Breeding back your time with labour-saving traits

Time is the resource we waste

Mark Ferguson: Thanks very much for the opportunity to be here. Thanks to the Mumblebone team for inviting me back, and to the hosts today for putting on the venue. It's always good to have a nice clean shearing shed to do these things in. Today I'm going to take a bit of a different tack than I might normally and talk a lot about time, because it's one of our most precious resources. Hopefully someone got the joke at the start, which is lamb and time. Anyone who doesn't know what thyme looks like, that's what it looks like.

Hands up if you're going to have enough time next week to do everything you want to do. This bloke's got it covered. Anyone else? Everything you could possibly do? So the reality is, I'm going to take it from that that you're like me: you're busy, we've all got plenty on, and we're flat out. So the way I want to think about genetics in this presentation is from an angle of time. How do we breed back our time?

Because the reality is time is measurable and consistent, but we treat it exactly the opposite. We go about our lives thinking we can put another production system on, we can do something extra, because we can just work a bit harder, go to sleep a bit later or get up a bit earlier. Farmers are amazing at finding time, as in cutting time out of their personal lives and putting it into the farm. And so we keep perceiving time as being endless, and we have to be really careful about how that ends up for us.

I'm not going to be this morbid the whole time, I will get more positive. But for the average Australian, that's how many days you get to roam the planet: about 30,300. For some of us in the room we're pointing towards the end of that. So I'm putting a number on it to make sure we know this isn't an endless game we're playing. We do have a limited amount of time, and we don't want to spend all of that time in the shed dagging sheep or chasing flies or chasing worms.

That's what I want to talk about: how do we breed an animal that requires less of our time on farm? Breeding back your time. I reckon there are about seven or eight time killers on a farm, and I'm happy to take any extras if you've got them. In New Zealand people think compliance is another one, but we try to stick to the stuff that's heritable. So: flies, feet, worms, dags, and robustness, resilience, constitution, however you want to talk about that. I'm not going to talk about that much today, because Tomo, Andrew Thompson, is going to cover it in a lot more detail, so I'll skip over it.

If you're doing any sort of lambing rounds or you're joining ewe lambs, then stuck lambs can kill a heap of time. And then growth is probably one you might not expect to be there, but I'll start there and talk about why I think it's important for time as well. Any other time killers? Awkward silence. No? Okay.

Faster growth gets lambs off your farm

So we're going to go through those one by one. Growth is where I wanted to start, and again it's not something we might think of as a labour-saving trait. But I did the maths on the different growth rates per day that we could have lambs growing at, and a lot of that will be nutrition and some of that will be genetics. That's how many weeks on farm they need to be there to reach a 50 kilo turnoff weight, and Will will tell us that's roughly where we need to get them to be useful to kill.

If we look there, a difference of 50 grams a day will cost you about eight weeks on farm. That's eight weeks checking them, making sure they haven't got flies, making sure they haven't got worms, shifting them, feeding them, all the things we have to do with sheep. So I reckon there's this insidious loss from slow-growing genetics. We have to be really careful that we don't just think, "Oh well, Merinos always go like that." We've just heard from someone who's changed genotypes, and that's the opportunity: if we can breed a sheep that gets up, does its job and is finished early, it's a lot less time we've spent on farm.

So think about growth as a time saver as well as a money maker. Often we think of going for a heavier or faster-growing animal as all about making more money, and it is, but it also saves you a heap of time. And while that animal is on your farm hanging around, it's eating grass that your ewes for next year, or your replacements, could be eating. So there's a whole heap of things that cost us by having slow-growing genetics.

This year when you're buying rams, look hard at those early growth breeding values, weaning weight and post-weaning weight, to get animals off your farm quicker, save you some time as well as make you some money. I grabbed the data from one of the Merino Lifetime Productivity trials and had a look at the range in growth rate of the different sires that were measured there. We had a range from 125 grams a day up to over 150 grams a day in that particular trial.

Obviously that would be blown out more if we grew them a bit faster, but it's correlated with the post-weaning weight breeding value. So what does this mean for you? It means when you're buying rams this year, look hard at that post-weaning weight breeding value. It's not quite the 50 grams a day, it's about a 30 gram a day difference here, and that could be bigger depending on how you feed them. So there's time you can save yourself and money you can make yourself by looking at that particular trait. Any questions on growth? Anyone disagree with me? That's always fun.

Good question. I haven't really checked them, but this is squashed up. You'd see much more if you grew them faster; that's kind of a tough-season graph. If you had a better feeding regime you'd get more of a slope on that. Post-weaning weight always gives you more growth, but the gap it gives you reduces as your nutritional restriction comes down. So there'd be more upside than this, because these have just been fed to get through as growing sheep. They're not really being fed for production, whereas if we were feeding them for production we'd see a steeper line. So that's probably a worst-case scenario.

Audience member: It would be interesting to see that side by side between the two.

Mark Ferguson: Well, if you run that trial for me, that'd be awesome.

Audience member: How much does that push mature size up?

Mark Ferguson: Yeah, good question. That's the trade-off, so we need to keep an eye on that, and that's why we'll talk a lot about fat and muscle, and it's what Tomo's talking about. We have to be really careful about not just going for a massive animal. We have to get early growth. That's why, when I said growth, I said weaning weight and post-weaning weight, not your yearling weights or your hogget weight or your adult weight. We want that early growth.

What we've shown is that if you go for muscle and fat at the same time, you can keep mature weight under control, and that's really important. We've got an adult weight breeding value and we've got a condition score breeding value, and you need to have them all as part of your objective. Good point.

Flies, chemicals and the dag breeding value

Right, so we move on from growth into flies, everyone's favourite insect. Obviously a massive time killer on farms. This autumn it wouldn't have been much of a time killer for you, because you tend to need rainfall to get flies around, but you've definitely been through summers where it has been a nightmare.

Genetics can have a massive part to play in that. Again, it's something where for a couple of hundred years we've just bred a sheep and been happy that the chemicals kept working and kept the flies at bay. In the last data I saw out of New South Wales, 55 farms were tested for resistance to Vetrazin and CLiK, the two commercial examples of those actives, and every one of those farms had resistance to those chemicals. So our chemicals are starting to fail us, and there's no real sign we're going to get new ones.

So even if we were happy just continuing to breed sheep the way we have and rely on the chemicals, those chemicals aren't going to work anywhere near as well as they used to. If that hasn't got you frightened, nothing will. Genetics has a massive part to play in resistance to flies. The four big ones in the south are dags, breech wrinkle, breech cover and wool colour, and the top two, dag and breech wrinkle, are the real key ones.

As you go further north you get away from dags, and urine stain has more of an impact in country where you just don't get dags. But down here I'm safe in assuming you get the odd dag on your sheep. Everyone's seen a dag before? Yep, good. So this is the data coming out of AWI. There were two different breech strike projects, one at Armidale and one in Western Australia, and probably the WA data is more relevant because it's a winter rainfall environment. On each score, one is free of dag, one is very plain, one is very big breech cover, and one is very white wool.

You can see on all of those things we can genetically shift our predicted breech strike by breeding an animal that's low dag, low breech wrinkle, low breech cover, so a big bare area, and very white wool. Dag is one that we just forgot about in the industry for a couple of hundred years, and to me we should not have dags on sheep now, based on what I've seen happen in the last five to ten years where breeders have really focused on it. You can shift dag off sheep really quickly.

So this is a flock out of New Zealand; I grabbed their data. This is the breeding value you would have bought their ram on, and each dot is the progeny from an individual sire. This is the data from before that progeny went in to create the breeding value, which would have sharpened those breeding values a bit. I wanted to present it like it would happen in your flocks, which is you buy them on that dag breeding value, and that's where they come out for dag. One is very clean and five is a crutcher's nightmare.

We've got sires there at minus 0.6, which is pretty good in the database, and their progeny have a 1.7 average. I should get on my right hand so it's not so shaky. So they're sitting here: some of those progeny are very clean and some you might just need to hit with a handpiece. In that same mob, same treatment, been together since weaning, you've got progeny groups averaging three and a half, sitting up here. You've got to crutch every one of them or you're getting flies.

So there's massive variation, and this dag breeding value is something we really need to get our heads around and start focusing on. These sheep are awesome. Once you're down here, you hardly see a dag. Whereas these sheep will get dags eating bugger all. It's amazing, and it's really repeatable. They'll be the ones that are daggy at weaning, they'll be daggy again when you get them in the next time, and they're the ones you crutch and then go out to the paddock two weeks later and they've already got crap on them again.

That's the sheep here with these positive breeding values. And it doesn't seem to matter what the reason for the dags is. It might be rich feed, it might be worms, whatever; this breeding value just works. It's as close to magic as anything I've ever seen. So I think it's a trait that really needs to be in your objective, unless you like dagging sheep or chasing flies.

Audience member: How much has that got to do with internal gut health?

Mark Ferguson: Yeah, we don't know. There's got to be something going on. Regardless of a massive worm challenge, these sheep will still be crapping pellets, whereas these ones, regardless of what's going on, have got relatively early-stage diarrhoea. So there's something going on with gut health. I don't know what's going on; someone might. And I kind of don't care, because as long as we don't get dags it doesn't matter. But if you want to do a PhD, that would be a good area to do it in.

Audience member: Is there a relationship between sheep that are worm resistant and dags?

Mark Ferguson: Good question. It used to be that there was an unfavourable correlation. When we just went for worm count without dag, we tended to get some more dag. Hypersensitivity scouring was one of the outcomes of selecting for worm count, so a very small amount of larvae on the pasture would result in a lot of diarrhoea and dags. But now that correlation doesn't seem to be there; it seems to be pretty neutral. You can't select for dag and get worm resistance, and you can't select for worm resistance and get good dag. So they're independent traits. Best case scenario they're not correlated; worst case scenario they're correlated the wrong way.

Why wool goes yellow

So that's dag covered. Wool colour is the next one. Even on breech strike, wool colour is correlated with strike. Body strike obviously makes sense, with yellow wool going through to fleece rot and therefore attracting flies, but even on breech strike, wool colour is important. So I want to go into a bit of the biology of wool colour, because I'm a scientist and that's what we do. This is important because of the power of the breeding value: you can select for low-colour wool, so whiter wool, which is a low colour number, and you can do that across different regions.

I want to point out why some wool will look white in one region, and then you change where those animals are running and they'll go yellow. In wool, like us humans, they've got bacteria all over the sheep. They've got wax in there, which is the lanolin, and they've got suint, which is the sweat. If you open up the wool of a crossbred sheep you'll see that glistening; that's the suint in there.

So what's happening when we get this combination? You haven't had much of it this year. You had plenty of this and none of this, and now you've got a bit of rain happening and it's cold. Under those conditions you should have white wool, because you haven't had the combination of warmth and moisture. When you do get those two things together, the bacteria start chewing on the suint.

They metabolise it and release some carbohydrates that react with the amino acids in the skin and the wax, and that forms the yellow colour, which gets absorbed up into the wool fibres. That's what's going on. If we don't have this combination, we don't see colour. So you can go to a ram sale where the animals have been in a shed or held away from moisture, and they'll look snow white. But the reality is, unless you've got a breeding value to look at, or they've been running out in an environment where they get this combination, they'll look white because it hasn't been allowed to occur.

So if you are buying rams that have been protected from this combination, the breeding value for colour is a great place to start, and a very negative number will be very white wool. Again it works like magic: the more negative that number is, the whiter the wool. We can breed these traits that we've always had in our heads, where we go and look at the wool and want that white wool. The breeding value helps us get there faster, because every time we combine our eyes with a breeding value, we go there faster than we would with our eyes alone.

You can breed wool that's resistant to that colour, and they're the ones with lower suint percentage, so a higher wax to suint ratio, a different potassium content in the suint and a different pH. But essentially, like gut health, it kind of doesn't matter, because we can just breed for a more negative colour breeding value and we'll get that combination happening. So it's an opportunity for us. If body strike and flies are an issue, these traits should be starting to come up your list if we want to breed back our time.

Fleece rot, wrinkle and urine stain

You should know that the higher the wool colour scores, so the more yellow wools, the more fleece rot you get. Fleece rot is when you start getting a crusting or a banding in the wool, whereas wool colour tends to be across the staple a bit more. Going into my little cartoons again, what's going on with fleece rot is the same combination happening, but the suint molecules actually act as a bit of a detergent.

They wash away that wax layer, so you get water irritating the skin, which releases an exudate. The bacteria love that stuff and get fired up. When the moisture goes away the bacteria stop being active, and you'll then grow white wool again. So when we're scoring fleece rot, we're looking right on the shoulder and at the back of the pins and the middle of the back, looking hard for it. You'll see the susceptible ones even with an early banding, even when there haven't really been a lot of conditions.

Again, we're doing this because we don't want labour in our sheep systems. We want to breed animals that don't require either jetting or checking for flies, and we can do that. We can breed fleece rot resistance and colour resistance into our sheep. That's the fleece rot breeding value, which is different to the footrot breeding value. Another opportunity to breed back our time. I probably don't need to tell you that when fleece rot goes up, we get plenty of flies.

When you get warmth and moisture, fleece rot goes yellow, then it goes green, then it goes blue or whatever, and that's very attractive to flies. In wet summers you'll see lots of sheep cruising around that have been crutched over the back, or some of them dead in the corner of the paddock. Big issues in some flocks, particularly some Merinos that haven't been selected that way.

Audience member: That band, isn't it often associated with a change of feed, like really green feed? Is that a cause and effect thing, or is it more that it's the rain that brings the green feed on? We'll see it at the autumn break, and then it'll grow off beautiful white wool again.

Mark Ferguson: Yeah, I think it's a combination of conditions when that happens. It's humidity. You can have lots of rain, and as long as it's cold it's fine. Lots of heat and no rain, it's fine. So I think it's more that combination, rather than a protein band, which we hear mentioned. I haven't fed protein without the conditions, so I don't know that 100 per cent, but what I'm thinking is that it's an on-skin thing, not a feed thing.

But even within that, you'll have some sheep that are worse than others, which is what we're trying to get at. Not every sheep in that mob that gets the band will get it as bad, and there'll be some that don't get it at all. That's probably what we're aiming for: whatever the reason is, let's breed the ones that don't get it. But I do think it's environmental conditions at the skin level rather than what we're feeding them. That's what I think, rather than what I know.

The last one around flies is wrinkle, and it makes plenty of sense with breech wrinkle. There's no real problem with wrinkle other than it creates these little crevices where you get that combination of moisture, and it's really happy days for bacteria sitting in those crevices. Historically that's been mulesed away to tighten it up and reduce those areas. But that's basically all wrinkle is doing: producing those little areas where moisture gets going, bacteria get going, and then it's a really happy place for maggots to get into, and away we go.

The breech wrinkle breeding value has proven really, really useful at getting rid of breech wrinkle. Because we use the breeding values for that plus fleece weight, we can breed sheep that have fleece weight without wrinkle. There are heaps of examples in the industry now where that's happening, reducing our reliance on chemicals and reducing flies.

This is relevant for anyone who's travelled from the north. Where you don't have dags, you do get urine stain. We don't have a breeding value for it yet, but there is a scoring system, and hopefully once there's enough data we'll get a breeding value for urine stain. I keep saying that everything on a sheep is heritable; you just have to score it. If you want to increase eyelash length you probably can, though I haven't tried. With urine stain there's variation there, and the work shows that it's heritable. If you don't get dag, a sheep like that can get struck. There'll be variation in our sheep in the south as well, but it's often masked by dag, so it's hard to score if it's covered in dag.

Putting the fly traits together

So what does that all look like if you bring it together? It looks exactly the opposite of that. That photo is from New Zealand; I wouldn't put an Australian example up here. And it's chewing on that wood, hoping for I don't know what. So if you're out there buying rams this year, look at the breeding value for dag; a negative number is what you're looking for. Look at the breeding value for breech wrinkle, early breech wrinkle; a negative number there is what you're looking for. Urine stain will be hard to do, but if you really get focused you could do something there.

Breech cover is not as important as the other two. When we first went breeding for flystrike resistance, we had this theory that we'd just breed animals with a big bare area. It is important, but it's nowhere near as important as dag and wrinkle. So it's good to have in there, but don't just do that; you need the other ones to go with it, because they're generally more important. And then negative breeding values for fleece rot and fleece colour are good places to start as well: fleece rot mainly for breech strike, and fleece colour for both breech and body strike. I'm not sure I got that combination right, but hopefully you know what I meant.

Just quickly, we hear stories about what happens if we breed all the wool off the sheep by doing this kind of stuff. Every one of these dots is a sire in the database across Australia, with I think 75 progeny as the cut-off I used, so they're well-recorded sires. Then I just correlated the breeding values. This is the breech cover breeding value. Yes, if you go for lower breech cover, a bigger bare area, you get slightly less fleece weight, but there's massive variation to work with. You can find heaps of sheep that are very bare and have heaps of wool, if that's what you're after.

The cool one that I always like is the correlation with reproduction, so weaning rate, our reproduction breeding value. The bigger the bare area, the cleaner the points, the more lambs we get. Again there's heaps of variation. If for whatever reason you wanted heaps of wool around the backside and a high weaning rate, you could do that; it would be hard and it wouldn't make much sense, but you could. It's a really cool correlation with what we've seen forever: open-headed, clean-pointed sheep tend to have more reproduction, and you can breed those sheep with plenty of wool on them.

Audience member: If you're trying to get time back, would a lower weaning rate help?

Mark Ferguson: Possibly. I don't know how your bank manager would like you saving that much time. You could select for singles to get a bit back, but twins that are bred right shouldn't cost that much time. Thank you, Nathan.

Footrot and lameness

Lameness again is probably not something that would have featured in the last four or five months. But it is the curse of a good season. When things are going right, you've got plenty of feed and plenty of moisture around, sheep feet start to fail. That's listed as the number one reason why people leave Merinos and go and do something else, like going to crossbreds. Feet health was well and truly up there anyway, and like everything, this is under genetic control.

We've done a lot of work in New Zealand looking at footrot specifically. I know that only your neighbours have footrot, but for a place that's eradicated footrot, there seem to be a whole lot of footrot workshops. In New Zealand it's not treated like leprosy; it's just another disease, so we've been able to work with it and select against it. We've got some work going on with Animal Health Australia, AWI and Murdoch University, all working together at the moment to really investigate this and hone in on genetics for footrot resistance, but also OID, ovine interdigital dermatitis, or what we'd call scald, which is when you don't get any under-running, you just get that infection between the toes.

And then foot structure, so we're investigating those things. Whether it's a benign footrot or it's OID, we still want to find the genetics that aren't going lame, because nothing takes condition off a sheep like lameness. It rips condition and production out of a sheep really quickly. So we've developed a breeding value for footrot in New Zealand. Because footrot must have a different accent in Australia, we're not allowed to use that breeding value here yet, but we're working on that. That's the reason we've got this project going, to make sure this is going to work in Australia.

So this is the normal distribution of footrot. These are sheep you can literally run with footrot and they won't get it. These are sheep you could run on this concrete floor and they'd get footrot. That's the population of Merinos in New Zealand at the moment, and there are a lot of Australian rams mixed into that, because we've used a lot of semen in New Zealand from here.

Again, it's a disease we thought you had to work your way around. It was a massive cost and massive labour; nothing gets people out of the sheep industry quicker than feet problems and footrot. And we can breed sheep that literally do not get footrot, so that's been a really great opportunity. What we want to know in this project is about the ones that get OID, or scald. The ones that don't get it are probably down here, but we don't know that, so we've got some work to do on it.

Again, really exciting stuff that we can do to breed back our time. We've been at it about 10 years now in New Zealand, and we've got people putting out ram teams averaging down here, and they literally don't fill up their zinc troughs anymore. It has completely changed. One key place keeps all their old diaries, they've been around forever. I looked at the date 100 years before the day I was there, looked up what they were doing that day, and they were footrotting sheep. So it's been around a while in that place, and now, through breeding, for the first time they've really found a way to manage it.

Breeding for worm resistance

Next favourite thing to do with sheep is to drench it. Worm resistance to drenches is on the march. It's been around for a long time, but it seems to be gathering a bit of pace. There are places now down to Zolvix and Startect as the only ones that work. Not lots, but there are examples out there. Has anyone's neighbours got drench resistance? No one's got it themselves, but there's a bit around. Anyway, we are running out of actives. The actives we have got are very expensive, and all the stories I'm hearing are that there's nothing new on the horizon in terms of drenches. So we do need to get our heads around how we breed and manage an animal without the get-out-of-jail-free card we've had over the years of just drenching them and away we go.

I get pretty excited about these labour-saving traits, but worms are another great one. This is some trial work out of Western Australia, an example of resistant ewes and control ewes, so non-selected ewes. We know what happens when we put ewes out to lamb: that's when they go through the periparturient rise. Their immune system basically shuts off and the worms go hell for leather laying eggs and building up. And that's beautifully timed with when we can't get near our sheep. So we try to treat them before we put them out for lambing, and things like capsules and long-acting products have been used, and have caused half the trouble we've got.

But beautifully, when we've got these resistant ewes, running separately obviously, they go through that periparturient rise weeks before lambing and they're nowhere near the eggs per gram of those control ewes. So it's a great example of what's going on with genetic resistance. These are sheep that fire up their immune system and kill those worms off or stop them laying eggs, and therefore don't require drenching. Someone was crazy enough to count the worm larvae on pasture.

That's how many larvae are sitting per kilogram of dry matter on pasture. Same sheep, pre-lambing, not many there, resistant versus controls. Post-lambing, you go out there and count them again, and there are larvae everywhere on the pasture under the control ewes, the non-selected ewes. Under our resistant ewes we've got some larvae there, but a much lower number. Our lambs going out on that pasture have basically got no immune system yet; they haven't developed it, so they're being exposed to massive burdens of larvae.

That impacts them. It'll reduce their feed intake and reduce the performance of those lambs, whereas these ones are hitting some larvae, but nowhere near the numbers. You hear a bit of resistance versus resilience chat in the industry. A resilient animal is one that will handle worms and not care. A resistant animal is one that will control those worms and kill them. Under resilient sheep you can still get this: they've still got heaps of eggs and heaps of worms in them, and they're bolting along as mums, but their lambs at foot are still having to handle all those larvae and they don't have that immune system yet, so they'll be copping a flogging from the larvae that are there.

That's why I'm so hot on resistance rather than resilience. I think again we've got this power to take out a major production issue, but also a labour issue. Do you have a question, Trevor?

Audience member: The question is how many worms are on the pasture at different times of the year. I ask because it's a little bug that we need a microscope to see, and it comes out of an animal that has a similar body temperature to ours. It could be a 40 degree day with the ground temperature at 50, or it could be a minus five degree day. There's got to be a difference in how the worms survive in those different parts of the year.

Mark Ferguson: Pretty good question. Yeah, there is, and they over-summer in different ways. A lot of them stop their life cycle at some point, and that's why our summer drenching caused a lot of resistance issues, because all the worms are in the sheep. When you've got a lot of larvae on the pasture still and you drench them, you don't put so much pressure on the drench. They're loaded up when you've got your drench gun out and there are plenty of larvae on the pasture. Hot and dry will kill them, frost will kill them, but they're pretty resilient little things.

Audience member: I was just going to say on that, the parasitologist I use down here says probably our biggest concern is a worm that shouldn't be active in winter because it's too cold, and he has found barber's pole in the snow.

Mark Ferguson: And what I learned this week is that it's got the same size genome as a human, which I had no idea about. I interviewed a guy the other day. So obviously they've got massive genetic variation to work with, and they're running through life cycles at a hell of a rate, so they're evolving quickly. I've been interviewing some parasitologists lately. That's what's evolved over the last 30 years.

Worm resistance and a stronger immune system

I reckon this is probably the most interesting stuff I've seen in the last little while. This is Katahdin sheep out of the US, so we have no idea if it's relevant for you, but it's cool enough to talk about. These are worm count breeding value groups, so lower worm count, and that's their average faecal egg count, or worm egg count. It goes the way it would make sense: the high worm count breeding value means they're not resistant, so they've got plenty of worms.

This is what's happening in their immune system, the immunoglobulin counts after they've been vaccinated. So what we're actually selecting for, it seems, is a better immune system, which makes sense. They've done a lot of work looking into it, and there's a better immune response from these low worm count sheep versus a lower immune response from those high worm count sheep. So not only are we getting an animal that's resistant to worms, we're getting an animal with a better immune system, which is pretty cool.

What they went on to look at was colostrum. They looked at colostrum quality, or the immunoglobulin content in colostrum, which is a tough word to say. Obviously colostrum is how mum transfers immunity to lambs, and what they found was that those resistant animals had more immunoglobulins in their colostrum and were therefore passing on immunity in a better way.

And this was survival in one year: 30 per cent mortality in the highs and only 10 per cent in the lows, and nowhere near the scale of that in the second year. That's a massive number, so we wouldn't expect it all the time. But the fact that we've got a way of selecting an animal to improve its immune system, which passes through to its lamb and makes that lamb survive a bit better, is pretty cool. So we're really keen to keep investigating this kind of stuff.

I think we'll see that with these disease-type traits. We see that pneumonia is correlated with worm count, and we see worm count is slightly correlated with footrot. So this animal we can breed towards is just a more bombproof animal in how it's handling disease, and how can we bring that together? The tool at the moment is worm egg count, but there might be others.

Audience member: Are we blurring the line here between resistance and resilience? Are some of those things driving resilience, which is a good thing, because the two might be positively correlated and move together? When you start talking about immunity, that's more resilience.

Mark Ferguson: I don't think it is. Resilience is when you don't reduce your feed intake when you're under worm challenge, so you keep eating and keep producing, and your immune system doesn't react. So I think they are different things. If you turn off the immune system and feed them full of worms, they're happy. There's a lot of interaction going on, so those things will all be at play, but I think it's probably more resistance than resilience. Happy to argue about it, though.

These sheep are not unicorns

I just want to give an example, because it sounds like I'm talking about unicorns, and this is not. This is a sheep that's not related to anyone in the room, so I thought we could bring it in and use it as an example. It's an old ram, so it's kind of irrelevant these days, but I wanted to make sure we're not talking about unicorns. These sheep do exist, and we can put these traits together. This bloke has got no fleece weight at all, which is what makes him relatively irrelevant these days.

So he's very low there, but really high condition score, really good muscle and fat, a really good colour breeding value, a really good fleece rot breeding value, a really good cover breeding value, pretty handy on his breech wrinkle, a very good dag breeding value, handy enough on his worm egg count at about average, and a really good weaning rate and really good rearing ability. He's a 2012 drop, so this bloke was born 12 years ago, and the industry has moved a long way since then. We've got lots of sheep out there you'll be able to find in catalogues this year. We're not talking about unicorns; we're talking about real sheep that exist on farms in New South Wales. We can actually start to use these tools to move towards a sheep that will be bombproof and, I reckon, a whole heap more fun to farm.

Breeding for balance

I don't know how I'm going for time, Josh, but you're standing up, so I'm in trouble. So, breeding back for balance. I've talked a lot about breeding values for labour saving. Obviously there are lots of production traits I could have talked about and haven't today. They're obviously important and I'm not ignoring them; I'm just going hard on labour saving because I think it's going to be a key issue for us. So the question I ask you is: will you be on your deathbed wishing you'd produced another bale of wool, or wishing you'd gone on one more fishing trip?

I reckon I know the answer to that question. But we have to make sure when we're buying rams this season that we're thinking holistically. What's the production system we want to pass on to the next generation coming into our systems? What are the animals we actually want to farm with? Do we want them working for us, or do we want to be working for them? We get to ram sale season and we might just go hard on a couple of production traits and forget about all this stuff. So I'm being quite brutal to try to make sure you don't forget about it.

Because that's the number one regret of the dying. Bronnie Ware was a palliative care nurse, and the number one thing people said on their deathbed was, "I wish I hadn't worked so hard." I'll just let that sink in a minute. And I'm as bad as anyone, so I'm not throwing stones. But we've got an opportunity to change the way we farm sheep. I don't think the future is that hard to predict. This is Bill Malcolm, a great economist out of Melbourne Uni.

I don't reckon it's that hard to predict what's going on in the market. Are we going to get more chemicals? No. Is labour going to get cheaper? No. Is the consumer going to care less? No. Lots of these things are all lining up, so we know what the future looks like, and it's not going to go back the other way. So we've got this opportunity to really hone in on these types of sheep. If you want to, there's a booklet around which goes through each of those traits in a lot of detail. There are copies of it all over the place.

So you can grab one of them and read up. I haven't gone into a lot of detail on the breeding values today, because I wanted to go a bit higher level than that. If you're not sick of this voice already, you can listen to it every Monday: we do a podcast about genetics in beef and sheep, and livestock generally. Thanks very much for your time. I think we're probably out of question time.