Know your numbers: metrics and skills for sheep businesses

Celebrating what we do well

Thanks to the Mumblebone team for the opportunity to be here. It's fantastic to be back on Aussie soil. I had a couple of years in quarantine, dealing with the dreaded virus, but it's awesome to be back and awesome to see a room full of people come to talk about sheep. It's something we do a bit, and something we love doing, so long may that continue. It'll be going on for a fair few hours this evening, I imagine, so hang around and do that with us.

Most of my material's been stolen today by Chad, or by Henry, who works for me, so I've got some different stuff to work on. It's a bit of a different tack for me. But I just want to endorse what Chad just said and how he explained those really critical traits. For 15 or 17 years I've been playing in that condition score space, and I think we're just really understanding the power we've got at play now, as we change the shape and really develop something that's completely new for our industry.

I know we're not going to ask questions, but I want someone to tell me what they do well in their business. Succession planning? Awesome. Only got one person doing a good job? Listen to the right people? Excellent.

We're not going to dwell on that, but the reason I wanted you to tell me is because that's something we're really bad at, as Australians and New Zealanders, or farmers generally: celebrating success. It's really critical in our game to actually sit and think about what we do well. It's really easy to beat ourselves up, and we've got heaps of people around us who'll help us do that. But it's really important to think about what we do well in our business, and that's what I want to talk about: the things I think we need to do well. I've got two presentations today, and the second one will get more into the business stuff.

Anyone heard of imposter syndrome? Everyone's got it. We get up here and we're giving presentations, but each of us is always questioning whether we're good at what we do. This is a reality. This is our belief: that we know this little bit, and everyone else knows all this other stuff. But the reality is that what you know is just as much as what everyone else in this room knows.

So don't sit there thinking your point isn't valid or your question isn't valid. We've all got amazing experiences, and there's heaps more knowledge on that side of the room than this side of the room, because you're doing it every day. So never underestimate what you know, never underestimate the power of a good question, and back yourself.

Know your numbers: standard reference weight

So I want to talk about the things I think we need to know: know your numbers. As a sheep business, and I'm assuming we're all in the sheep business, what are the things you need to know to be able to judge yourself well, and to know if you are doing things well?

The first one I want to know is standard reference weight. That's the weight of my ewes at condition score 3, fleece-free and conceptus-free. Anyone can put their hand up if they know that accurately for their sheep. Three people, four people maybe.

Why is that important? Because everything runs on standard reference weight, and Chad covered that really well. If we just have weight of sheep as our metric, an animal weighed at condition score two and a half is a completely different animal to one weighed at condition score four, because the way that animal performs is massively different. Even how much I should drench that animal is determined by the standard reference weight. So it's a really key bit of information.

I'm happy to help work it out, but basically you go through a heap of mobs of ewes and condition score 150 or 200 ewes, weigh them at the same time, and then work out off that graph where your condition score 3 is, and take your fleece off. It's a bit of a process, but I think it's really valuable. You don't have to do it every year, but if you do it now and then do it again in three or four years' time and it's gone up a couple of kilos, that's something you need to think about.

Maybe you think you're going well, but maybe you're just increasing the standard reference weight of your ewes, and maybe you haven't actually changed that much. You need to understand what's going on at that level. So I think that's a key metric, a key number that you should know in your business, and more people need to know it.

Response to nutrition

Response to nutrition is another cracker. Again, it comes back to that condition score thing; we're going to talk a lot about condition score. How many extra lambs do you get if your ewes go to the ram half a condition score higher? Anyone tell me that number? Lots. Excellent. Chad, that's why you're CEO, mate, you're all over it.

Again, this is an important number. Why is that important? You want lambs. If I want my ewes to have more lambs on board... For some of you, if you're joining early, if part or all of your business is lambing in April, this won't be very high, because of the time-of-year effect, and even your genotype might be having an impact. So there's no money in you necessarily doing anything to join your ewes in higher condition score.

For other people in the room there could be up to 40 lambs per condition score. If you're lambing late and you've got the right genetics, they're enormously responsive to condition score. So you can go to your bank manager and say, I'm going to feed a bit of barley over summer to keep my ewes in good condition, because I know I'm going to be able to bank lambs next year and I'm going to set myself up.

So if you know this number, you've got yourself in a position to act well in terms of making those good decisions around when am I feeding, what am I feeding and why that's important. Again, it's not that hard to determine. You just need to condition score and weigh a heap of ewes at joining, and then scan those same ewes. It's a couple of hundred EID tags if you haven't got them in already. It's a bit of a process, but again, something I think is worth doing every now and again so you know where you sit. We don't want to be in the position of just guessing or thinking about the average, because no one's average. Everyone's got their own unique enterprise differences.

Fleece weight to body weight ratio

Chad's talked about this one a bit, around the impacts of going for wool, and some of that through wrinkle. Another number you want to know is your fleece weight to body weight ratio: how much wool are my ewes cutting per kilogram of standard reference weight? Why do I want to know that? Because across all the wool sheep, the higher that number goes, the fewer lambs you're going to wean, unless you do something about it. Going for high fleece weight at the same body weight puts those sheep under nutritional pressure and physiological pressure.

This is data out of the Merino Lifetime Productivity project from AWI. This is increasing fleece weight to body weight ratio, so 12 per cent is 6 kilos on a 50-kilo animal, versus 10 per cent, which is 5 kilos on a 50-kilo animal. Each dot is a sire group of progeny. This is their fleece ratio and this is their lamb weaning percentage.

That's a pretty tight line. There are a few dots around it; there's one that's just crap at both, and there's one that's sort of okay at both. But generally, as we jam up fleece weight to body weight ratio, we are making it harder and harder to have lambs. It doesn't mean you can't do both, and it doesn't mean you can't feed your way out of that situation, but those sheep are running in the same environment, so that's what's at play.

So again, know that number. Know whether you should be expecting 90 lambs or 120 lambs because of that number, and then breed your way into a position that means you're always going to have those lambs, if that's part of your breeding objective.

Whole body energy and the flock profile test

This one's hard to measure, but it's important, and we're going to get onto a way you can look at it soon. It's this whole body energy that Chad was talking about: genetic condition score, fat to weight ratio, however you look at it. It is such a critical part of running sheep in most places where sheep get run. If it's decent country, someone generally does something other than run sheep on it. The sheep get pushed into the places where other things don't happen.

So generally we're expecting our sheep to carry a good spring, or a good nutritional period, through a time that's not so good. Having that fat to weight ratio, having some haystack on the back, is a really critical part of doing that.

The other way you could look at that is through the rams you've purchased, and do a sire team audit. Again, that's only if you've been buying from someone with ASBVs, and we'll talk about how you can do it if you haven't.

For a while the Sheep CRC, with about 30 or 40 million bucks of your hard-earned grower levies plus some government taxes, invested in developing genomics for the sheep industry. It was a massive investment, and there's a massive opportunity that sits there now. What this thing is, is a flock profile test. It's 20 ear samples from your young ewes, sent away, and they come back and tell you what the average of your ewe flock is. It's a massively powerful benchmark for the sheep industry.

I'll try and zoom that up a bit. Essentially what it's telling you is where you sit compared to the average of the industry. The red lines on each of these traits are the average of the industry, and the green lines are your flock average. This one's not a bad one. You get micron, CV, staple length, clean fleece weight, post-weaning weight, so early growth, yearling weight, muscle, fat, breech wrinkle, worm egg count, and then an index that Henry will talk about.

So all that stuff Chad was just talking about, you can actually send away and have a really good benchmark on what's going on in your flock. I reckon this is the most important thing if you're sitting there in the crowd going, I don't really know what my sheep are like, my stud tells me they're pretty good. This is a great way of knowing whether they're good, knowing what better is, and knowing where you're sitting on that front.

I can't spend enough time on that one. How many people in the room have done a flock profile test? Was it useful? That's good, excellent. There are a few more to go, but I think it's worth doing, and worth doing every now and again. I had a bloke the other day in South Australia telling me that if a ram breeder tries to sell him some rams, he just says, give me 20 TSUs from your ewe flock and I'll tell you whether I'm going to buy your rams or not. That's a really good way to start getting some real information.

Normally in that position you don't know what's feed and what's genetics. We're always farming the same genetics in our environment, so you don't know what the power of genetics is. One of the best things I can do for young people that work for me is to throw them into some sort of progeny test. Will Gibson is not here, luckily for us this evening, but the first job I gave him when he worked for me, back when I was working for New Zealand Merino, was to run the central progeny test. It changed him completely, because he saw those genetics running in the same environment, and the power of genes.

So doing this gives you a really good look. If you really want to change your mindset, run a progeny test on farm. Set it up properly, get a bit of help to do that, and see how the power of genes plays out on your farm. You'll be blown away.

Scanning index and lamb wastage

Scanning index is something the Kiwis focus on. It's per cent scanning per kilogram of ewe, and it's similar to that response to nutrition thing. It's something to calculate every year. If you know your standard reference weight you can do that, and if you're weighing some sheep you can do that.

What we're talking about all through this presentation is that we have to start treating our businesses like businesses. We have to measure stuff, because if we can't measure it, we can't change it. So that's your scanning percentage divided by the weight of your ewes at scanning, calculated each year. It's just a good metric to see how your management's going, and if you've got a couple of different farms, to compare them, because it takes into account a few things. So that's something to look into.

Lamb wastage is probably the most important thing for you to calculate every year. You can't do it if you're not pregnancy scanning, but it's really important. This is the number of foetuses we lose between when we count them, what the potential is, and what we end up with. You would have heard this message a million times in the industry, but it can't be said often enough. It's great to scan big numbers and whack it on Twitter, or go to the pub and talk about it, but none of us get paid until those lambs are being sold.

In lots of businesses there's a big number between what is conceived and what actually turns out. They're not disappearing, they're not vanishing, they're not being absorbed. They're dying in the paddock, often due to the nutrition of their mother. There's no magic bullet. Some people will have a genuine eagle or pig problem, but generally we can set that system up way better by managing our ewes.

It's easily calculated: basically, divide the number of dead lambs by the total that were there at scanning. There are people in New Zealand getting that down to 16 or 17 per cent, and there might be people in the room doing that. There'll be other people in the industry sitting at 30 or 35 per cent of the foetuses conceived dead within 48 hours of being born. That's a big number. That's not pretty for our industry, and it's not pretty for your bank account.

Four key skills: condition scoring

So I'm going to guess there are four key skills. This presentation hasn't been in ink very long. I reckon there are four key skills you need to have or employ. You don't have to have them in your business; you can get them in temporarily to do that job, or you can employ people that do the job for you. You don't have to do it yourself. But there are four things you must be able to do.

One is condition scoring. How many people can back themselves at condition scoring? Oh, we've got a good number, awesome. Did I say accurately, or did I just say could you do it? That's great, there's a big show of hands there.

There might have been lots of people who did Lifetime Ewe Management, hopefully, or have done similar programs. A lot of people are good at doing it or have done it, but you need to keep doing it. Often you'll do it and you'll change your management as a result, and then you might go, oh well, they'll be right this year, they're out on the hill, I won't bring them in. There's always something to be learned by getting your hands on sheep accurately.

There's that great Lifetime Ewe Management app; I don't know if you've used it, but it's really good for getting the average condition score of a mob. Most of the year you only need to do 50 of the mob, when they're in the yards for something else, because you want to know where they sit as a mob. There are a couple of times in the year when doing individuals is powerful. If you think they're going to be in poorer condition, and you've condition scored 50 of them and they're sitting on condition score 3, then there's money in going through them. When are those two times of the year, do you reckon?

Pre-joining? Pre-lambing, so post pregnancy scanning, is the number one time. That's when you can do something with skinny twins. Skinny twin ewes are your highest return per kilogram of grass; they're the best return you can get in your farm grazing system. It's about a dollar fifty per kilogram of dry matter that you can make out of putting half a condition score on skinny twins. There's a massive amount of money to be made out of those, so if they exist, you need to know who they are, and you identify them straight after scanning.

You've got time to get them back up. You've got 60 or 70 days between scanning and lambing, so you've got an opportunity to get those twin-bearing ewes up. You would have heard that message, but it really is absolutely critical.

The other time is weaning, because then you've got the opportunity to separate those skinny ewes off again. You've got time at weaning; often you've still got a bit of grass around, or you've still got an opportunity to lift those ewes. If you leave it later than that, often you're having to feed grain to put weight back on ewes, and it never pays to feed grain to a ewe to put condition on her to get scanning out of her. It pays to maintain her weight and make sure she doesn't slide down too much, but if you leave it late and then try and feedlot them up to get lambs on the ground, that won't pay.

So you need to do that early, so you can try and get some condition back on before the season dries out further or before the quality drops off. It's a key skill, and it's good to have lots of people in the room that have done it. I encourage you to continue to have that as part of your business, because there's money in it.

Chad talked about how, if we set our sheep up right, we can probably put that skill away. But even in that system, if you're going to milk the value of that new sheep type, you have to be running it at the right stocking rate, and you can't run it at the right stocking rate unless you're condition scoring those ewes.

Feed budgeting and ram selection using data

Feed and energy budgeting. Again, if you're doing that condition scoring, that's a key skill to have in your business. You don't have to do it yourself; you can pay people to do it, or get someone in that does it. But we've got massive variation in the energy required per head per day across our businesses: dry sheep needing eight megs, and then twin-bearing ewes in peak lactation up over 25 or 26, and if you've got heavier ewes, or composites or whatever, even bigger than that, up over 30.

That's a massive difference. Again, if you know your standard reference weight, you know you're preg scanning and you know where your skinny twins are, you can calculate this stuff. We're running businesses and we need to be really good at knowing our numbers, and this is one of those skills I think you need to have. Again, it's not that hard. The Lifetime Ewe Management app that AWI developed is a good one to do this as well: you put all your numbers in and it'll tell you the number.

Probably the one we should have started with is ram selection using data. You're going to go out there and you're going to have information thrown at you. Some of you are going to be really comfortable in that world, and some of you are going to be looking at all that stuff like it's in Spanish. It'll be a whole different language for you, and that's fine. We just need to either get that skill yourself, and you can upskill yourself, or get someone in to help, because understanding that information is critical.

Long gone are the days of that big tin shed in Bendigo, walking around looking at a micron and possibly a fleece weight. Trying to understand from that which of those sheep are going to make you the most money on your farm is impossible. With these breeding values, you still look at all the stuff that's important to you, but you use these numbers to separate out what is right for you and what is wrong for you.

Henry is going to talk to you in a minute about how we go about that, developing indexes to help weight those different traits for individual people, and that can really hone that process. It's such a great opportunity that we have now, with breeders really focused on giving us data. If we don't utilise that data, we're absolutely letting ourselves down and letting our futures down.

Collecting data to select your own ewes

And then if you are getting right into it, there's new data collection and selection. We've got EID, which surely will be mandatory pretty shortly, with FMD on the doorstep. But if you are going to start to measure stuff, what we often see is fleece weight and micron. People start: all right, we're really going to crank this ewe flock up, so I get there and I start weighing fleeces and I start getting microns. What happens if I do that? Start killing lambs.

I also start selecting single-born lambs, because single-born lambs have higher fleece weight and lower micron just because they were born as a single. So there's a massive risk that when I actually do that, I go out there and select those ewes based on some information, and I give myself a pat on the back because I'm starting to use some data, but actually I probably would have been better off not doing it, because it could be detrimentally impacting my flock. So I get really jumpy about people starting to use data to select their commercial ewe flock unless it's a full spectrum of data.

I think we can do this. Firstly, you need to make sure you record who's a single and who's a twin, and whether they're out of a maiden or out of a mixed-age ewe. That's the first thing: if you're going to start selecting ewes in your commercial flock, you have to know their birth type and you have to know how old their mum was. That's not that hard if you're preg scanning, and as you're lamb marking you record those. You can notch their ears or you can record those EIDs, but you need to get that information, because if you box those mobs, it's gone forever. You've pretty much given up on that drop, and you start again next year.

If you've done that, then weaning weight should be pretty simple, and we can get a weaning weight if the EIDs go in. It doesn't have to be done on the day of weaning. Everyone tells me how busy they are at weaning, because they are, but you can get them back a week later, at that first drench or whatever, and get a weight on them. That sets you up for knowing which ones grew early.

This one I reckon's critical: 12-month condition score. It's what Chad was talking about. We select for fat and muscle to get condition score, so by definition, if we've got condition score, we've got fat and muscle. When I class sheep, whether I'm on a commercial place or a stud place looking at ewes, the first thing I do is put my hand on the spine and work out what the condition is, because that sets my brain right. If I feel bones, I want to find something else to cull that ewe on. If I feel she's in pretty good order, then I'm looking for another positive virtue to go forward with.

Right then, before they've lambed or done anything else, their condition score is pretty much their genetics for fat and muscle, and they're very highly correlated. So that's a great thing to do in your commercial flock, and very few stud classers do it. At the same time, eight- and twelve-month weights can be collected together. Fleece weight and micron: we're not pretending that's not important, it just has to be in balance.

And then if you're joining as ewe lambs, the pregnancy scanning result, wet and dry, that sort of stuff, can come into it as well. All of that information should come into your selection strategy. So if you want to go absolute gold standard in a sheep farming business, we need to get right into the whole data side of the equation. And that's it. I went too fast overall.

Questions from the audience

Dr Mark Ferguson: Yeah, so there is a bit of development. I think DPI have developed something, but it hasn't been commercialised that I know of. Really, it's a hell of an easy process, but I know there's value in automating it. There's been a bit of work, but nothing that I know of that's commercial, unless someone wants to correct me.

Audience member: With long-term data, by feeding those skinny twins, or something that's not in condition, are you breeding an animal that requires feeding all the time, so you're going to be feeding more and more animals?

Dr Mark Ferguson: Yeah, that's a really good question. So the question was, if I manage my skinny ones better, am I just encouraging average performance or poor performance by giving them a leg up all the time? We've got clients that will record that, and if they do it twice then they're out.

Often those ewes that are skinny at weaning have just lactated their hearts out and have reared heavy twins. That's where we would normally go up the draft and kick her into the cull pen because she's looking a bit crappy, and there's a big shiny one there that looks better. The big shiny one killed her lamb at 48 hours, and the one that brought in twin lambs you've just culled because she's no good.

So you're right, there's a risk that we will encourage mediocrity. But generally, if she's there on your farm as a three- or four-year-old, you've invested in her, and you've either got to get rid of her or get her back up to speed. If you're increasing numbers, or you haven't got room to find another ewe to replace her, then you need to feed her up, because the risk is that if you don't, there's a good chance both her lambs are dead and she's dead.

So at that point, at preg scanning, your bases are loaded and you've got to do something to try and get an outcome from that ewe. So you're right, we have to be careful about how we do that, but there's a commercial side of the equation and then a ewe selection side of that equation.

I've got a question from Facebook here, from Jason: how far can we push positive fat? We all hear about waste on the kill floor in cattle. We know the benefits of fat in the system, but how far can we take it?

Good question, Jason, from South Aussie. We've got rams, I was looking up last night, out to four and a half for fat in terms of breeding value. That's pretty out there. But again, it's about how you run that system. What I talk about is balancing fat with growth. If you're building growth at the same time, you're killing them at a younger age, and therefore they haven't gone to fat. Last time I did the correlation across all of industry, you couldn't get outside that two to four fat score grid based on the genetics of fat. We might be pushing out there now, but again, we have to manage that.

Our sheep, being Merino, none of us are genetically as fat as some of the composite sheep and shedding sheep out there. So it's just about how you manage that as an enterprise. The fat and muscle is there to build those ewes up, to maintain condition and to maintain your stocking rate. If you just let everything get obese and you don't run them at the appropriate stocking rate, then it is a waste.

It's just about giving you a bit of a buffer, because sometimes we drop the ball. I know it's amazing to think, but sometimes we drop the ball. We have to go and do something else, we're harvesting, we've got jobs on, and they lose condition, and the fatter sheep are just protected.

There are no linear relationships in biology. Eventually you cap out, and you cap out the value, and we may be getting close to that. Every year we generate sheep that have never been bred before; they've never existed before. So we don't really know what we're playing with. We will get to the end, and that's why I'm encouraging people to know their numbers, because we want to get that feedback: hang on, we're starting to plateau, we're not getting value out of that.

We're already shifting our focus away from driving just fat and muscle. We've always been balanced, but now it's things like worms and dags and other health traits that are important to us. We've got enough fat and muscle. Yes, we can keep tweaking it up, but let's get rid of dags, let's reduce our reliance on drenches, let's make sure we've got no flystrike, let's get the feet right. There's a whole lot of other stuff that here at Mumblebone they'd be focusing on, because we've done that fat and muscle job and it's time to move on to other jobs.

So it's a good question, Jason, and we don't know the absolute cut-off. There is no cut-off, because it'll change with environment. But we've got other things to go on with now that we've got that pretty well sorted.

Audience member: Is there any correlation with taking all your replacements out of ewe lambs that got in lamb, or just twins generally?

Dr Mark Ferguson: Yes, it's favourably correlated, so it's genetic. There's a lot of noise in that; those traits are only about 5 per cent heritable, so there's 95 per cent other stuff. But if you just keep doing it year on year... Tim unfortunately couldn't make it, but he has done that. Year on year he's kept twins, retained twins, those that twinned, those that made it as a ewe lamb, a heavy reproduction focus, and his reproduction is just sailing ahead of the industry.

It's what the Romney game did in New Zealand. They used a bit of Finn stuff as well, so they cheated a bit, but generally they just selected on twins. It's more effective if you select on the weaning rate breeding value. Like on your rams, there's a breeding value down there on those rams; that's how you bring the reproduction genetics into your ewe flock. And then you can select on those that made it as a ewe lamb and those that twinned as a maiden.

I've got a graph from a station showing that those that twinned as a maiden scanned at 175, whereas those that were single as a maiden scanned at 130 or 135 the following year. So it definitely sets you up both phenotypically, so you'll get better production, and genetically you'll make some gain as well.

Audience member: What's the optimum ram percentage?

Dr Mark Ferguson: We run one and a half per cent. For ewe lambs it's more like three. Ram breeders say four or five per cent. We've got people who get away with 0.75, but generally we say one and a half, so one ram per hundred plus. That certainly will do it, but it depends on the environment. If they're chucked into containment and they don't have to go too far, you can get away with more ewes per ram. But if they're running around on these hills and getting lost in rocks and stuff, you obviously have to have ram–ewe contact.

Young ewes are different: they don't seek the ram. Adult ewes will seek the ram. There's an experiment where the ram was tied up, and all the ewes still got pregnant. I'm always a bit nervous telling that story; I don't want to get Chad too excited at this time of day.

So one and a half per cent is the short answer. A lot of people go to two. The last thing you want is dry ewes because you didn't put enough rams out, but equally, you're mostly trying to put out good rams, so one and a half per cent will do it.

Audience member: And on the joining length too?

Dr Mark Ferguson: Yeah, joining length is important. If you're teasing, then you put more pressure on those rams, because a two-week tease will synchronise them a bit. I've certainly been guilty of stuffing that up for a client. We didn't have enough ram pressure in. We teased them, then went for a four-week joining, and we missed by another three or four days. So that was a good learning experience.

Audience member: What's the optimum joining length?

Dr Mark Ferguson: Five weeks is the standard answer. You don't need any more than five weeks. If you're joining before mid-January, then a two-week tease and then a five-week joining. If you're joining in November, you can either go seven weeks with the rams in, or a two-week tease is better and then rams in, because for the first couple of weeks the ram will be almost just a teaser.

But to get all the stuff I was talking about, knowing your numbers and getting your metrics right: if you've got any more than five weeks of lambing, it's bloody hard to get nutrition right across those different times. If you've got a seven- or eight-week joining, that's 56 days, so you've got ewes at about day 90 of pregnancy and ewes that are already into peak lactation in the same mob. That's a very different scenario energetically.

So the shorter you make that the better. Obviously with age scanning you can tighten that up a bit, but most people who age scan get pretty frustrated with their scanner. You need a good scanner to be able to separate out those different groups, because it doesn't take many wrong to stuff up the whole advantage of that.