In the current climate of rising input costs and volatile commodity pricing, profits are not guaranteed, even in the current, high price cycle. With the land price appreciation over the last few years, purchasing more acreage to spread your fixed costs over isn’t always within reach. So, as farmers, we come under pressure to produce more from what we already have. In the sheep part of the business, we strive to increase lamb weaning percentage, wool clip kgs per head and carcass yield. Another strategy that doesn’t get much airtime is mating ewe-lambs. This strategy could be relatively low hanging fruit in your business.
Cherylton Farms is a large property in the Kojonup/Frankland area, in Western Australia’s southwest. The business is very diverse, with a large sheep unit, Angus cattle, and a sizeable cropping operation. The management team have a mandate to be “always thinking outside the box”.
A composite ewe flock is an important part of the Cherlyton sheep unit. To bring the latest genetics into the flock earlier, and to maximise the return on investment, the management team made the call to mate a portion of their composite ewe-lambs for this year.
The entry weight into the mating program averaged 45kgs (however a portion were as low as 35kg) and commenced on February 28th. The ewe-lambs, at 7-8 months of age, entered a feeding centre in mobs of 200 and were placed on Milne Feeds 4mm EasyLick® adlib (CP 14.5% and ME11Mj/kg). At the same time, teaser rams were introduced at just over 2%. The teaser rams were removed and mating, with performance tested merino rams, started on March 10th.
The breeding focused on highly fecund rams known for producing early maturity, and strong genetic fat and muscle, at 4.5%. Two weeks later the feed was restricted to1kg/hd/day of EasyLick® to ensure that embryo loss from excess feeding was limited.
“What about the cost of feed?” I hear you say. At just over $30 per head it could be considered significant. But one could argue that through the autumn one would be feeding this mob in the paddock anyway. Let’s call feeding in the paddock $15 per head – so $15 extra. And there are advantages to having your replacement females out of the paddocks at the break-of-season, as it allows more feed to establish for the earlier lambing main-mob. Marcelle Harris, Cherylton Livestock Manager, said, “Having the ewe-lambs in feed centre confinement through this period made their feeding and management easy, and the ram efficiency was amazing”. The scanning results certainly validated Marcelle’s comments. A total of 89.5% of the mob were scanned in lamb, with a potential of 154% if we consider multiples.
Sure, you need a breed that can accommodate this strategy, and a feed centre is handy. I’ll let you do your own calculations on what the extra feed cost was, what the mating percentage could be, and what those extra lambs could be worth, but my quick tally up suggests a massive return on investment.
No extra land or livestock was required to undertake this strategy, just the ability to think outside the square, and the need to maximise the return from what you already have.
