract is that it's effectively a win-win for our business and for supply to Icebreaker. We shear twice a year, our clip is valued by Zentera twice a year, and on top of that there's a 50-cent margin added to make sure we're not out of the money.

Then on top of that there's another $2 added. So effectively it's $2.50 above the market for every kilo that meets contract specifications in this 10-year contract. There's some really good economics behind this long-term deal. If you're interested in this sort of stuff, I'd encourage you to make the most of having Angus in the room. Toby's here as well, so people can talk to you behind the scenes about how this works. I think there's a wonderful opportunity to build these relationships. Icebreaker's looking at opening something like 40 stores in China alone this year.

Audience member: Ninety.

Chad Taylor: Ninety. Wow. There's great demand for this sort of product, so they're looking for supply. If you're interested in building relationships and supplying a quality product to a quality brand, facilitated through Zentera, then make the most of having Angus in the room. This has been a great little win for our business.

Get on the bus

But it's genetics that link us around the country. There are a lot of new faces in the room, and I'm quite happy to say we're looking to work with more businesses around the country, commercial and stud operations. One of the things I really enjoy is that when someone new turns up and we work out where they're from, it's really quite easy to put you in touch with someone who's either in your district or much closer to it than we often are. So keep in touch if you'd like to know more. Often the best way to go about it is to hook you up with another local.

I'll leave you with this, and it's a little bit light-hearted. It is an unashamed Mumblebone push, just as a bit of a finish. If what you've heard this morning from the three speakers, and what you're seeing tied up, is the direction you want to go; if you like the idea of data but you don't necessarily have a head for numbers, but you're confident this is the direction you want to go, then the simple message is: just get on the bus. This is the direction we're going. If you want to come with us, by all means, get on the bus.

You can tailor how you take this journey with a better understanding of the traits that apply most to you and where the numbers correlate. All of that detail can be added if you want. But if you want to go in this direction and keep it as simple as you possibly can, then the simple thing is to just get on the bus.

I'll leave you there. Thank you for coming. It's wonderful to have a crowd like this. Thank you again to our speakers, and thank you to our team; it's an incredible team to be working with. I just love days like this, so please make the most of it, and I look forward to catching up with you throughout the day.