Nearly doubling lambs marked with Mumblebone rams

Running sheep on agistment

I'll try and be as concise as I can. It's a bit hard to fit a whole farm tour into 20-odd minutes, but here we go. So that's us, Bellevue Rural Enterprises, and there are the figures: 4,200 ewes joined this year. We're red gravelly ridge country down to grey loams on the river flats.

We run on native country out there. There's very little improved pasture; most of that good country is continually cropped in the winter program. We've got just under 1,500 pregnant ewes away on agistment. We use that for numbers. It's cheap. Fifteen weeks is the average time the ewes are on agistment through the lambing period, so 15 bucks a head to run an extra 1,500 ewes through that time. We've also got 1,800 ewes at home, as well as the few dry ewe lambs that we've got.

The little black dots on the map there are where we've run sheep since 2019. We're based at Tottenham. We ran our entire flock for 12 months, from the middle of 2019 to the middle of 2020, just out there east of Wilcannia, and then we've done two years up at Coolah. We did two joinings up there with part of our flock. Everything's back within a 25 to 30 kilometre radius of Tottenham now. But one thing we found was it didn't matter where we took the Mumblebone sheep, they outperformed their peers in every environment.

We absolutely smoked the shedders at Wilcannia. There were blokes running Dorpers out there that couldn't keep up with us, so that was really interesting for us, going out there. Agistment offers opportunities, but it's also got a few challenges. Like anything, it's all to do with personalities: get involved with the right personalities and things will work all right.

To give you an indication of stocking rates where we run, Wilcannia's about a sheep to four hectares, Tottenham's a sheep to the hectare and Coolah is four sheep to the hectare. So we've run them in very different environments. I've got just a few numbers, only because we could collect them at Coolah, purely on agistment. It's probably the most expensive way to run sheep, but our net per head was $225 a head there at Coolah.

There was mention about dollars per hectare, but with agistment you're managing per head, because all your costs are per head. You're not paying for the overheads on the farm, you're just paying whatever it is per week to run that sheep. So we run our metrics on a per head basis on the agistment. At Coolah it's getting up close to a thousand bucks a hectare per year of net profit, so that was a bit of a surprise to us, that we're actually doing that well.

So apart from the bit of agistment we do around the place, we're pretty normal. I've got excellent fences and my management's exceptional. That's 23 bogged hoggets there, and that's about the most fun you can have in the morning, dragging them out one by one. That mud's over my neck deep, which I found out because you can't walk in it, you have to swim in it. Anyway, we're just normal and we run a few sheep.

Our breeding objective and where we started

This is our breeding objective. We're in the game of breeding ewes. We don't fatten lambs or do anything like that; we're breeding ewes. So we're selecting rams to produce a moderate-sized ewe, aiming for 130 per cent lambs to ewes joined, plus 85 per cent lamb survival, and wool, non-mulesed, less flystrike, all that sort of stuff.

A bit about our background. We ran traditional-style sheep for nearly 50 years from the same stud. In 2010–11, I remember it was quite a wet year, a wet summer, and we were getting flystrike. I was the one chasing them around. Mulesing was on the nose, we began to become aware of breeding values, and there were the usual succession issues. In 2010–11 I'd have been in my early 30s, and you can't afford them. So what do you do? You control the controllables: produce more and make more money. That was what we were trying to do.

We'd also been talking to our stud, trying to select plainer rams, talking to them about how we want to see sheep like this and we want to see sheep like that. We were told that the mulesing issue would go away, and we were also told that breeding values and all the other stuff was a bit of a fad, and don't chase rainbows. And that's what their progeny looked like.

The photo's not real good, and he's a bit of an outlier, that poor fella, but I'm pleased he didn't have too many sisters looking like that. That photo is not that old either; that was within the last 10 years. So we've come a long way.

So where did we start? I met Chad on a chance meeting. I was over in South Australia looking around at sheep, and met Chad. I came back to central New South Wales, had a look at a few studs, and decided Mumblebone was the direction we wanted to head in. So we came down here in 2012 and bought one ram to trial, and those were his breeding values.

At the time, that was all the breeding values you could get; that was all that was offered in the sale catalogue. So he was pretty good for the sale catalogue, but overall, where we've ended up, he probably wouldn't get picked now. We joined him to 60 of our plainer, younger ewes and we marked about 100 per cent of lambs. Ninety-eight per cent of the wether progeny made our top weight; we were still finishing the lambs then.

Sixteen of the ewes we joined as ewe lambs, and of that 16, every ewe lamb raised a lamb for the duration of her life. But we chose not to continue ewe lamb joining. We just weren't ready; that's basically what it comes down to. However, that little trial was enough to totally change our direction.

In the following 12 months we went out and bought 1,800 SRS ewes to try and speed up the transition. Apart from that joining and maybe one other, we never joined the Mumblebones to our traditional ewes. It was just going to take me too long to get the skin off them. So I went and bought skin-type ewes. I bought other people's culls, but they had the right skin and a few other things that were right about them, and we went on from there.

Nearly doubling lambs marked

And here are the results of that. You can see we bought our first ram here; that was that trial. We were averaging around about 75 per cent lambs marked to ewes joined. Fast forward that through, and it wasn't quite 10 years, and we're up above 140 per cent lambs marked to ewes joined. So we've nearly doubled our lambs marked to ewes joined in under 10 years.

The top line there is our conception rate, or our scanning rate. The blue line is our marking percentage. The only reason I've got that there is the gaps. You'll see here there's a big gap; it's just a visual way for me to assess lamb survival when I'm looking at things.

These lines back here, some of our flock wasn't being scanned for twins, and that's why they're so close. From here on we were scanning for twins. We hand fed through 2018. I didn't run over a single lamb with the feed trailer, but the gap there is considerable. That year was done at Wilcannia, a 7 per cent difference there, which is acceptable. Then we're coming home, but also our numbers are getting up, and I'll touch on why that gap stays so high.

That sort of blew our mind, that we could keep that line going up. Obviously the lambs haven't been born yet this year, so that's why it's zero. It's not that I had a catastrophic failure this year.

With high percentages come high twins. Our twin line's going up and our singles are coming down. The red line is our dries. It's creeping down, but it's kicked back up a little bit this year. These figures don't include our ewe lambs, and this is the first year where we've had one-and-a-half-year-olds coming out of the ewe lamb joining back into the main joining. That's probably the kick up from 3 per cent up to 6.

I can probably blame my management on that a little bit. I'm a bit disappointed with how this has gone; I was hoping to keep that up there. I think I got a bit excited and a few things didn't go right. I overcooked the ewes, that's what happened. They were plateauing at joining, not rising.

So, survival of the fittest: that's our lamb survival. The top line there is single survival, then twin survival, triplet survival, and that's our ewe mortality down here. We've been under 5 per cent, mostly between 1 and 3 per cent, for ewe mortality. That's probably the key one. You can't raise lambs out of dead ewes, so keeping them alive is the first step.

The other thing I'll touch on is a program that Ferg's involved in, Towards 90 lamb survival. It's really hard to get. I'd love to be above 140 every year in marking rates, but that just means you've got so many more twins, and the more twins you get, the closer your overall lamb survival gets to your twin survival.

I do have my overall survival rates for the last couple of years. This was out at Wilcannia. Those two twin mobs were in excess of 400 sheep in the mob, plus they had 400 hoggets in with them: two 8,000-acre paddocks with 800 sheep in there. Our overall lamb survival was 88.6 that year, and then we've dropped to 86.3 and 83.

So we're up there. If you want to get to 90, the easiest way is to sell all your twins and keep your singles, and you'll get above 90. But that kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it? We've only recorded triplets for one year, and they are 68, so there's still a bit of work to be done there.

Buying rams around the sale average

So how did we make the change? I'll talk now a bit about coming here. On these next couple of slides, the dotted line is the Mumblebone sale average for each of the traits. If you get your sale catalogue, that's the average in the front of it. The blue line is what I've bought.

So there's no need to buy ribbon winners. As you can see here, I'm buying about the average of the sale. This one here was that one ram, but the rest have been multiple rams in my ram team that I've been purchasing at the sale. To get those results I'm not buying the top of the sale; I'm buying what I think is about an average-price animal.

However, the early traits, fat and muscle, are what we went for early on, and if you're going in this direction, that's what I'd be chasing first. So we chased that pretty hard, and now our trend has been above the sale average for fat, and it's also been above the sale average for muscle.

What we haven't been chasing is clean fleece weight. But you'll see that I'm following the sale average, and the sale average is going up, so I'm going up, and I'm quite happy with where that is. Staple length is the same. Now, there are plenty of other traits up along the wall here that I am selecting on. I think I select on about 14 traits, but the trends are much the same.

So what's in my team? Anything with the blue number is above the Sheep Genetics average, and anything in red is below it. So most of that is good: worm egg counts, early breech wrinkle and things like that. If you put a line right in the centre there, around about the fleece weight, I'm really happy that we're about average with the Sheep Genetics database for fleece weight. I'm really happy to stay there and to focus on these traits over here that make you money.

Another little thing I'll point out is something I've been doing for the last couple of years. I'm focused on our sheep not getting too big. So we've got a percentage here, which is my ram purchase as a percentage of the Sheep Genetics average. Last year my post-weaning weight was 7.5, so 197 per cent; it's nearly double the Sheep Genetics average. My adult weight is 187 per cent.

So it's still quite high, but what I'm trying to do is keep that adult weight number below my post-weaning weight. I'm trying to trick the system into getting an early-maturing animal that plateaus, by buying rams that aren't as high for adult weight as they are for post-weaning weight. I can only do so much with that, and I know Chad's very conscious of that.

Over on the right-hand side here we've got a few traits that I'm just watching. I'm not so much actively selecting, but I'm conscious of maternal weaning weight, because I think that's an important one in breeding. The IMF and the shear force are just things I'm watching in my ram team. I'm putting a little bit of emphasis on IMF, because we're turning off a lot of wethers to the feedlot. If we can offer them a product that's a little bit better than the average, it might create a premium for us.

What drives the bottom line

So, the bottom line. This is our gross income since 2008–09. Across the top there are stock sales and wool sales, and the bottom line is our shearing and crutching expenses. That gives you a bit of a look at what's driving the bottom line. There's a pretty strong correlation between our stock sales and our gross income out of the sheep. And what drives that is conception rate and marking percentage. That's what's driving our sheep business.

It's probably coincidence, but there's my fat and muscle average curve. Back here it's about 0.7, and up there it's a bit over two. Maybe it's just my eyes, but I can see a bit of a correlation in the up and down between what I'm buying for fat and muscle and what my conception rate has been. I've offset that, so the 2012 figure sits over the top of the 2014 figure for conception, because it just takes a little bit of time to get that genetics into your ewe flock. There was a doctor here before talking about this sort of stuff. It might be coincidence, or it might just be working. I think it is.

So what's driving the wool in our business? I said we weren't really focusing on clean fleece weight. There's the EMI for the same period, and there's a pretty strong correlation between the market and our wool income. If I asked for a show of hands of who can control that, no one should be able to put their hand up, because I don't know anyone that can control the wool market. What you can control is your conception rate, and that's what we're focusing on.

The other thing Chad touched on is six-monthly shearing. That's the cost of our shearing. Would anyone like to hazard a guess as to where along that line we started shearing six-monthly? Right there, that's where we started six-monthly shearing.

To give you an idea, the shearing price around about here was about seven bucks a head, and it was costing us about four bucks a head to crutch. There's maybe a little bit of noise in that line, where we were coming out of a lease place and doing a few things. But the point I wanted to get across is that everyone says it's going to cost you extra to shear six-monthly, and we haven't really noticed it. Right up the end here, that's a shearer shortage-driven increase.

We don't have a problem getting shearers to our shed. The contractor doesn't seem to have a problem. We've got blokes ringing us up wanting to come and shear at our place, so I think that's a good thing.

Just a few wool results, because everyone might be interested in that. We've got lengths there ranging from 59 mil to 57 mil in the lambs. That's five months' wool, from a January shearing, so they're August-drop lambs. And there are the dry 18-month-old ewes doing 76 mil. The rest of them, all the non-mulesed, will be younger ewes; those are the oldest, because we're still running them out of the system.

An issue for us with non-mulesed is VM. That just about kills us out of any non-mulesed contract. There was one that came through the other day with a maximum in a line of 1.5, and my lowest there is 4.3. So we're probably not going to get the premiums that the guys in the cleaner country are getting, but we're not too worried. Like I said, I'm selling ewes, and the premium now is in a non-mulesed ewe. So that's where we're at on that front.

Our calendar and joining ewe lambs

This is our calendar of operations. I've cut out a few months where nothing goes on. Shearing is January and the end of June. We shear six weeks prior to joining and five weeks prior to lambing. Mature joining starts at the start of March, for five weeks. The ewe lamb joining is a bit different, and this will change, but this is what we're doing at the minute.

We tease for the first two weeks of March. We put half a per cent of rams in with the ewe lambs for their first three weeks, then the rams come out of the mature joining and go straight in with the ewe lambs, to try and catch them on their last cycle. I don't want to spread it any further than that, because it gets too confusing down this end. We've got another pretty important thing that happens in November in the cropping program, and I don't want to be trying to muck around with stuff then if we were trying to push anything further back. Anyway, that's the best we can do at the minute.

So I'll talk a bit about ewe lamb joining. In 2021 we scanned 82 and marked 63 per cent to ewes joined. That was our first go at it, and we were pretty happy with that. It's very hard to get a benchmark on what's good and what's not, but it was a good start. I couldn't follow it up the next year.

Before I go on, these were our weights at scanning. Have a look there: we're between 42 and a half and 47 and a half, across dry, singles and twins, with an average of 44 and a half. That's at scanning, which is 90 days post joining. If we work that back at a kilo a week weight gain, which is about 150 grams a day, and that's not a massive weight gain, those ewes were being joined at an average weight of 33 kilos.

So do we need to review the industry recommendation of getting ewe lambs to 45 kilos to join them? How many ewes do you reckon I'd have joined if I'd weighed them before joining? I'd have joined none of them. So I deliberately didn't weigh them, because of that. We just put the rams in with them, and we've got twin-bearing ewes coming through at 38 kilos at scanning. I think it's more about the type of sheep than it is the weight gain. But obviously the industry's got a lot of pretty poor-performing animals in it, so they've got to set the bar pretty high.

So this year, 2022, we've scanned 63. Remember our staggered joining. A quarter of our ewe lambs came out of the ewe lamb joining the previous year, and that's where our problems start. The majority of those lambs were conceived in the last two weeks of that joining period. That's our scanners telling us that, and I think that's to do with not having enough rams in up front, but we just can't make it work.

So the progeny out of those ewe lambs are potentially five weeks younger when they're joined as lambs. They're only rising six months old when the rams go in with them, so they're behind the eight ball. There's a big difference between a six- and a seven-month-old ewe lamb in their maturity; it's 20 per cent of their life in difference. So we've got a few issues to work out there.

However, this ewe here, that's her there with the red dot. She's a ewe lamb, a twin-born ewe lamb out of a ewe lamb, scanned in lamb with twins. She's a bit more compact than her mates here, and they're all twin-bearing ewe lambs. She's cutting 70-plus mil of wool, and she's got a nice open face. That's a pretty ideal sheep for my climate. She's nine or ten months of age.

So there are ewes that can do it; I think we've just got to get better at getting them to do the job for us. They're out there, and she wasn't the only one. Within that penful there were probably two or three of her sisters like that. So she was a twin-born ewe lamb out of a ewe lamb, scanning in with twins. Judging by her body weight there, she'd be somewhere between 40 and 45 kilos. She'll raise the lambs, I'm pretty confident.

Triplets and lambing mob size

Triplets. Last year was our first year, with 68 per cent survival, which turned out at 203 per cent lambs to ewes joined. We're targeting an optimum lambing mob size, rather than smaller is better, and we're trying to give them as much shelter as possible.

We find it really hard to settle sheep down coming out of mobs of a thousand or bigger. You take three ewes out of a mob of 1,500, and all they want to do is jump the nearest fence and get back in with their mates. I think it's a safety in numbers thing, and we really struggled with it with our triplets last year: just finding a mob size that provides enough space where they're not frightened. We had mobs of six to twenty last year, and this year we're all around ten.

The mob of six, you couldn't get within 100 metres of the gate and they were gone. They just panicked and off they went. The mobs of 10 or bigger sort of look at you and think, I've got a few mates with me, I'm safe. I can only imagine that if a fox or a pig or something gets in amongst those ewes, they're just going to run. So we're still learning there.

The future of our business

So, the future of our business in one photo. She's a twin-born lamb, and that's her second set of lambs. She was a twin-born lamb, she conceived twins at seven months of age, she lambed down those twins and they survived. And because I've got great fences, I put my rams next to the ewe lambs, because I thought it doesn't matter if they get in, they're not going to get them back in lamb.

So she then conceived twins again while she was rearing twins as a lamb. She's 13 months old in that photo, and that's her second set of twins. She's probably only got two months' wool on her there too. That was back in March or thereabouts.

There's the potential for us to join ewes every six months; that's what I'm getting at. The cattle guys put the bulls in with calves at foot. We'll get there, we've just got to learn how to manage nutrition. But she's a ewe that can do it, so give us ten years and we might be doing something like that.

A few other things: we'll continue to do some more trialling. We've got to refine our management of ewe lambs and try and maintain our high twinning rates. We're having a bit of a play with using nutrition to skew the male to female ratio across the whole flock. There's data out there that says we can do it.

We're playing around with our ewe lambs because we can control their nutrition. They're in confinement through joining, to keep the ewe–ram contact as close as we can, so we can control the nutrition a bit. We're making steps in the right direction; we're getting a 10 or 15 per cent split in ewes to wethers. So that's something we'll continue to work on, hopefully across the whole flock.

We'll start selecting for eating quality traits, because I think that's important. And something we need to be conscious of is our RWS compliance, so we need to explore or develop a market for ram lambs. Anyone who's read through the RWS booklet... I'm a bit of a stickler for rules. If there's a rule that you've got to comply with, that one there is a rule that I don't comply with, and I brought it up with my auditor and she's taken it further up.

The RWS requires us not to castrate lambs if we're not keeping them up to or past puberty. We're turning off wether lambs at four months of age, so there's an issue there. From an RWS compliance point of view there are a few other things that I think are real issues if someone wants to go to town on them. That's the easiest one for us to overcome. The other one is chemical application: no prophylactic chemical use. CLiK is a prophylactic chemical, so you use it before you need it. So there are a few things there, but that's the main one.

Like I was saying at the start, with the succession issue, we can't afford anything, so you've got to increase profit: make more money and build shiny things. We built that new shed in the drought, and those yards went up last year, and there'll be a roof going over them, or part of them, shortly.

Hopefully that's given you a bit of an overview. I have gone well over time. Those are my details. I post a bit on Twitter with all my figures. Thanks very much, everyone.

Questions from the audience

Well, I'll only give you what I know and what I've done. The first time we did it, back in 2013, those ewes raised lambs like that. They never scanned dry. There was only a very small number to play with, but they certainly didn't break down. I think it's going to affect their adult body weight, but I think that's a good thing.

I've got a lot of guys ringing me, talking about changing their genetics. I was talking to a guy down on the Southern Tablelands who plays around with different types of sheep, and he was saying he got some Riverina and South Australian-type genetics, and he's got 100-kilo dry ewes. That's definitely not the way forward. I'm conscious of shearers: I want a shearer to be able to shear as many sheep as they can, so they keep coming back.

We're aiming for 80 per cent or better of our ewe lambs getting in lamb; that's a five-year target for us. If that trims our adult weight back, so be it. Joining them as a ewe lamb doesn't affect their growth, and it doesn't affect any of the genetics that we're shooting for. Fleece weight's highly tied to how much food you put down their throats, so we see more wool in the better years and less wool in the lighter years. But as far as breaking down, I don't think so. You're always going to get ewes that break down.

And on that point, we're addressing this issue, but by far the most ewes that leave our system go for udder defects. A small amount leave the system as scanned dry ewes, and a small amount leave as lambed and lost, but the vast majority that have left our system in the past are from cut teats. We wet and dry at lamb marking. We're now on to our shearing team about that, and at the January shearing there wasn't a single cut teat.

They're cutting them as ewe lambs, because there's nothing there. Once we get past that first joining, generally the ewes have developed an udder that's big enough for the shearer to see. But we made the point once we saw it was happening. That's really the only thing our sheep are breaking down on structurally, so I don't think it would have an effect.

We get a marginally higher ewe mortality in the ewe lambs. It's not great, but it's not significant. They've got a lot going on, and as we get better at it, I think we can improve that. But it's early days. Thanks.