2023 conference presentations

Jemma Pearl

Welcome everybody to the first concurrent session. My name's Jemma Pearl and I am part of the Agriculture Victoria On-Farm Emissions Action Plan Pilot team. We're a quite a small team. There's three of us. And I'll introduce you to Alison in a minute. But another name in our team that you might have heard of before possibly at one of these events is Ralph Behrendt, unfortunately he couldn't make it, but he's part of our small little team. Alison Kelly is our farmer missions specialist and has been doing farm missions work for quite some time now through horticulture and dairy. And now of course with us here at Ag Vic.

Before I get Alison to stand up and give a presentation, we do have a few questions. So keen to see a bit of a raise of hands on some of these questions. We know that this space is, everybody's kind of at their own starting point in thinking about their on-farm emissions.

They might be at different points in the journey. You may have gotten to a point where you know a bit more than you did, you know, in a few months ago. So we're just kind of keen to understand where you are at and then Alison will tailor her presentation somewhat to suit.

So just with a raise hands, I'd be really keen to know how many of you have recently attended a, either a soil carbon, or a carbon markets workshop, or event? Who's been to one? Yeah, few hands there. There's a few more events happening at the moment, so I'm sure there's, everyone's gonna be thinking about them in the future.

Has anybody actually done an emissions audit for their farm? Done the calculation? Yeah, there's two hands here, one here, one at the back. So few, which is cool. Of you guys, have you ever have gone and done any offsetting or actually mitigating your emissions, or are you just at the point of knowing your number and thinking about the next step soon? We've done few, one person's done some action, so that's cool.

We're all very much, I guess at a point we're just, somewhat at the beginning or we're, or further down the path, so that's great. I will now let Alison take us through. We're gonna try and keep our presentation to about 25 minutes 'cause we want as much conversation and questions at the end as possible. Alison.

Alison Kelly

Thanks Jemma and good morning, everybody. I will be running through a couple of slides today, but please try and think about some questions as you go, and we'll try and leave as much opportunity to answer them at the end of a couple of the slides that I'll run through to talk about carbon and greenhouse gas emissions. So thanks for the opportunity to start with and yeah, we'll get going into it.

So I guess the first starting point is just a little bit why? Why are we here? What is all the fuss about greenhouse gas emissions? And so starting quite globally, big picture, thinking about the ongoing work that's happening to be able to curb the impact of greenhouse gas emissions in terms of global warming.

The International Panel of Climate Change is working towards, you know, an overarching agreement about where we need to get to, to be able to mitigate against the worst impacts of what global warming might influence in our world and our livelihoods. And at the moment there is quite a bit of work at both country and corporation level, trying to look at setting targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to be able to look at that global warming impact and cap that at a level which we think is realistic or possible to reduce most of the impacts, which is about 1.5 degrees.

But if we take all of those pledges, put them all together against each other, at the moment, they will not necessarily get us there to that point. And so we really wanna be working towards working as a collective to be able to address these greenhouse gas emissions.

But that's all a big picture that feels a bit more like, well, so what? What does that actually mean to me and what does that actually mean for agriculture itself? And we think about that in terms of two sort of main components, which is about making sure that we better understand our own contribution to that in terms of our greenhouse gas emissions, and we are seeing markets and financial institutions starting to really look at that at their level as well. And then maybe starting to have conversations with their suppliers and clients about that.

The reverse is also true that agriculture is also vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and a warming world. And so what we wanna be doing is also thinking about the adaptations that might be required as we go out into the future. But again, what does that actually mean? So what do I actually need to be doing if I'm thinking about all of those big picture context in global drivers that we're just talking about. It is about knowing your number, having a think about what that looks like for your enterprise, and actually putting a boundary about that, which is what we'll talk about today.

But I guess there's also the drivers from a consumer perspective, from a market as I said, where they will be looking for solutions or a low-carbon alternative for their products. And so where possible understanding your emissions, going beyond just knowing a number, but understanding what levers are possible for you, and then looking at where there are opportunities to be able to reward and recognize any of the carbon that's already in the landscape. So that's what we'll be talking about in a little bit more detail.

And before I get into the actual, you know, accounting, and looking at the tools, and greenhouse gas emissions sources and sinks, really need to have a bit of a think about what that actually means in terms of some of the terminology we'll use. So we think about greenhouse gases on a farm scale as having sort of two sides of each coin where there are opportunities to be able to store carbon in the landscape, whether that's through trees and vegetation, whether that's through soil carbon or even dams when water qualities allows for that to happen.

The other side of it is around the greenhouse gas emissions that are actually produced on a farm itself. So whether that's methane from the animals themselves, or the manure on the farm, nitrous oxide emissions from losses and biological processes on the farm, or carbon dioxide from input use like fossil fuel use on the farm as well. And then thinking about any purchases that come onto the property as well. So a lot of that we talk about is short term cycling.

So a lot of work goes into the background to think about how all those stocks and flows work together in a farm system in terms of, you know, pastures, animals, and crops. And then thinking about the longer term stocks is really what we're trying to do when we are building up carbon in the landscape. So in terms of just responding to the questions that Jemma sort of raised, what we are hearing more broadly is that everybody is at a different starting point for thinking about this topic. And so you're not alone in necessarily maybe not having thought about this topic at all, or maybe it just even, interested in what that looks like, or maybe even have just started looking into the tools that are possible.

But I guess we sort of are capturing this in terms of how we can actually respond about knowing your number, understanding your number, and acting on your number. And I'll go into those in a bit more detail now. So step one of knowing your number is also about understanding the tools that are available. As an industry, there's been quite a lot of peer-reviewed research already done in the background to be able to provide us with calculators that can estimate emissions from a farm system. In terms of emissions point sources, it is very timely and expensive to be able to measure greenhouse gas emissions at point source, if you're thinking about every animal roving around on the farm.

These tools in the backend are actually trying to provide an estimate based on, on a number of inputs that can be provided into those tools. Each of those tools are ones that are recognized both internationally and nationally, or those that I've listed on the website here, on the slide here. And the additional one, which has happened since we've developed this slide is also that there's a MLA interactive tool that's available, which is based on the Greenhouse Gas Accounting Framework Tools, which I've got highlighted there from the University of Melbourne. And we're lucky enough today to have a couple of members from that team here and they have a stand if you're interested in more information about looking at that tool itself. I guess a key tip before thinking about the tools, understanding the purpose of why, what you're doing before selecting a tool is quite important. If you're looking at a standard for carbon neutral, there might be a requirement to use one or other of a tool.

So just being mindful of that before you kick off and pick one of those tools to be looking at. And that the rule of thumb, we are still talking about estimates because we're not coming out with technology to actually measure a point source, it will always be a high level estimate, and depending on the data that you're using and the data input that you've used, there will always be some margin of error. So just thinking about that before you're going further into numbers. Now, I've mentioned about emission sources and the tools being able to calculate that, some of them are not able to calculate carbon stocks on the landscape as well as others. So, for example, the Greenhouse Gas Accounting Framework that works for sheep and beef. The SB-GAF tool does do a calculation of trees, so vegetation on farm, but it is at a high level and it is quite general in terms of its nature, so by that it is quite conservative.

There are some other tools that are available to look at like the CSIRO LOOC-C tool, but just noting that they're actually looking at different time horizons if you're looking at those two different tools. At the moment, any of those tools I've mentioned don't currently include soil carbon, so any carbon under trees and under pasture. But that is a work in progress and there are other alternatives that can be used, and we're happy to talk through offline if there are people interested in looking at that further. So when we talk about data, the data that goes into these tools, I've listed here on the slide there, there are quite often tied to production data that you're probably already collecting. So in terms of livestock numbers, live weight, feed, and quality of feed that you're putting in, it does need to be in a 12-month window. So thinking about a 12-month calendar. We normally think about a financial year, but it can be in a calendar year if you need to. So collecting that information for 12 months is important.

Thinking about any inputs that you're using on the farm, so whether that's feed, whether it's fossil fuels and fertilizer, or any other purchases that you bring onto the farm, including livestock that you might purchase. And then looking at any energy use that's actually used on the farm in terms of electricity, or machinery, and vehicles. I've mentioned trees, the tools that do include a sequestration rate for vegetation, we'll ask you for how many trees, so per hectare and the average age of them.

So keeping that in mind as you're going through looking at a tree area and having an average number for the trees is what will be asked of there. So a bit of a couple of tips that we've listed. Again, because these are estimates, there is a starting point that you can do a bit of a balance about looking at accuracy versus the time taken to collect that information. And if any information is missing, there are opportunities to use industry default values where those are available for you. And quite often the tools might have a technical manual that provides those for you if you don't have access to information.

The other is documenting any assumptions. We do know that any year of operation there might be something that's an anomaly year that might have happened. For example, you've kept stopped for longer or there might be some additional changes that have happened where you've brought in more feed for some reason. Keeping a list of those assumptions that might make a difference to your annual profile is important, so that you can be capturing that and explaining that as part of the story around the number going forward. If you are a mixed enterprise, the tools will actually ask you to try and split any of the inputs between the different enterprises. So if you've got beef and sheep for example, the SB-GAF tool actually has two different tabs for that and we'll ask you to make a split in terms of your input use across those two tabs. So just keeping that in mind if you are actually spinning them, so you don't have any double accounting of inputs across the farm.

And there are sources of this information that can be helpful, which we've listed, which might be around livestock inventories that could be a really easy way to be collecting this information from others if that's already been captured. So what those tools will do once you've collected that information, you've plugged them into, most of them are either Excel based or online interactive tools that we've mentioned.

They will generate for you what's called an emissions profile, an emissions summary for that year. That will be providing you both an overview of all of the sources of, sources of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as any of the carbon stocks as I mentioned in terms of vegetation, and putting those together with any inputs that you've generated, will be generating then your net carbon number at the end. So there's a lot of terminology around what each of those emissions look like, whether that's a scope one and two, which is in your direct control, or scope three, which is outside of the farm gate. So there's quite a bit of terminology to get across, but I guess following that terminology means that you're both nationally and internationally accounting for your emissions with the agreed method, which is quite important. I've mentioned farm context as something to keep in mind.

Thinking about your farm boundary, your enterprise boundary is important. So if you've got lease blocks, any inputs used on those lease blocks as part of your enterprise do need to be included. So where you're getting quite complex businesses, it might require additional information that needs to be captured or if you've got contractors as well, that does need to be included in input use as well. So making sure you have a clear boundary of what your enterprise looks like, and you're collecting data for that whole boundary is quite important. And then considering which annual year that you're looking at will actually be important in terms of capturing a typical year's emissions profile.

So, for example, if last year's numbers are outside or you've done something a little bit different to the typical system, just keeping in mind that it might be important to look at that in another year's time when you've got a more typical system and more typical emissions profile to be able to provide. So in terms of that understanding this number, once you've gotten admission to profile, it's given you an overview of what enteric methane, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide sources look like.

We've done some numbers as part of our On-Farm Emissions Action Plan Pilot. And I'll just provide a little bit of a breakdown of what we are finding for beef and sheep producers so far. So the average number that we are generally finding for a beef, beef-sheep sort of enterprise is broken down on the slide at the moment. So we're looking at enteric methane there, which is livestock emissions themselves making up about 80 to 85% of emissions from a livestock enterprise. In terms of nitrous oxide emissions could be around 10%. So that's from either fertilizer or input use, and as I said, any of those residues that might be left over from the processes on the farm, in terms of pasture and soils management.

Carbon dioxide is the third largest source there in terms of fossil fuel use, which could be energy, machinery, or urea and lime use on farm. And then those make up, as I said, scope one farm emissions from greenhouse gas sources. When we then look at the trees, it was really difficult to find an average number for tree sequestration through the round of beef producers, beef and sheep producers that we've been working with so far. The range was incredibly broad for how much percentage of their property had vegetation already on the farm. We found there was a range from anywhere of 2% of the property up to 22% of the property being vegetated through the groups that we've worked with. But on average we were finding that the tree cover was around 9%. So offsetting in terms of balancing those emissions does, it's a bit harder to give you that number given that's very rainfall dependent as well. And then the net number, again giving an average is probably not so useful. It is really dependent on scale.

Working with producers that have, you know, thousands of animals versus those that might have under a thousand animals will give a really different number given that enteric methane is such a significant component of emissions going forward. So those may, that make up of the scope one and two emissions is what we call the on-farm footprint. Looking at any of the purchases that are brought in, again we found a really varied range with the groups that we've worked with so far. So anywhere from, you know, 2% of input use, all the way up to 69% for a beef finishing business where they're purchasing livestock and bringing that in on farm. And so again, the average number is provided there, but it is very varied and dependent on the type of farming system that we've been seeing so far. And then again, overall we're talking about total greenhouse gas emissions, which are represented as a net number of carbon dioxide equivalent. But we were also have been working with those participants to look at what that looks like comparatively against other Victorian farming systems.

So we are quite lucky in Victoria we've got the Livestock Farm Monitor Project and that's actually what we've been drawing on to be able to provide us with some benchmarking data that we're able to give back as part of the project to pilot participants so far. And on the slide here is a snapshot of what we are finding from that Livestock Farm Monitor project for the 2020/21 financial year, which is about 120 farms across Victoria. It has been broken down by regions. So we've got the three regions at the top of the table there and then a statewide average down the bottom. Now, each of these numbers have been then looked at by output. So what this is trying to do is instead of looking at that issue around scale, we are trying to say per kilogram of output, or per kilogram of something like greasy wool as an output and breaking that up.

So emissions by that output number, so per unit measure. And that's the best way we can provide a comparative number for individuals to look at. So in the red I've highlighted what the sheep-beef Greenhouse Gas Accounting Framework looks at, which is in terms of kilogram of live weight or kilogram of greasy wool as I mentioned. And providing those ranges is quite valuable as a starting point to be able to understand how close are you in terms of per unit measure to other Victorian farms. And then looking at if you're outside that range where there might be opportunities to reduce emissions over time.

That information is available through the Livestock Farm Monitor Project as I mentioned. So the website is where to go for a bit more around that. So just a quick note, given that enteric methane, so livestock methane with such a significant component of a livestock's enterprises carbon footprint, we quite often do get questions about, well, what's that being generated from? What was the calculator actually drawing that information? How is it actually doing that? And I guess for livestock enterprises, given that it is quite a significant point, that's quite a normal reaction. We do know the tools are actually using the current accepted method for generating enteric methane output from a livestock producer, which is actually from a big analysis of multiple data sets for both beef and dairy enterprises over a longer period of time, which is looking at methane output as a percentage or so of dry matter intake per day. So you'll see within the tool when you're using them, it does actually ask about live weight gain and feed, and does do some calculations on crude protein and components that actually go into the dry matter intake as part of that component.

So a key point to mention here, it's important to not get too distracted by how big that enteric methane challenge is gonna be. There are opportunities which I'll mention in a while to be able to address that, but that R&D, so the research being, happening through the likes of MLA and AWI is very active in trying to address solutions, and try and provide more and more opportunities in the toolkit to reduce that over time. But the overall arching point is that we will be expected as an industry to be able to measure and report on how we are progressing against this. And so at the moment it is about good data collection to be able to improve the accuracy of that over time. So where to from here? How can we act on this and what's possible now? We do talk about emissions intensity. So as I was saying before, that per unit output as a first starting point for talking about emissions reduction. So we start to look at the efficiencies within the system, where there are opportunities to pull some levers, and take some farm management practices to be able to reduce enteric methane, and then address emissions intensity over time. There's also opportunities to reduce absolute emissions. So looking at fossil fuel use and reducing the impact of that, as well as some of those solutions we're starting to hear about, like, feed additives that will come into play.

Vegetation and soils on farm. There are more and more opportunities to think about how we actually value carbon in the landscape in farming systems. And work is underway to actually reward that as an in setting rather than hearing that word like a carbon offset where it's actually something that you purchase on a market, but rather rewarded within a farm landscape, and that work is happening now too. And then the final point is as the climate is actually getting warmer and drier, looking at opportunities to actually continue to protect any carbon stocks that you already have on the landscape will be even more important over time. So as part of our pilot project we actually are looking at opportunities to look at that efficiencies. It comes back to doing good management practices. Looking at those things that we already know have levers to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, like herd reproductive efficiency, looking at genetics, looking at feed, and making sure we reduce any inputs over time. We do have an action planning template that we're working on as well with our participants and happy to make that available over time too. So the types of actions we've been talking with beef and sheep producers so far are looking at areas around livestock. So in terms of looking at live weight gains, looking at quicker turnoff times, opportunities, as I said for herd and reproductive efficiency, looking where pastures and soil play a part in feed, and improving feed use efficiency, and then vegetation soils and water management on farm as well. The opportunities around energy use or reducing fossil fuel use on farm has come up multiple times, and also around improving data and data collection as we go. So all of those are the types of opportunities, but they are tailored to each individual business depending on the emission sources and sinks that they have already on the farm. The other ways to think about acting in terms of reducing your number is looking at ways that we can actually prioritize and act on immediate opportunities, and look at how we can actually start to work together to improve those solutions that are being made available through research or through the supply chain going forward over time. But the critical point here is around recording, and data entry, and improving that as we go.

So just a brief overview of the pilot project, which I've mentioned previously is the project where we're working with beef and sheep producers, as well as dairy. We are just kicking off the round with sheep producers. We'll be working with 22 sheep participants, which are actually on the slide over the next couple of months to be able to generate their emissions profile, and their emissions action plans, and providing them with an opportunity to then take action through the availability of a grant. If you are interested in working with one-on-one to get your emissions profile generated through this project, there will be further opportunities over the next year and a bit to be able to participate in our project as well.

And we'll actually have a Agriculture Victoria stand and come and see us if you're more interested in that project going forward. But what we've been hearing, what we've already been seeing is that as we're working through participants and engaging with those through the pilot, whether that's a beef sheep or cropping enterprise, or a dairy enterprise, the drivers for their participation are really different. And what we're hearing is their starting point can be really different. And so we've provided just a couple of quotes in terms of what they're actually seeing and actually how they're responding to an emissions profile once we are generating them on farm.

And there is this sort of interest in how do I actually become carbon neutral, where do I go for more information about carbon neutrality and what does that actually mean for me? As opposed to something from dairy where they don't have a carbon neutral target, they have an emissions intensity reduction target. There's some really differences in terms of what we're seeing from different cohorts that we are working through so far. And then I guess final reflection before I open up to for questions and comments. But we are finding as part of working through that emissions profile steps that we've just described, that it can feel quite uncomfortable to be looking at these numbers as a liability to the business, but looking at opportunities to be able to reduce that can quite often take time.

And starts to talk about where you wanna go for in terms of goals for the business, where does that fit in sustainability, where are some win-wins? And working through that one-on-one we are finding is quite a useful process to do, but that we're also hearing that there is, you know, concern about how we're actually talking about this at a broader scale, at an industry scale, at a federal government scale to talk about making sure that there are solutions available for farmers to be able to reduce emissions in a significant way over time. And so that's the type of feedback we're giving back to, you know, the governments departments, as well as the tool developers around the challenges that we're already finding and hearing from participants so far in the project. So just to recap, it is important to start this process.

So knowing your number as a first step, using the existing freely available, mostly Excel-based or interactive tools is a good starting point. And we are already hearing from those that, through their supply chain, through their market, through their finance institutions, they are already being asked for these pieces of data or their number so far. So looking for some goals and short wins early on, there might be, you know, 1 to 2% reduction opportunities through efficiency gains. Starting with those is a good opportunity as the research catches up and provides more solutions for us. I've mentioned many times around the importance of good data. Any of these tools are only gonna give us good or accurate output as the data that goes in. So collecting this information over time for multiple years will be quite important.

When we're looking at benchmarking and any industry data, make sure that you are comparing a very comparable farming system, not looking outside, and then comparing yourself against a totally different emissions intensity number, so that you're feeling like you're actually comparing yourself against a similar enterprise will be important. And then I know Jemma will give a bit of a plug. We've got existing resources and hard copies already available that we can provide. And seeking support where you are getting stuck in any of these steps we're happy to help where we can.

Dougal:

I'd like to introduce Michelle Henry. And Terry, talk about young ladies in our industry and people having a go, Michelle is a Victorian, comes from South Gippsland and has a PhD through Melbourne University and is now working at the Gundagai Meat Company, Meat Processors. And what a fantastic business to follow on from Alex's presentation where we really are seeing a processor grow our industry, think about the consumer, think about the efficiencies, and how do we put an improved product on the consumer's plate that's more consistent, that provides more returns right throughout the supply chain. So can I please introduce to you, Michelle Henry.

Michelle:

Thanks, Dougal, for that fantastic introduction. I'm really excited to be here today to talk to you about what we're doing at Gundagai Meat Processors. Hopefully it's gonna push you in terms of how you're seeing the processing sector and what kind of feedback you can get from processors. Probably, perhaps what I'm gonna present to you, some of you might think, oh that's, you know, 10 years time, we're too early, but hopefully this innovative group of people in here can see what we're trying to do. So today I'm gonna talk to you a bit about who we are. So who we are at Gundagai Meat Processors and our Gundagai Lamb team. I'll talk to you about our GMP objective carcass measurement journey. So for those of you who haven't heard our journey, we'll talk a bit about the technologies that we've installed to be able to measure carcasses objectively through DEXA, the MEQ Probe and what we're doing in the animal health area. And I'll talk to you a bit about Gundagai Lamb in general, our approach to market, our own Gundagai Lamb Quality Score that we use to be able to segregate our product. And a bit about what we're seeing in terms of breeds and feeds from lambs that are coming to us. It's one of the biggest questions we always get. And also what's next for us as a brand. So here's a bit of a picture of our team. Will Barton was really sorry he couldn't be here today to present to you. He's second from the left there but I've brought a picture of his smiling face for you to all see. He's actually over in the US this week doing some selling of product to chefs over there. But you can see myself there. So I work as Supply Chain Manager at Gundagai Meat Processors. I've been there for about five years now and I head up our buy team for Gundagai Lamb. On the right, we've got Jake Bourlet there who's our Supply Chain Coordinator. So if you have supplied lamb through us, you've probably gone through Jake. And on the left there, Claire Marriott, who's from Victoria herself, so she's from Benalla area. She's our Supply Chain Officer and she also does a lot of our buying but also does a lot of our producer engagement activities and projects as well. So we've got a small team at Gundagai Lamb but we're all really passionate about what we're doing. So a bit about the company. So for those of you who don't know us, the Barton family own Gundagai Meat Processors. The Barton family have been in meat for about over a hundred years now. So Fred Barton, who's Will Barton's grandfather, started his butcher's apprenticeship in Gundagai. He then started a butcher's shop called Butcher's Bartonery in the main street of Gundagai in 1950. And that is still there, it's now called Smarts Butchery. And in 1974, Fred's sons Tony and Bill started Gundagai Meat Processors on the outskirts of South Gundagai. So where we are today, it looks a lot different to what they did start in 1974. There's been a lot of investment there with our big upgrading projects finishing up in 2018. So it's a lot of, a big different plant there now, if you've ever been up there before. In 2020, Gundagai Lamb was launched and it was launched as our own lamb brand. So Gundagai Meat Processors had been largely a service processor. So that means that we processed lambs for other clients. We didn't buy any livestock and we didn't sell any meat. So we actually didn't really have any IP around buying lambs, we hadn't done it for about 20 years. And we hadn't sold any meat. So when we started Gundagai Lamb in 2020, it was a real opportunity for us to do something really different. So we had all this technology installed in the plant and it was this huge opportunity to be able to bring it all together into the brand. And I think the reason why we've somewhat been successful in terms of coming out with something really different is that we didn't have anyone to annoy. So we didn't have any producers that we were sourcing lambs from that we were gonna annoy by bringing out a very different grid and a very different approach. We could just go out there and really say, "Hey, if you like what we're doing, come on the journey with us. We want to do something different with you. We want to produce a bit of a transparent relationship and form a bit more trust within the supply chain." So why innovation and technology at Gundagai Meat Processors? So, obviously the processor has a big role in the supply chain, as does the producer, as does the consumer. So we've got product flow obviously moving from the producer, to the processor, to the consumer, and then feedback flow which can come back through the consumer from the processor and the producer. But processors are a real pinch point in this. So if we look at there being 45 notable processors within Australia, so medium to large size, I'm not including the smaller ones who might be doing 10 head a day, so if there's 45 notable domestic and export processors, we are a real pinch point in the supply chain. So there's a lot of producers out there and a hell of a lot of consumers out there. And so we have a lot of responsibility within our section of the supply chain to make sure that we're meeting all of our export requirements to keep our license and to make sure that the product's going out correctly. But we also have a real responsibility to producers. And this is what we really base Gundagai Lamb off. So the first one is really to tell producers what you sent us. So we do that through feedback. And we really encourage our producers to ask for as much feedback as they can get. And we want to be able to give you as producers as much feedback as we can. Because when you know better, you can do better. But if you don't know what you're producing, you've put all this hard work into producing lambs and you send them off to the abattoir and you get no feedback other than weight and fat score, then you're not really getting a better sense for what you've actually produced. And therefore you can't really improve that. The second responsibility really as a processor we have that we see is to tell you what we want you to send us. And we largely do that through our grid. And I'll talk a bit about today about what our grid looks like. It's a lot different to all the flat grids that are out there. But yeah, we really have that responsibility. And we do that also by engaging with our producers in our supply chain. So we'll have one-on-ones, we'll have group workshops with producers so we can really talk to them about what we wanting from them. How many people here have heard of DEXA? Yeah? Quite a few but some of you haven't. That's okay. So it's basically dual energy X-ray absorptiometry is what it stands for. It's a bit of a mouthful but it's basically an X-ray that tells us what the composition of every single carcass that comes through our plant is. So composition in terms of how much lean meat there is, how much fat and how much bone. GMP were the first processor to install a hot side DEXA within Australia, something we're really proud of. That means that basically the carcasses go through the DEXA at the end of the slaughter floor. So we know the composition of each carcass while it's still hot before it goes through the chilling process and before it goes through our sortation process as well. And there's a big difference in terms of what we see the value of a low yielding carcass versus a high yielding carcass. So a low yielding carcass will obviously have more fat and less muscle, whereas a high yielding carcass will contain more muscle and less fat. So the more muscle that is there, is the higher value of that carcass, obviously. It's pretty obvious, right? But we also then don't have to spend time in the boning room cutting the fat off those low yielding carcasses, which really does slow us down, but it also produces a product for a consumer that they don't necessarily are wanting in terms of overly fat product. We are also the first processor to install the MEQ Probe, which measures intramuscular fat in the loin muscle. Intramuscular fat has actually been identified by MLA as having the single greatest influence on eating quality outcomes of lamb. So it's really, really important in terms of the eating quality outcomes. We also measure intramuscular fat on the hot side, so that is on the slaughter floor and it's just before the scales. So we're able to then collect this additional piece of information along our slaughter floor so that we can actually make better sortation decisions along there as well. Have any of you seen the MEQ Probe in action? Hands up. Yeah, a few of you have. Cool, very good. I think that more and more installations of that are probably happening, so it might be something that you start to see a bit more, not just at GMP. So intramuscular fat, we know the average in Australia sits at about 4.2% in terms of the level of intramuscular fat that we do see. And it sort of ranges between that 1% up to 8, 9%, with, I think, 12% has been quite rare. So it is quite a small range in terms of what we do see in lamb. And we know that in New Zealand their average sits at about 1.8% and this is largely because they installed a lot of technology to be able to measure and reward producers for lean meat yield. And we know that as we increase lean meat yield in carcasses, we have an inverse relationship with intramuscular fat, such that as lean meat yield increases, intramuscular fat actually decreases. So in New Zealand, they've bore the brunt of that in terms of essentially breeding out intramuscular fat from their flock and that landing at about 1.8%. And to Alex's point earlier, around that 5% is what we're wanting to see to be able to guarantee a good eating quality experience. So it's really important that we keep an eye on what's happening obviously in the wider Australian flock. But what we're most interested in obviously is where we sit as a brand in terms of Gundagai Lamb. So we know that our average in Gundagai Lamb sits at about 5%. And you might think, oh wow, they're doing such a fantastic job at communicating with their producers and they're making significant change. Probably what's happened, given that we haven't been around for very long, is that the producers that are coming to us and are finding that they don't have a lot of intramuscular fat, aren't coming back to us. So they're essentially weeding themselves out. And producers that know they have a really good intramuscular fat profile are coming back to us more and more, given that we do pay a bonus to our producers based on quality. What we're trying to do here too, and it's just worth pointing out, is that we're not trying to produce the wagyu of lamb. We're just trying to move the dial. So we see a lot of risk in the bottom end of intramuscular fat in terms of bad eating quality outcomes. And if you think as an industry we really need to be thinking about making sure that we move the dial up so that our consumers that are purchasing our lamb product, which is seen as a premium product in markets, are having a good eating quality experience every time. And that itself, if we look at the US market, is really important. So a really, really small percentage of US consumers have ever tried lamb. And I think the statistics are around, if only 1% extra of US consumers actually ate lamb, we wouldn't be able to supply them because of their population. But we also know that they're really sensitive to eating quality factors with lamb. So when they do try that product, we want to make sure that they're having a fantastic eating experience so that they're coming back time and time again and buying our product. We are also part of the National Sheep Health Monitoring Project, and this is a bit of a passion project for me. I have a bit of a background in animal health, what I studied my PhD in. So we've been part of the National Sheep Health Monitoring Project for about five or six years now. So this project, has anyone actually received data through the National Sheep Health Monitoring Project? Just put your hand up if you have. A few of you have. So a lot of you, if you've actually processed your lambs through a processor that's part of the National Chief Health Monitoring Project, you can probably go onto MLA's LDL or what's becoming my feedback now, to be able to actually access mob-based data. So you might actually have data sitting in one of those systems that you don't know about. So that's something that's important. One thing we often hear from producers the first time that we actually give them feedback, they're often quite shocked that they might have had some issues occur in their mob of lambs. And this is largely because you probably would have heard from your processors if there was a major issue. So if you had grass seed or vaccination lesions and it was over a large percentage of your flock or your mob that you've actually consigned, then you might get a phone call, an angry phone call, telling you not to do it again. But a lot of our producers always have some sort of issue that's going on within their mob of lambs that are consigned. So it's really important to remember that we often don't see a clean bill of health across a mob. But being part of the National Sheep Health Monitoring Project, we've been able to record mob-based animal health issues across the 20 that you can see there. So there's 20 different issues that we record against, both in the offal and in the carcass. But we've actually decided to move to an individual-based animal health feedback system. So this means that when you do consign to us at Gundagai Lamb, you'll receive hot carcass weight, you'll receive your fat score, carcass composition, intramuscular fat measured in the loin, and you'll receive individual animal health conditions. And this is so important for producers, especially given we're in Victoria right now and you've got EID running here and we're about to switch to that soon in New South Wales. If you're recording information on farm and you're managing animals in different ways, you can actually then start to see what different animal health issues you might have and are the treatments or the management decisions that you're making working in terms of how you're managing them. So that's pretty exciting I think in terms of being able to, for us to be able to give that information back to producers. It also creates a lot of transparency and that's something that we're really striving to do. So in terms of transparency, you're looking at your feedback and you're thinking, why did I have two carcasses that were weighed really light, 18 kilos, when the rest were a lot higher? That's not what they weighed out at. These mustn't be my carcasses. And then you look across and you see that they had arthritis. So they would have had a leg removed and that's why they had a lower weight. So that kind of transparency that we can drive through this feedback is really important. Something that in processing land that we don't talk a lot about, something we talk a lot about is technology and getting technology into plants so we can give better feedback to producers so that we can use that information to make sortation decisions in terms of boning runs and how we actually sell product. Something we don't talk about is the need for hook tracking to be able to do that. So hook tracking is our ability as a processor to have an RFID chip in each hook. And as we record different pieces of information on the processing line, that is related back to the single carcass. It's one thing to have all the technology installed, it's another to be able to actually relate that back to a carcass level. And that's something that I think really needs to happen to drive the uptake of some of these technologies. At Gundagai Meat Processors, we also have full carcass sortation that is automated and chilling. So if you have been in a processing plant, a lamb processing plant, you might have noticed anywhere between 5 and 10 people standing at the entrance of the chiller reading manually on carcass tickets, the weight perhaps if that's how they're sorting them. They might be thinking, oh how many do I need in each grade? And then manually making that decision and they'll be physically pushing carcasses onto rails to make those decisions. Once a chiller is full of hot carcasses, they'll move on to the next chiller and then start filling that one up. We, during our big upgrade, we made a big change to our chilling system which is pretty awesome. And if you do come on site for a tour one day, we do stop there for a while. People usually start to shiver but we just get so excited talking about it. So basically, what we do is we feed our carcasses down from the slaughter floor, so they're hot carcasses. They all move into chiller number one, as you can see down the bottom on the right-hand side there. And they line up in rows of 14 and they start to move down chiller one, they'll then move down chiller two. And that takes about five to six hours and they come out at about 10 degrees. During that process, we've got about 2,100 carcasses sitting in chillers one and two that we know all of that information on 'cause we've measured it hot and we can then make sortation decisions based on what we have. So they're sorted at the end of chiller two. So the little RFID chip is red at the end of chiller two, and then they're automatically sorted into either chillers three, four or five onto different rails depending on where they're going. So we have basically a No Touch system, which is really pretty cool. We don't have additional microbial load and decreased shelf life due to people touching every single carcass. And we can make smarter decisions about what we actually have. So we really live in this data-rich environment. But to really take all of that data and do something with it, we need to have some intelligence. So we can use different tools that have been developed through ALMTech and through the Sheep CRC; so Carcass Optimisation, Lamb Value Calculator, but also what we've actually done is our Gundagai Lamb Quality Score and how we actually start to sort carcasses based on that information that we do have. But you need the infrastructure as well so you can do it, so that automated carcass sortation and hook tracking. And through this, we've really been able to increase the value across the supply chain and we've done that through being able to reward producers. So if we think about the feedback evolution and where we are, a lot of you will be now in terms of the feedback that you receive. You'll receive the standard AUS-MEAT grid and that will contain hot standard carcass weight and fat score. As we know, fat score is very inaccurate. So it's a subjective measure. You or I could look at the same carcass and give it a different score. It's very quick. If you've ever been on a slaughter floor and seen how much time they have to make that decision, it is a very quick process. And we know it's somewhere between 20 to 40% accurate. So it's very inaccurate. And that is why you don't see, a lot of grids that we do see are very flat because a processor is not going to make that leap to offer more money basically for either a fat score two or three when it is so inaccurate and that would not be fair on anyone. You might see some grids that obviously discount for a fat score one or blue back, and maybe a fat score five 'cause they're in that fatter range. The kind of feedback that you get from us at Gundagai Meat Processors is hot standard carcass weight by lean meat yield. And you see when we actually look at the same lot of carcasses and we look at their lean meat yield there, you can see much more granularity in terms of what's there. We see that general relationship that as a carcass gets heavier, it gets fatter. So sorry, Alex, the theory around going to a 30 kilogram carcass is all well and good as long as we're not producing them fatter. So we need to make sure that they're still lean because obviously that's going to have a big effect on the processor in terms of processing time of those carcasses. We know that if they're fatter, they're sort of fat score five, they start to take up to 40% longer for us to put through our boning room. So it has a real significant effect on us. But we also know that the consumer doesn't want that as well. So there's a bit of a balancing act that we do need to be able to undertake. If we replace what's in carcass weight with intramuscular fat on the left side, we start to see sort of what happens here. So as intramuscular fat increases, so does lean meat yield decreases. So there is that relationship, as we can see, a tendency for as the lean decrease, the intramuscular fat increases. But we can see that there are carcasses that do exist within that leaner range that still have a really great IMF above five. If we overlay all of this with hot standard carcass weight, we can see, so for us, we're after that sort of 25 kilo to 30 kilo carcass for our export markets and we can see in that bright blue aqua color that's sort of where we're aiming. And we do see carcasses falling into that high weight range that do have a really good lean meat yield and IMF as well. So they do exist within what we're actually seeing come through. But obviously all of this is overlaid with the fact that we see a portion of what's out there, and a small portion at that. So I'm just gonna switch gears a little bit and talk a bit about Gundagai Lamb and what we're all about. So that was a bit about Gundagai Meat Processors and all the technology that we've installed and what we're starting to see. So our approach to market really sits on three pillars; to be better, to be cleaner, and to be fairer. So in terms of being better, that's all about our Gundagai Lamb Quality Score and producing a product that's graded for eating quality outcomes. So ensuring that the product that we're selling at a higher price so that we can offer a bonus back to our producers for eating quality; ensuring that there's guaranteed eating quality and that our chefs, wholesalers, our customers will come back time and time again because they've got that high eating quality product that's going to be guaranteed. To be cleaner. So cleaner is really about lean meat yield grading our product to reduce the amount of wasteful fat production that we do see. And also giving feedback on animal health. So reducing the amount of disease and defect burdens that we do see coming through. So if we want to reduce food waste, if we want to have more of that product going to the consumer, we need to be able to give that feedback to our producers. And we see it as our role to work with our producers to help them to reduce the amount of fat that they're producing so they hit our grid better, but also to reduce the amount of disease and defect burdens that do come through our plant. And to be fair. So building trust and transparency within the community of our producers. And doing that also through ensuring that we're rewarding our producers for the quality product that they are producing every day. So that really represents our understanding of what producers and consumers really value in the supply chain. So you might think, what's our Gundagai Lamb Quality Score? So I'll just take you through what it is and how we actually calculate it. So it is based largely off intramuscular fat. It also takes into account lean meat yield and it also takes into account animal health, so disease and defect burdens. So I'll explain that in a bit more detail. So we really are only after carcasses that produce an over 5% intramuscular fat within the carcass. They're the only ones that are really going to make it through. If their lean meat yield is below 51%, then they automatically get cut out. So you could produce a ripper in terms of intramuscular fat but still not make it into a GLQ 5+ product because the carcass was far too fat. We also deduct points for animal health issues but we only do this if they're treatable, if they're manageable or if they're preventable. So something like nephritis, where we don't have a clear pathway in terms of how you would actually treat that, how you'd prevent it or how you'd manage it, we don't deduct points for that. So it's really about ensuring that we're supporting producers to be able to reduce things that they can reduce on farm. So you might be wondering how much of our product actually makes the grade. So we do see for our GLQ 5+ product, about 30 to 40% across the year, we'll actually grade into that product line. So we do have a large proportion of what's coming through actually receive a bonus within our grid. It is variable. So we do see at times that a producer recently actually sent a consignment of lambs in and 96% of that consignment received a bonus. So they had some really good intramuscular fat and really great lean meat yield profile and disease-free animals. But we have seen as low as 5% receive the bonus. We have a lot of producers who have come through us over time who will just send through a small consignment of lambs 'cause they want to see where they sit. So they want to be able to understand where they're actually at. And a lot of times producers that we're working closely with will send them at different times of the year and that becomes really important for them to understand when the best time is to actually send to us. We're not about converting the masses, we don't have enough space unfortunately to be able to process for everyone. We're really just about saying, if this journey looks like something that you want to come in and be part of, then that's great. You might want to send some of your lambs elsewhere 'cause they're gonna fit a different grid or you might want to go to the sale yards with some of them. But you might draft out 200 a year that really you think are going to fit our grid and you want to be part of the journey as well. So that's sort of where we're at with a lot of that and what a lot of our producers do. So this is what our grid looks like. I'm really sorry it's an old one. The pricing is a bit higher than what we're seeing now unfortunately. So it is a bit of a different grid if you haven't seen it before. We've got five categories of lean meat yield up the top. So we run from left to right, so really fat lambs, to really lean lambs. And we have five different categories for weight. So our sweet spot sits within that 53 to 50% lean meat yield bracket and 24 to 32 kilos. So that's our sweet spot. This grid is actually based on a model that actually looks at the actual value of those carcasses. It takes into account how much time it takes to go through our boning room, if it's fatter, but also largely it uses the yield predictions from the Lamb Value Calculator using different cut weights to be able to tell us how much each cell basically is worth. So it is very much a value-based marketing grid. And I think we're really proud of what we've produced with this grid. It is a lot different to what you see out there. We find that lambs that are below 50% lean meat yield are really too fat and those that are sort of above 60, even that 57 to 60% mark, are really some unfinished lambs that we do see come through that just don't hit the mark in terms of what we're trying to do for our brand. All lambs are also graded for their GLQ Score and anything that is above 5 receives an 80% premium per kilogram at the moment. The brand has really made a step towards that and it's really our guardian of quality. So we're still building up our sales for our GLQ 5+ product. And the brand and the family have really put a big investment in terms of rewarding for quality before we could actually sell it. So we're still building up the Gundagai Lamb story. We're a brand new brand getting out there, trying to sell that increased quality product. But we've really put that quality aspect in our grid so that it's a guardian for quality so that we don't see any quality slip in the lambs that are coming through. And we're not just rewarding for lean meat yield. So we have two product lines. The first is our standard product line, so it's what we call our GLQ Score Graded product. It has a standard amount of lean meat yield, a standard amount of intramuscular fat. So that's in the pink and cream lid there. And we've gone for artwork that's really different to what's already out there, trying to stay away from rolling green hills and farmers with their elbow on the fence. It is really different in terms of what we're doing. And our GLQ Score 5+ product. So that has our lower lean meat yield and high intramuscular fat product that goes into our orange and pink lid there. So where are we sending product to now? I thought just always is interesting, every time I talk to producers, they want to know where their product is going. That's something we'd really like to be able to give more information to our producers on. So don't ask me all the flags because this is not my expertise, but we do send a lot of product to the Middle East, to the USA, Japan, Singapore. We've actually cultivated a really good story domestically as well. So we have product going into fine dining restaurants in Sydney and also in Melbourne. So there's different places that you can try our product as well. So it's been taken on board in different restaurants domestically, which is pretty exciting too. And locally as well for us, at one of the Three Blue Ducks restaurants. So we can actually go and try it too near Gundagai. Where do we get our supply of lambs from? So it's been really variable being sort of a bit of a 50-year-old startup, as we would say. We have lambs that have come only 500 meters across the road from us from the local farmer, but we've had lambs travel quite some distance as well. So a really good example of this was a South Australian producer who put his lambs on the back of his truck, drove them up to the plant himself, stayed the night, got up the next morning, watched them be killed, and sat down and looked at the feedback before driving all the way home. So we have a lot of enthusiastic producers that are really just after the feedback to see where they sit and to understand what it means. Our average kilometers traveled, so weighted average, is at 155 kilometers at the moment. We're actually trying to reduce that down to 150. We have a lot of really good lambs and producers in our area and we want to make sure that we support them just as they've supported us over time. We also give feedback to our producers through our Gundagai Lamb Producer Portal, which is really exciting. So if you do consign to us, you'll be set up within our portal and you can go either on your phone or on your desktop. And the night that your lambs are actually sorted, you can get on and have a look at your feedback. You're also sent feedback via email as well through Excel spreadsheet. So you'll have line-by-line individual feedback. But through this portal, you can actually start to look at some basic analytics for your data. So you can look at things like minimum, maximums, averages, scatterplots. You can also have a look within scatterplots and select different diseases to see if those carcasses weighed less or if they have a different lean meat yield profile. We also do a bit of benchmarking within our portal as well. So we benchmark you against our other Gundagai Lamb producers as an average. So you can see where you actually sit in relation to other people who are consigning to Gundagai Lamb for GLQ Score, lean meat yield and intramuscular fat. We're up to version two at the moment and we're pretty excited to hopefully get started on version three really soon so that we can offer more in that area as well. And start to offer livestock agents also that ability to get on and have a look as well at their producers' information, obviously with permissions. So one question that we never get out of when we talk to lots of different people is, what about breed? So, surely you're collecting information? So we do ask our producers what breed they're actually sending in and we also ask them what feed they're finishing their lambs on. We are an outcomes focused brand. We don't care how you do it, we just want that outcome. So we want to see you getting lots of bonuses so we can sell that product as GLQ 5+. So that means that you need to pick the breed that you love to look at, you love to work with, that stays within your fences, all of those things that you want as a producer. And as you can see, if you sort of look at the red dots, just to highlight one breed, with merinos, we've seen some of the worst lots come through that have been really lean and had very little intramuscular fat, but they've been some of the best lots too. So there's as much variation within breed as there is between breed. So we're not here advocating for any breed, we just want you to pick something you love and go with it, go with genetics. So obviously use your breeding values. And pick accurate breeding values as well so that you can ensure you've got as much accuracy as possible. We've had lots of feed types come through and I guess a bit of a curse in terms of how we've been collecting that information is that that it's a bit of an open-ended question. So we get variable data quality when we ask this question. So feedlot doesn't really tell us much but we do get more granular information from different producers. So we can't really tell you and we wouldn't, given we're an outcomes focused brand, what is the best breed or what is the best feed to use. There are so many variables in terms of where lambs are coming from, how they're managed, what genetics have been selected, what feed might be on offer and available. All of those things that make it far too difficult for us to really even analyze this at the moment. There's too much noise around the data that points to anything and we wouldn't do that anyway. So excitingly, what's next? If you're not already overwhelmed by all of that and all the feedback that's possible and is out there, we provide DEXA composition values and weight values based on the whole carcass. We've had a second tube installed into our DEXA and this is going to enable us to start to be able to see lean meat yield and hot standard carcass weight by region, which is pretty exciting. So in the fore, the middle and the hind. This will allow us to start thinking about other metrics and other pieces of information we can give to you as a producer so you know what you're producing. So something that we've come up with that we're hoping to be able to look at some data soon on is middle meat yield. So, we know that, we know that the leg portion is the leanest part of the carcass, the middle portion is the fattest part, and the shoulders are the fatter part of the carcass. So what we're trying to do is think about, what is the eye muscle area, how much meat is actually in the middle portion? We know the middle portion is obviously contains the loin and the rack and it's the most valuable portion of the carcass. So can we actually produce a benchmarking value for producers to use if we can see more about that carcass? So that's something that we're currently hoping to work on soon to be able to give feedback to you as producers. We're also really into engagement. So we launched our Pioneers Program this year. So this is our community of forward-thinking, engaged producers who are passionate about the quest for an efficient, profitable, superior eating quality lamb. This is our pilot group of producers that are those really forward-thinking producers. We have about 13 different businesses in the group and we've had our first networking event this year. It's really about us ensuring that we can provide those producers with the resources they need to make the improvements that they want on their farm. It enables them to network and to come together and to talk about issues that they might be having and to see each other's properties and what they're actually doing and really build a bit of a community within our Gundagai Lamb brand. So that's really an exciting step forward for us as a brand. But we do lots of other producer engagement too. So we don't just give feedback and then expect you to figure it all out yourselves if you don't want to do that. We do one-on-one visits. We invite you to come and see your lambs being processed and sit down with you afterwards to look at your feedback. We offer all sorts of support around objective carcass measurement, how you can hit our grid better, and also animal disease and defect. And we run different workshops throughout the year. So these include objective carcass measurement workshops where you'll sit through three workshops over a six month period to learn more about how you can assess live animals and what they look like when they're hanging up and how that relates to objective carcass measurement information. We do animal health workshops in conjunction with Soritus. So that's something that we do quite regularly in terms of bringing producers on plant, taking them through the plant, talking about disease and defects, what can be done about them and how it impacts us as a processor. We're looking at starting a livestock agent program so we can engage with our agents and ensure that they've got the most up-to-date information that they need to be able to service their clients as well. And obviously our Pioneer's Program. We also have an annual event, which is pretty exciting, it's coming up in August. We had our first last year. So this is an annual evening event of celebration in August where we talk about a Year in Review. So we go through the stats of what's come through and what we've seen in terms of markets. We have our Producer and Livestock Agent Awards where we're rewarding producers for IMF, for GLQ Score. We have Producer of the Year Award, and Agent of the Year Award as well. And our New Season Launch is that night as well. So, all producers and livestock agents who's consigned to us will receive an invitation for that event over the past year. So key takeaways. We see low IMF as posing as high risk as the opportunity of high IMF. So it's really about being on the right side of the IMF profile and ensuring that you're producing lambs that are in that high quality area. It's really important obviously for you to consign to a plant that can offer you as much feedback as possible. 'Cause when you know better, you can do better. And I think, hopefully, that will be taken up by different processors so that that's more widely available to you as producers. And Gundagai Lamb measures, you know, a lot of these and really provides these in an easy-to-digest manner through our Producer Portal. So it's something we're really proud of. Hopefully, we're seen as sort of leading the industry through this way in terms of giving more feedback. And hopefully there'll be more that come on board with it as well over time. So thank you.

Dougal:

Thank you, Michelle. I think everyone enjoyed that. That was really motivational, really a great insight. And your passion and your commitment is just awesome. So thank you very much. Some really strong themes coming through here, guys. Following on from Alex's presentation, he talked about the next 25 years of the lamb industry and I think we had a great example there. A great example of where our industry can head and the technology we can adopt. And while we have showcased one of our meat processors here, I put the call out to you and just for you to talk to your supply chain and you to talk to your meat processors and what's the supply chain and the meat process you're doing in dealing with what have they got going on. I just think we've also got to call out the awesome technology that the Gundagai Lamb company are using in their supply chain and how they're utilizing that technology to gain efficiencies, to improve profitability, and then share that throughout the supply chain. So we've got time for a couple of questions. One in the middle here.

Andrew:

Andrew Stewart. Michelle, congratulations to you and your company on your innovations. It's very inspiring. I'm interested to know, what is the heritability of the intermuscular fat and the lean meat yield, and are there any associated genetic correlations?

Michelle:

Well I think that that question might be best for one of the geneticists in the room. Maybe someone like Serida guy might be able to answer that one.

Dougal:

Right, yep. On the left here.

Audience Member:

About moderate to high. So the heritability of IMF and lean meat yield is moderate to high. And there is a negative correlation about minus 0.2. So if we do select for lean meat yield, higher lean meat yield, our eating quality will decline.

Dougal:

Yeah, fantastic. All right, Terry Sim down the front.

Terry:

Michelle, has anyone ever-

Moderator:

Sorry, we've got a mike going around-

- Here you go.

- You go here while we wait.

Moderator:

We'll come back to you.

Terry:

Michelle, it looks like you're taking enough data to tell us, even relate back to the size that are producing the sheep that are fitting in your sweet spot, is anybody analyzing that apart from just individual breeders drawing their own conclusions?

Michelle:

I'm not too sure, to be honest, whether that's happening. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know the answer to all these questions.

Dougal:

That's all right. I think, Terry, what you're saying is the power, there's a lot of opportunity in that data set there and I'm sure if industry were, the industry would be happy and keen to work with Michelle and the company with it. We've got a question in the middle.

Chantelle:

Hi Michelle, Chantelle here. You guys are obviously very open to sheep breeds. How have you gone about that? 'Cause some producers around our area, like to get composite ewes into them or lambs is near impossible. They want first cross terminal lambs and they won't touch anything unusual. Like we did a first cross composite lamb this year, and trying to sell them into meatworks has been bloody difficult. They look at them and like, "Nah, don't want them." How do we engage with them to try and encourage them to-

Michelle:

Yeah, that's a really good question. I guess we're still learning what fits our grid best, but from the data that we have seen, in terms of being an outcome-based brand, as long as those outcomes are coming through, we aren't too put off by breed at all. So yeah, I guess it's having those conversations around why that would be an issue for that processor you might be going through, yeah.

Speaker:

So Chris will be known to a lot of you, a real leader in our industry and a significant innovator. A a strong background, well actually started on the mutton floor and the shearing stand and then worked his way up through Elders, was head of the agency network for a long period. Has recently jumped into the RMA network and is keen to work with the independent agencies. But I think Chris is gonna talk to us all about applying the principles that we've just heard about from Michelle, but also how we grow our industry and grow our people. So over to you, Chris.

Chris:

Thanks very much. You need to stick with me 'cause everyone up here so far has been quite structured. So we might end up a long way away and then eventually we'll come back. I'm not up here to bang on about agency. We'll get to the end and we'll talk a little bit about that. The main part for me is to get you to think, and it's been a really great start with Alex and Michelle so far. So who's ever thought about Waltzing Matilda? We sing it when we're at the football, we sing it at the cricket. And there was a quote there before in regards to a poet back in the 1900. So Waltzing Matilda, when you think about it, is about a suicidal sheep thief. That's exactly what he is. Pinched a sheep jumped in the lake, he was gone. The beauty about my job at present is that I've moved away from being an operational agent. So I've had 40 years doing it. A lot of people in the room I've either dealt with directly or worked with. I see Rex Bennet there from Elders. That was the last time I was on a shearing stand, was with Rex with about 40 trainees in front of us. He still looked pretty good, I looked like a little fat bowling ball. But what I haven't got now is that leg rope, which means that I have to speak directly to basically an agenda. So I like to talk about the future, easy to talk about the past, I can't change it. And with that, the opportunity that I got given with Beef Central Sheep Central has allowed me to probably a level above where I ever expected to be. Emily and Jason, known Emily for a long time. And Jason, we worked together with PIRSA in South Australia and I really enjoyed the messaging and I think that's where this has come about. And with the ability to work in with agency training and service provider training at Wodonga TAFE, that all becomes part of this overall sort of group. It's not only the messaging, it's about the understanding. So what we can get towards a couple of pieces. Easy for me to get bogged down because there's so much stuff that I'd love to talk about. A couple of things I'm going to give you before we jump into it. Carbon, do not sell your carbon credits under any circumstances, okay? At your own peril, carbon will become the new market access hurdle for us to get into the EU, into the UK, probably into America in time. And if you've sold them, when you go to a processor, because they're going to be looking at what your carbon footprint assessment is, I'm not gonna go on too much about it, hold onto them. 'Cause no one understands what they are yet. And once you've lost them, very hard to get them back. And the other thing, and this is a little bugbear of mine, cropping programs fit really easily into spreadsheets. Banks love them, banks love spreadsheets. What's really hard with my time at Stock Co to put into a spreadsheet, is a ewe wool lamb operation. And unless you understand it and you've been through the industry and you're out there, it's really hard to find those that are prepared to help you get that messaging across. Really easy for a bank to say, oh no, that's too hard. And you know, we don't want you to do this and do that because it's difficult for them to understand, even though you know it's the right thing to do. And before we hop into it, target market. You need to know where you're going before you start. Otherwise you're going to become this big ball. And we've seen it in the last three months, got a million sheep on the market all at the same time because the bloody tractors had to start up. We're our own worst enemy sometimes and we'll get to that in a minute. And have you got time to get it done? What I've found now is I'm getting to the, not to the end of my career, but I'm getting to the end and I would think I've got so much value to add, but I haven't got enough time to get it out there. So I've gotta actually be really targeted in what I'm going to deliver. So one of the mantras of our training when we train young people, is do simple well. We love making simple things really complex. So when you sit down at night, just think about what you've done during the day and was there a way that you could've done that easier? So just to get into the context of things.

- Right, he is rolling now.

- He's rolling.

- You tell me when to start speaking.

- Okay.

- Speaking?

- Yep.

- On the 5th of March, 1936, the Spitfire prototype, K5054, made its first ever flight from the Supermarine works at Eastland Southern England. Heralding the start of a legend that is just as powerful today as it was during those dark years of World War II.

Chris:

So for a lot in the room when we were at school, all we wanted to do was fly Spitfire. Now he had so much information he knew about the Spitfire, and he did too. He knew about it, where it come from, what it did, all of the bits and pieces. But what he didn't know was what was coming. And that's exactly where we are, and what we've looked at for the last six months. So in November, as sure as God made little green apples, the market was going to reset. We didn't know it was gonna reset by that much, but we knew it was gonna reset. Every time the cattle market tried to reset, it rained, so it stopped supply. Then what happened? It rained and we couldn't get the performance into our lambs, we couldn't get weight gains. So clients of mine that were still selling, supposed to have sold lambs in October, December, have still got lambs now. They just couldn't get the performance. And what's happened time bound again? Our lambs are all pushing towards cutting teeth. And then it rained. And then the amount of times in the last three weeks I've had, oh look, they've just gotta go. And they've unloaded lambs, underdone, pushed them into an oversupplied market. And all of a sudden all that work you've done, years of breeding at least 12 months worth of work, you've actually done a disservice to yourself by moving them out without having got full potential out of them. So let's get things talking before we talk about agents of the future and relationships. And I love agency, don't get me wrong. I actually lived and breathed it for so long. I got to a level way above where I ever expected to be. All I ever wanted to do was get to 40 and I wanted to be the state livestock manager for Elders for South Australia, Northern Territory. And I got to that and I had that job for 11 months. And then Elders nearly went broke and I got sacked. I went to the boss and I said, but I still wanna work for Elders. And he said, well, we haven't got a job, Chris. And I said, well, what do I gotta do? So come back, he said, oh look, we'll keep you on until September. And from there, one thing led to the under other. Ended up as National Livestock Manager. Had done my time, went to Stock Co selling livestock finance, and RMA come along and said, can you come and give us a crack? And I said, oh, righto. I'll give that a go. The Global Food Sustainability Forum, which I was involved in last year, this really stuck out to me. Singapore produce less than 10% of their food requirements. So what they wanna do is they wanna get to 30%, and this is called thinking outside the box. So Singapore island, covered in buildings, they've started building eight story vertical barramundi farms. They're going up instead of out. And the other part, the next stage is that they're actually going to build these barramundi farms inside residential buildings. So they start at the top and they just keep going down, down, down. And when they get to the bottom, out come the barramundi about that big, straight to market, it's pretty cool. Now let's go to China. Everyone loves to bag in China, and honestly, I wouldn't like to live down wind of this. Have a look at that. 26 story piggery, 650,000 pigs a year. Work that out now, what I want you to start thinking about right now is kilograms. I don't want you to be thinking about how many lambs you put on the truck, how many bales you put on a truck. I want you to think about nothing but kilograms because until you start thinking like that, no one can help you improve your program. And let's have a look. All of these industries, how do they measure success? So you have a look at 'em even down to crayfish, the poor cray fishermen, copping $110 on the wharf, last couple of years, 35, they're still going all right, don't worry about that. Steel, wood, honey. It's in kilograms. So at the end of each season, they know what their inputs were, whether it be in diesel, whether it be in fertilizer, they know what went in and they know what will come out. But we don't do that. As producers and agents, we don't do that with livestock. We don't sit down with a client and say, how many kilograms of red meat, how many kilograms of wool did we produce last year? How can we do it better? So the second you get a baseline number now season, season, and I'm jumping all over the place here, the second you get a baseline number, you've actually got the ability to improve. It's like having a target, a career goal. It's like me, by wanting to be the livestock manager. I knew where I was going so therefore you work towards it. But if you haven't got that goal, no one can help you. Agriculture is moving so quickly. We went through the nineties and we're not gonna go back over that. Set me up as an agent, but bloody hell, hard work. '89, we thought we were king of the heat. '91, we all know what happened then with the sheep. '95, we thought, oh, hello, we're coming out now we're going right. '96 South Korea fell to bits, wool jumped back down again. But we just kept going and we all worked together and we all liked the Merinos. And I tell you, the old girl, she looks after you if you look after her. Well, there we go, this is only a hundred years ago, not, yeah, a hundred years ago. 15 years ago That's science fiction. Don't even need to drive anymore, just hook it on the back. She goes round and round and round. So this is where we have got so much capacity now because going back in the nineties, auctions plus, ear tags, we didn't have the technology to keep up or to understand. So it was all well and good to say at the development stage, we've got all this technology, but honestly out on the farm, we didn't have it. You had a fax and when you turned your computer on, remember what we had? What'd we have? We had 32 RAMS. Wow, how good was that? That thing there has got more power in it than the first spacecraft that went to the moon. The entire operation center at NASA, more power. And we have now got the capacity through ear tags. And this isn't about, traceability is a wonderful thing, biosecurity wonderful thing, but productivity management. That scale system there, and I see at the side here, Clipex, and I honestly, I think I've drafted more than a million sheep. We stood watched 300 lambs weigh themselves, auto sheep, wherever Alex has gone. A dog stood back there, we stood in the bugle race, they had this Clipex set up perfectly. 300 lambs ran through, drafted themselves four ways. And I was gobsmacked. I just thought, wow, where was this, you know, on a 40 degree day. And then we look at the things like FarmBot, you talk about your carbon profile, FarmBot's the ability to follow. And this isn't a sponsored plug, it's just fact. The biggest stations, you know, if you're talking to Jumbuk Park or CPC or any of those big stations, the amount of time saved on water runs with FarmBot. And again, be careful that you don't burn all your ability to show that carbon saving by implementing this before you map it, map it your base level, then add these in afterwards because it all adds into your carbon footprint. Now, I dunno whether Bill Mitchell's made one for sheep yet. Most undervalued article in Australian Cattle Industry at present is the Optiweigh way. And the reason being, it tells you when you're in a declining feed plane before you see it. I reckon I go right, it takes me two weeks to know when cattle is slipping. You go, oh yeah, right, they've just lost a bit. By the time you say they've just lost a bit, they've lost 20 kilos. This is in real time. You're gaining at 1.6 when that big rain event come through in November, 1.6 kilos a day, they're going like that. Then it rained, they were losing 3.5 kilos a day. All that needed to happen was take 'em outta that paddock, put 'em on a bit of high ground, give 'em a bale of hay, and you could hold them. So all of this is in your phone. Oh, it's right there. That's where it lives. And we just saw Michelle. So much information out there. So we're gonna start to drift towards agency now. If you use an agent, you use an agent. If you don't use an agent, you go direct, entirely up to you. But if you're not using an agent, who in your business is the agent? Because there must be someone in your business that's talking to the processor or talking to the store buyer or talking to the feedlot, that's cutting the deal, negotiating the deal. Last time I looked, that that takes a fair bit of time to make that work. Because have a look here, let's go back. Weight for age always wins unless you've got IMF, unless someone's paying a premium for something. So at the end of the day, as many kilos as you can produce in the shortest period of time is what's going to give you best returns. Unless you're overcapitalizing tipping too much money in. And do you understand your kill sheets? Do you understand your dressing percentages? One of the biggest issues with agency is training people how to understand dressing percentages. The agents, not the clients. And unless you actually weigh them, put them in, do the calculation, eventually it becomes instinctive. You can just look and you go, all right, that lamb's gonna do 42%. Everyone wants to tell you it's gonna do 45%. But if you send it to an export works, that neck trim, that takes 300 grams out of a lamb straight away, all of a sudden it goes dropping your percentage, 'cause it's not like cattle. Understanding curfew minimization. Preparing livestock. The amount of times that we put livestock, especially lambs onto a truck, we've spent 12 months breeding them, we've got 'em looking as good as good, we take 'em outta the best pasture. We walk 'em up the lane way through a heap of bloody cork screw and barley grass. So we've just put all this seed into their skin, and then we think we're gonna fatten 'em in the last six hours after we've had 'em for five months and they get to the works or they get to the sail yards covered in green muck, you immediately get a discount. What everyone here needs to understand is the USDA licensing accreditation, fecal matter is the number one way that you'll lose that license. And the problem is that seed grass seed infestation under the salvage, that's actually treated as fecal matter. So there's no, they don't discern that. They said, no, no good, off you go. Shearing times, DEXA. Look, DEXA's a great thing on it's, I think we're still a little way away from getting down to that payment on meat yield. Marbling, providence, and social license. Everyone these days wants to know where something come from. Taught at school from day one. You know, it's where did it come from? Was it feeling okay? You know, did someone give it a lolly when it needed a lolly? All of that type of stuff. That's our social license. And that's the issue that we are, that's the issue that we've got in Western Australia at present. So if you wanna do one good thing for the day, go out, send an email to Murray Watt, tell him to pull his head in 'cause Western Australia need live export. And if everyone thinks that the live sheep export being stopped in Western Australia's the end of it, it doesn't stop, I was involved in this for 15 years. It's like a military campaign. They just come after you, they never stop. And what you've got is the ability now, baseline measurement, someone said earlier on, it might've been last night, there's so many different uses for land now. You know, it might be almonds and the water. So you've actually gotta make more off of the same land and just be a little bit smarter. Understand your input costs and continue to look for improvement. It's honestly, I didn't know what Alex was gonna talk about, but talking about a 0.1 improvement. You have a look at the market gardeners, the piggeries, the chook growers, the fish farmers, the dairies. They are looking at that number all the time. We spend all this time, we love our sheep to bits, yet the second the bloody rain comes, we forget about 'em at the most important time. And it might be lambing time or it might be joining time or setting 'em up, you know, for a proper lactation. 'Cause once that tractor starts, all out the window, oh yeah, well they'll be right. Chuck 'em a bale of hay. And we always, and this isn't in a bad way, but we tend to run to the easy option, which is to blame someone for something. At present, everyone's blaming the processors because they're making too much money. They're not paying enough money. Well I can tell you what's happening with the processors. They haven't got the capacity to handle the numbers that have gone through the saleyards. They already forward contracted. And so now we've seen the old 1990s supply glut. We've got a four or five week waiting period. So we lived with that. The older agents, we just lived with it and yet you managed it. But we haven't seen that, even during the drought. We had so many processors if, sorry, excuse the French, if it had a head and an asshole, they'd pay you good money for it. Well now it's on the other way around. We've just gotta even that level out a little bit, because we can adapt. Don't blame stuff we can't control. So I can't control the rain, I can't control the international foreign exchange rate. But what I can control is having that lamb the best it can be when I go to sell it. And a lot of lambs, like I said, a simple input of $20 worth of lupins out in the paddock, not in feedlot, would've got that lamb from being a slippery two score worth $110 to a good hard three score would've made 180 bucks. Whether it be Bendigo, whether it be Wagga. There we go. I love this list to bits, the Merino wool lamb combination. If you sit down, if you're prepared to do the work, if you wanna drink rum on a Friday night, nothing on the weekend, probably not. But this is still by far hands up your best model. And especially now that we got out of the nineties, we allowed that mentality around Merinos just grow wool. And Jason will talk about that later. The good bloodlines within South Australia, and the Merino Parks, East Bungarees, they had magnificent carcasses. Cut a power of wool, but no one talked about how much, so what happened is the meat breeds sort of pushed in a little bit into that Merino ewe country. The problem we've got with the Merino ewe is we do treat her like a second class citizen. It's just, you can't expect her to perform like an athlete to get to 180% lambs, if you've just got her out the back there and just, she'll be right. You know, the one thing we do know about Merinos and having traded quite a few of them, is that whilst you've got 'em on a rising plane, they'll put it into meat. The second you check them, their metabolism switches over and they'll start growing wool. The only way to stop that is to shear them. So if anyone wants to trade at present, all of those Merino lambs that are going into market with two inches of wool that you're buying for 70 and 80 bucks at present, if you've got a bit of feed. stack five or 600 away, run 'em through as hoggets, cut a good clip of wool off them. and sell the hogget for 150 bucks. Even in my math, I reckon you're gonna go all right. All right, so we're eventually there. Are all agents the same? They're the two important questions. So everyone loves talking about commission, marketing fee, whatever you wanna call it. Look, sprinkle glitter on it, it's still, it is what is there. Agent is one of the few jobs in Australia, anywhere in the world, that you don't get paid for the work you've done until you've completed the job or got the sale, okay? You just don't get it. If you are continually looking at how much commission you're paying, you are treating your agent as a cost. You and your agent need to have a chat. Or at worst you might need to change an agent. But the good agents, and I think I went all right and look, there's a few out here, we never came, we never had a conversation about marketing fee, because you were treated as an asset to the business. You were invested in the business. And again, you're in control. As a producer, you're in control of this. Have you ever had this discussion when you're putting the rams in? And look honestly if you wanna tell yourself fibs again, we go back to that blame someone or blame something you can't control. What is our target market? What do you before the rams go in, what am I trying to achieve? So there's number one. How much feed will we need in a normal year? How many here in the room, just a quick raise of hand, have ever done a feed map on their property? Do yourself a favor, I don't care who you talk to, what color shirt, Rob Inglis at Wagga is a guru. Robbie Neil at Lake Bolac, bloody fantastic. Peter Gordon at Yenda, get 'em to come out. They'll tell you how many kilos of weight gain you've got available in that paddock for X period of time. And once you know that you'll never go back. What's the best model for your property? So I've seen lots and lots of producers use all their best feed to try and make the bottoms of their lambs look like the tops. And then I've also seen properties, especially when I was in New South Wales, they'd spend 10 months of the year trying to produce export lambs. We sat down and we had this chat and we turned their operation into a store, lamb breeding operation. They ran more ewes, they made more money, less stress, and went to the coast for a month on holidays instead of trying to get lambs nearly there. What's your breakeven? I've heard this today. If you don't know what it's costing you, you can't put a forward contract in place. And I will throw one in it. It saddened me, I think yesterday or Friday. Cotton has now for the first time ever higher export value than wool. The cotton blokes have been doing this for years. They forward contract, they're 18 months to two years out. All they do is grow it. They know how much they've got it sold for. They've just gotta make sure they grow it. Wool, the most measured product in Australia forever. And we still can't get our head around forward selling. So I don't know how many years it ago was now, went to 1900 cents, and I was banging on about lock some in lock some in, oh no, it might get higher. Yeah, well take a little piece. Take 20, 30, 40% the same with your lambs at a particular time when there's contracts around, just take a piece. What that does is it gives you the quarter of the average. If it goes up good on you because you've got the base. But if it goes down, you've still got that core of your average in there. What's your plan B, C, and D? 'Cause we don't know if a drought's coming, but those that have got a good plan, and I'll use the likes of one of the big cattle companies, they put a line in the sand, they said, if it doesn't rain by now we're unloading. Why? Because a $500 cow with $500 worth of hay in it is still only worth $500. You have to have your plans put in place. And here we go. And again, I love what Michelle was talking about. How many in the room know who bought your stock last year? And whether it's the agent or you, if you'd go direct, how many have you picked the phone up and ask the buyer of your livestock how they went? What can I do to improve them? Would you like to buy them again? Can we put an arrangement in place? All of these little tick boxes are where you can make your operation really start to hum. And we like talking about the big end of town. You look at the big studs and that, or the big terminal shire operations. How do they do that? This is the stuff they're doing. And when do you have the discussion? If you're having the discussion about your sale program two weeks out, too late. You need to target market, sit down with your agent now before the rams have gone in. Talk about what your plan is for the next year. Your agent in most instances will be quite uncomfortable. But once you and you and that individual, him or her get into the conversation, it actually becomes, it becomes quite empowering, quite enlightening. You start talking about business in a different way. And then six months out, right, how are we going? You've got someone doing a bit of feed mapping and all this stuff starts to pull together. We continually pay for agronomists, love them. It used to be in the old days, rouse abouts, there was a million rouse abouts. And when I went shearing, so there was rouse abouts, and then wool classers, you'd kick a rollie poll and 40 wool classers would run out. And then in 2000, the cotton boom happened in Aus and New Zealand, 2000 and every tree you went around, here was a hundred agronomists. And they were getting paid all this money. So as an agent, I was getting paid 40,000, and you think, 60,000, thought, Jesus, what do they do? They're really good at spreadsheets. Then they'd walk around with their little net and they'd catch butterflies and oh righto, we better get an airplane in and spray them. Do this, do that. And yet if I walked out and said look, we're gonna bring someone in and you're gonna pay them to tell you about feed mapping or to, you know, what we should be, oh, no, no, no. No, no, no, I'm not doing that. So again, I talked about it earlier. All of those lambs that hit the market, the processors don't want them all at the same time. And they definitely don't want them as a one and two score. What they dearly love is that supply evened out. What it would do is it'd take the herd away in regards to pricing. And look, I reckon the job's undersold at present. And I think, and I'll put it in beef central, I don't mind saying, I think we're a couple of weeks away from the market, I'm not saying it's gonna fly, but it's just gonna bubble up, 'cause that's what's will happen. Cattle drop will happen probably second, third week of July as much as they don't want it to happen. And how much per kilogram produced. So understand what you tip into what you're getting back. The chook farmers know this. They know exactly how many cents per kilogram. A young, well not a young bloke, a 30 year old. He's decided to become a stock agent. 15 years at the Sofitel as the executive chef, and he becomes a stock agent. He's a weirdo. Love him to bits. The system they've got in the restaurant trade is I can tell you how much weight in the skin of a carrot so that they can work out how much each meal costs. So it's not about what the cook wants, it's about what's most economical. You know, we all had asparagus last night, must be cheap. That's what they do. Buy asparagus next week it might be pumpkin. That, no worries, I'm nearly there anyway. Have you ever told your agent what you expect? Like I said, it makes no difference to me. Have they ever asked you what you want? So little blonde lady here, Simone, down from Wodonga TAFE. This is what we teach the young agents, next generation agents. Become a business partner, not a transactional agent. Do you have a transactional agent? Say drafting has a cigarette, kicks the dirt, jumps in the car, got another job, and gone, okay? Well the next, and don't worry. I worked at Port Augusta for a fair while we had one up there. He would drive a thousand K's for the day, make sure he is home by four o'clock every afternoon, spend about 10 minutes on the property. But he was busy doing a lot of driving. Next generation agency, invest in your entire value proposition. Target market, relationship network, based on facts and market intel will help your productivity. Marketing fee is cheap. All I want you to know. If you had a hundred thousand kilograms of red meat and wool produced last year, what do you need to do to go to 110 kilograms? Same property, but those conversations are extremely strong. And again, I'm not gonna take fees, 'cause what I love about is lamb survivability, keep the bloody things alive. Look after the ewe, set her rutter up. Make sure she's got enough energy inside her, enough magnesium to push that bloody lamb out. And the second lamb, and if you're having three, the third lamb. Isn't it amazing how feral goats can have two or three every six months and the whole bloody lot live. Or we look after our horses or don't put 'em on the clover, they're gonna die away. Brumby says, I was up near Kosciuszko, hundreds of them. They look better than the horses around Melbourne. Next, tools. And this isn't just a free plug, this is fact. Livestock financing became an opportunity to break through the glass ceiling because you buy livestock when you've got feed instead of when your overdraft tells you. You can make your payments to the bank and still, outside of that banking structure without impacting your position with the bank. You can make best use of your feed. And so, important at the end of your season or the end of your sale, sit down and debrief the result. How did it go? I thought they might've made a bit more, why? Hell they yielded well, okay, what did we do that allowed them to yield like that? Our fat score was up, our yield was down. We had too much seed, we had a bit more dust than we normally do. All of those things will help you improve your business. And the only reason I became successful as an agent is because my clients took ownership of me as a young fella. Thank God there weren't mobile phones around then 'cause I would've been sacked 27 times. And I had a network around me. And it doesn't matter what color shirt, I talk to everyone still because we've all grown up together and we support each other. This is where a lot of us live. I'm so busy, no, no here I can help you. No, no, I'm too busy mate. I haven't got time. I can't come the best wool, best lamb 'cause I'm too busy. Shit that gate that hasn't swung properly for 10 years, I've gotta fix it today, yeah. Many agencies are already doing this. So this isn't about that, so many agencies are doing this, others have no reason they can't. And like I said, if your agency doesn't deliver what you want, you have to have a very frank, 'cause they're mates normally, a really frank conversation or maybe you're gonna have to change an agency. Look for the feedback. And last bit, a little bit of mental health. If you understand that series of human emotions, you can jump to that bottom one a lot quicker. Because a lot of us denial and anger, and at present in the lamb industry, denial, anger. We're just hitting depression now. This job's never gonna come good, it's the end of the world. Chicken little cross, I'm getting outta sheep, bugger this. I don't like it anymore. Action, what do I need to do? Who can help? And sorry, but we've actually gotta get a bit tougher on the kids. A flogging never did me any harm. I'm not saying go back to flogging your kids, but not everyone's a bloody winner and they've gotta understand why. Thanks very much.

Speaker:

All right, thanks Chris. You use credibility and you use your experience in the industry, and thank you very much. I think you shared with us clearly, hey, don't go anywhere Chris. Wanna do a few questions, but no, no, no. I think the core for me is you talked about surrounding, who do you surround yourself with, and do we surround ourselves with people who give us energy and help us grow? And do we surround ourselves with good people? You also talked about the fundamentals of kilograms of beef, knowing your target market, and you complimented Alex and Michelle beautifully. Let's take a few questions. All right, I got Terry down the front.

Chris:

It's not fair, he's an employer.

- [Speaker] It is a bit hard to see. So make sure you please stick right up.

- [Audience Member] Chris is a sort of a general question. What really turned the light on for you that enabled you to grow into what you've presented here today?

Chris:

Firstly, passionate about industry, and I suppose when I got out of Elders, I spent a lot of time at that point of time looking in and we were trying to, we lifted the old girl up, we got her banging along again. And I'd come to the end of my run. But once I come out all of a sudden I went, oh shit. I'm not trying to get a client to like me to do business anymore. I'm just happy to let you know what I think. And if you don't agree with it, no skin off my nose at all. I've just tried to pull together all of the bits and pieces I've learned as I've gone through while my career, I suppose.

Speaker:

Up the back.

Elise:

Hi Chris, I'm Elise. When you had a list of areas of expertise that an agent could help a farmer with, your very top point was genetics.

- Yup.

- We've spoken to agents from seven different companies local to us, and not one of them has any understanding of Australian sheep breeding values. What courses are agents required to do that gives them the qualifications to give farmers advice on genetics?

Chris:

Right, so EBVs and ASBVs are a key focus for the young group that are coming through. So we worked out the other day, I've doing it for 12 years. We've had 300 young agents come through, young and new agents, you know, our oldest one, 55, change of career. We don't talk specifically about studs, we keep it holistic and we talk about target market and we use the tool ASBVs to match the target market. Now what we've found with agency, it's called legacy agency. You look after the agent, the studs within your area. It's very hard to take someone from one stud to another stud because you're gonna make one happy and one very unhappy. So again, I think that's the place and you've got MLA, there's so much information out there. We just need the right vehicles to carry the information and contextualize it. So to say to someone come along and learn about EBVs, everyone goes, yeah, right, I'm gonna go and fix that gate that's been swinging wrong for 20 years now. Or if you contextualize it, this is going to help you come out the other end through target marketing, genetics, da da da. All of a sudden you've got a story that people oh, wouldn't mind doing that. So Lake Bolac we did exactly that with Gorst, expecting 20 people, we ended up with I think 80 people there in the morning. So a bit better here.

Speaker:

One in the middle here, yeah thank you.

Ricky:

Yeah Ricky Lewis, how are we gonna bridge the sort of, there's a lot of bias with the agents, with the commission off ram sales to then the producer's productivity. You get a lot of hear, a lot of push, oh you gotta buy this gen or buy this gen because they run the actual sale themselves. So they've got potential making big commission off that sale. So how's the education happen to work with the producer, what their needs are instead of looking after their clients on the ram sale side?

Chris:

Yeah right, okay so, Kio is not in the room, is he? So an agent in 99.9% of instances is earning their commission working on behalf of the vendor. That's where the commission comes from. Unless you are paying an agent. Now your agent will take you to a ram sale, and depending on who the company is, your agent's acting in your best interest. It an easy throwaway line. And look, there's a few here that have been involved with ram sales with me. Very rarely are we getting to a point where we think pushing you to that ram, you know, an elite ram, that's gonna make 200,000. We can't convince you to spend 200,000. At the end of the day, you've gotta pick the rams that best suit you irrespective of price, you know what your budget is. Where we can help is understanding the ASBVs or the EBVs. Because you only normally look at those once a year, and there's a lot of information. So what happens is you immediately fall back to just that subjective oh yeah, that ram's about right, not too bad. I again, talking about the commission is a distraction. 'Cause at the end of the day, if you don't buy the next bit under you is going to buy it and the commission's still gonna be the same, moves about 10 cents. I hope that answered it, but anyway, so.

Speaker:

Up the back, sorry, Ally.

Audience Member:

George, any governance Chris?

Chris:

Oh, here's my friend, hello.

- [Audience Member] that actually brings a very interesting topic up because it's called conflict of interest. So how much training do agencies give in that conflict of interest? 'Cause we do see it. Yeah, I'll leave it at that. So how much training?

Chris:

Yep, yup, so it's actually quite a specific area. It's about, and again, what I go back to, it's about understanding who you are employed by. So it's easy to go into a conflict of interest, understanding, but then you've also got what's called relationship. So agency is the last relationship based business, they did a study on it in Harvard University. So I believe that I had a great relationship with, and you know, they're the seniors of the process of business. But if you talk about Cole McKinnon at Midfield, Chris Thomas, when I was a young fella, they were the buyers. And when I'd go out to see clients, I'd say, right, we'd set up and say, right, these are the sheep we're going to look at, these I need a little bit more because, you know, they're pretty good lambs, these here about right. So the relationship, when you got to that point, then all of a sudden I'd ring up and say, you do the job. So exactly what you are talking about. So I had to go out and protect the relationship, but make sure that I was giving true market value to the client. Now I'm not saying everyone does that or has the capacity to do that, but we speak specifically about that. It's actually one of the assessments that like, a certificate for an agriculture assessment is exactly that, is how to manage that conflict in regards to being both the vendors agent and the buyer's agent.

- [Speaker] Thanks George, last question, Terry.

Terry:

Chris, in the context of maximizing competition for your lambs or your ewe's or sheep, where do you see the mix going? Is it gonna be all sale yards? Is it the strength of your relationship with the processor through the agent? It's a sort of a future of sale yards or not question or versus consignment?

Chris:

At present, normally we would see forward contracts coming out. So we've glutted the supply chain, it will shake itself out, okay, so nothing sure. Labor restraints have held the processing numbers for the processors back. They know that, they're now starting to get more labor coming in, but they're not gonna crank up until the spring. Like whether you want to, yes or no, why would you? Why would I go and get another 400 people in? I'm making pretty good money on lamb or cattle at present. Just let's tick along and when we get to the spring, supply will be there and we poke along. The, sorry, give me the tip again?

Terry:

Oh, just essentially where do you see it going with future sale yards, business consign direct.

Chris:

Okay, you have to have a price discovery method. And the price discovery method at present is the sale yards. Now what's happened is that suppliers driven the price down. So the processes are holding more slaughter space open for the sale yard supply versus, and so they don't have to go with a forward contract. Me personally, this time of the year as a rule, I would take spot. And then getting into August, I'd take a piece of end of August, September delivery as a forward. Now whether it's 30% of your supply might just be the heavies, and then you take another piece. And what that does, you actually start sleeping at night. You are really good at feeding lambs, putting weight on them, and you know what you're gonna get. And you move on. You're already starting to think about the next crop. What can we do better? Instead of, gonna sell your lambs in the third week of September and we get a northerly change come out through the hay plane. Heap of seed comes on, heap of lambs come into Wagga, big heap of lambs come into Bendigo, big heap of lambs start moving, and the market takes a 15 or $20 check. If you've already got two thirds of your supply locked away, you're pretty comfortable. But if you're swinging on the spot market I think that's the piece we've gotta get away from, the spot market. So you've gotta know what your price is, you've gotta start looking further ahead. And sometimes it's hard, especially now, it's gonna be really hard to try and cut a deal for $7.50 lamb at the current rates. We're just gonna have to wait for this numbers to shake itself through.

Jason:

Thank, thanks very much for having me and they tell me that as I get a bit wound up with this preso, I move in and out from this mic. So if I get a bit loud at some stage I apologize. But just practicing adult learning down the back, I was trying to get everyone to come and grab a seat and two gentlemen just said, thank you very much. I'd like to stand and listen. So that's what we gotta get better at, getting our message across. And this is gonna be a challenge for us as an industry I reckon, because if we're gonna go anywhere near, maybe Bally stretch targets a bit out there. The point is with his targets you don't get in the car and you say he's off with the pixies. There's some real fundamental things. He talked about the fact that we've gotta be tracking at 2% per annum and sure for the average farmer that doesn't mean he's getting many triplets. But I'd say for a fair subset of those sitting in the room, there's a fair few under the covers and the numbers are growing year-by-year. So this project, I'm fortunate enough to be the mouth from the south for the research team led by Andrew Thompson and others farmers and researchers and consultants that are in this room. We appreciate all your contribution, absolutely. What I'm gonna do is talk about the background to the project and I wanna say that for all the different projects I've ever been involved with, this one's consultation to the farmer community before striking a blow is the best I've seen. and I'll explain that. The summary of the findings we've got and then an example of how we're gonna put that together in our best practice guide is the flow of what I'll go through. What I wanna do is put this slide up right from the get go just to contextualize where we're at with triplets or the opportunity with triplets. So what this slide is saying, this is the value our industry can achieve or the extra profit that we can make by going from more lamb loss to core lamb loss. And if you've ever listened to Gordon Refshauge speak, man's done the most lamb autopsies in Australia, new South Wales DPI, more lamb loss is 30%, core lamb loss is 10 to 15, so about 12. So what do you know? What are these numbers based on? They're based on our industry current lamb loss of 30% down to a lamb loss of 12%, that's worth a billion dollars in lost profit to the Australian sheep industry today per annum, that's $6 a kilo for meat. What I wanna do though is hone in on the triplets here and you can see out of the billion, they don't make up much money. So this project was not funded as as regards of its economic opportunity that it was gonna revolutionize our industry on day one. It was actually funded through a wellbeing and welfare lens and hats off to MLA for really understanding that the world is watching what we're doing. Same as when we're joining our year lambs. You can see the correlations to getting teenage girls to have babies, this sort of stuff. People that are disjointed from our industry are saying You're winding up your sheep. You, you men and women, you're only interested in production and profits. You don't give a shit about your sheep. and that makes me so upset. We are the greatest custodian in the animal. We've got millions of years we care for. We're trying to be productive and profitable, but we wanna do it the right way. And this project was about trying to understand how to do it the right way with triplets, which is a challenging cohort. So just continuing the backdrop, Bally's numbers are more precise. The Kimball's worked up with him, we said 10% over 15 years, he said 12. As we're increasing weaning rates, we're getting a greater proportion of triplet bearing ewes. And what other projects are telling us is a disproportionate number of our dead ewes on our farmer triplets. Projects that have gone in and autopsy ewes that are so-called multiples. They go in and they slice 'em open when they find them lost in the paddock and a big proportion of 'em have got three inside them, not two. So that's part of what we wanted to get in and understand further. So these are the things that we did that were all about consultation before we struck a blow of, of research in the paddock. 'cause reality said... You know, we could have easily been researchers gone mad and said the first thing we'll do is try fully shedded in triplets. They do it round the world, UK, New Zealand. We could have jumped straight to that. We wanted to go what's right for the Australian context. So the first thing we did employ in New Zealand or in Paul Kenyon to do an overall lit review for us. and it's worth a read. Please take a quick picture of that slide or look it up back online for that title of that little publication. I don't have time to go through this, but little things that he was able to tell us from the science. Like for example, most of our twins lost for example, is in the first one to three days of life. We call it neonatal lamb loss. Well, that's also the primary point of lamb loss for triplets. But there's a second death spike around day 10 to 14 lactation. And that's because the literature tells us they only produce 10% more milk, the triplet bearer than the twin bearer. And so on some occasions you keep the three lambs alive and that individual ewe doesn't have a minimum, minimum critical amount of milk to keep the three going the whole way. So if you wanna learn about some of the science behind triplets, have a read of that, and Paul is contactable at Massey Uni New Zealand. We then went into a series of focus groups and surveys and then finally a workshop again back with farmers throughout Southeastern Australia and Western Australia to set our ultimate research priorities. I wanna walk you through some of the results that we've come up with through that consultation process. Basically the average marking rate of triplets, regardless of breed was 174, ranging from 102 to 237. So obviously the opportunity with triplets is to mark 300%. We didn't get a paddock in our surveys come in with 240, I've never cracked a 240 Lemo was in the last presentation and he's never cracked a 240. So if you've done that, you want to try and work out how to replicate it because it's as rare as rocking horse shit, it's difficult to do. So what I'd like you to sort of focus in on more out of our surveys, maternal and Merinos, the average single marking, the average twin marking and the average triplet marking for those different breeds. Now, please don't jump to conclusions that the respondents to this survey are representative of average because our national survey work paints a very different picture to the survival rates in those categories. Like for example, Merino twins, the average would be more like 120 to 130 mark, not 154. It's a biased group of farmers responded to this survey 'cause we were chasing people that have done some segregation of triplets 'cause we had a whole heap of questions to ask them about the what had worked, what hadn't, what you want to do in the future. The one thing that was interesting when we looked at these farms and their overall number of fetuses and lambs marked is it's being promoted heavily at the moment in Twitter that go with your triplets is just leave them in with the twins. A few people are saying put 'em in with the singles. and I can tell you for the record this project is not advocating either and I'll give you the results for that. But one of the results that tells us it's not the solution is the farms that were leaving... The separating the triplets compared to leaving them in were achieving on average about a 50% higher marking rate out of their triplet component of their flock compared to those that were leaving them blended in based on some back calculations on our numbers. So we reckon there's an opportunity there. The first thing this project's gonna talk about is lamb loss and this sort of stuff. And we went out to talk to the farmers just like I'm talking to you. So I left it in our focus in this order. We got refocused real quick and the focus in Australia is you, is ewe mortality or keeping the triplet you alive, but we'll deal with the lamb initially. What is it that's causing the lamb loss? The three big killers of triplet-born lambs is mismothering. So that's being disassociated with the mum in the first few hours post birth. It's that low birth weight means the lamb has got a lack of fuel basically relative to its surface area to protect itself coming outta the warm uterine environment into our cold paddocks at greeter that we've got this week. And then the exposure which that wind speed triplets are really vulnerable to that chill index because of that low birth weight, there's an interaction there. What's really interesting, I'm pausing on this slide because the results I'm gonna show you without shooting my foot off with my presentation is mob size matters, like size does matter. And and that's our number one result from all our trials and it ties straight into the yellow section of this graph. Condition score of ewe matters particularly in Merinos. It drives birth weight, helps with lamb survival. I'm gonna show you results that says shelter matters. So I'm a bit of a fan in education of understanding working back, you know, through cause and effect and the some of the best days I've ever been part of are the Lamb autopsy workshops. And I remember once I did with Bruce Jackson in Tasmania, just a vet that wants you to make more informed decisions and work through it with you and understand why your lambs are losing and work back from that. So I'll give you an example and I'll digress, which will mean I'll blow my time, but we don't scan early and late in our singles. And everyone says why don't you do that Trompfy? And I said well we don't have any issue with late when people's singles get heavy late in the lambing paddock. It might've caught me out one in 10 years. If that wasn't an issue for me, I need to scan early and late and keep the foot on the throat, hold the restriction of nutrition on those late singles. So work back from your issues that you're having. And I know each year varies a bit, but this is really informative for our research and it's informative for your decision making on farm. Don't get sucked into doing everything that people tell you. Think about what's actually unfolding on your farm. The the the next thing I want to talk about is ewe mortality. Still, this isn't our results, this is just the backdrop. And basically in a nutshell the average mortality of triplet-bearing ewes in our survey was about 6.5%. But I want you to soak up the numbers in that graph. The range was from 0.5 to 25% of triplet-bearing ewes dying. And if you think that's just one recalcitrant responding to our survey, that's not the case. You're gonna see in our trial data that there's many trial sites where 10 to 15% of the triplet ewes are perishing. So this is an issue, it's a number one issue in Australia. If you want to go back to averages, on average the triplet/ewe mortality is double that your twins. So keep that in mind as I work forward through this presentation, big issue. And the big issue behind this is in particular is pregnancy toxemia. Now, there's a few of you that have farmed for a few years and you will have been told that the answer to your preg tox is to buy a lick block. I call bullshit to that. All right, just, just to be crystal clear, that's a scientific term, but preg tox is an energy deficit disorder. And I wanna labor this fact because I wanna labor the fact that leaving your triplets in with your twins, you are making the use vulnerable to this outcome, that is you keep 'em in an energy deficit for long enough, they start to catabolize their organs internally to keep buffering the fetus to the lamb to stay alive until the point that it kills the ewe. Now, I know they said last night I should go and survive and I should wipe off 15 to 20 kilos. I think they're spot on, but that'll be leaving Trompfy tied up and the feeding the water just outta reach for a few weeks too long. So be very careful 'cause again, the cause of death feeds straight back into what we found in our trial work. So keep that in mind as I go forward. But I wanna lighten the preso up a bit, now after giving you a bit of a rev up and talk about some benchmarks. So when we looked at the survey work and we said what if a farmer achieved overall survival of 70%? What's that breakdown to if his lamb survival for his single twin and triplet performance? You can see that there. If you're gonna get into the 90% club, you're gonna have to mark over 90 for your singles. You're gonna have to be marking sort of 175, 180 in your twins and over 200 in your triplets. There's not many people doing that, that's a real challenge. But if you're gonna do that in our Australian context, the only way you're gonna get there is by getting those ewe deaths right down. And particularly in your triplets because there's a real association obviously every ewe that perishes three lambs go by the wayside. So there's some benchmarks there to have a bit of a think about where you sit in in your operation. Now, I want to just explain a little bit of the, the consultation we did and what farmers were saying. Farmers were asked two key questions in this survey other than getting all their data was what do they rank as their top practices they currently apply on their farm for helping either triplet ewe or lamb survival? And and secondly they were asked what are the things they want us to spend our time researching? And what I wanna highlight here is you've had farmers that are banging the table saying mob size is important, feed on offer is important, condition score's important, shelter's important, so goes the list. But then when we ask what are you actually are practicing? So the average mob size was 52 for triplets, 134 for twins. But look at that range, they're banging the table and saying mob size is important but they're landing anywhere from 10 in a mob to 150 in a mob, that's chalk and cheese. So when we then interviewed the consultant, same thing. They'd bang the table and say this is important, this is important, this is important, but the variety in the message was like this. Some would say lamb, your triplet at 2.8 score a bit less than your twin and others are saying 3.5 to four score. So our task as researchers was to try and unpack where the truth laid. The numbers over here on the right, if you're wondering was we then sliced and diced the survey to say, well if mob size was one of your primary practices, were you fundamentally different to the rest in your whole farm performance? And the answer was no, but the reason that is 'cause they were practicing it with levels all over the shop. So they said it was important, but there was no clear guideline, that was our task. So we finally then got back with the teams of farmers and they told us clearly where their priorities sat. They wanted us to go after feed on offer and I'll come back and labor that one in a minute 'cause there was... Everyone said it was important, but there was miles apart in what people thought was the way to go. We went after food on offer mob size, condition, score minerals and we certainly did some work on this mixed versus managed. So if I rip into some of the results, 15 farms, mostly maternal's and we found no breed difference in the earlier lambing density works, that was okay. We didn't end up with an even split of Merinos and material, set up mob sizes comparing 20 in a mob to about 60 in a mob it says 64 there because by the time you set it up, match up the stocking rates, you know that's, that's how research works, but we got our difference We were chasing in mob size. The average was 3.2 score at the point of lambing and 1200 a FOO. I'll show you some results. So basically what you've got up the top left is the treatment trials and what's that's showing you is mob size had no significant impact on ewe mortality, wouldn't expect there'd be a big story to tell there. It did have a significant impact on lamb survival and marking rate. So I want to just explain the phenomenon a bit here so you're clear. The background work had shown us for every a hundred less twins in a mob was worth 5% gain in marking rate, that's what we learnt with twins. This is saying for 10 less use in a mob we're getting about 5% gain in marking rate. Triplets are 10 to 15 times more sensitive to mob size than his twins and they're in a different ballpark completely to singles. So it's part of why we're advocating that you need to set them up in their own right nursery environment. We trialed it in the mixed versus managed stuff and what we found and we did it on our own farm and other farms that when you blend these triplets in, they're out there in bigger mob sizes. The actual triplet-lamb survival within those bigger mobs was worse than out in mobs that matched the same number of lambs born per day but in triplets. So it's interesting, we need to give them privacy, we need to give 'em the opportunity to bond to these lambs. Ties back to our lamb loss cause of death, as does our next bit of work. Every one of these trial sites were assessed for shelter and the proportion of the paddock that was sheltered. We found a significant impact that for every 10% extra of shelter that delivered over a 10% increase in marking rate. Makes sense they're low birth weight, vulnerable to chill index, need to lamb them in a more protected environment, really important. Then we get to condition score. So I'm rolling through a few of these and we'll have plenty of time at the end to have a chat. 20 sites set this up, 10 Merino, 10 maternal. We had to get both breeds up to a minimum because we thought there'd be some differences and there were. so basically we grabbed hold of these ewes at the point of scanning. You can see in the maternal line they were basically 3.5 at scanning. We pushed the high fed group up and rationed the low fed and it meant there was about a 0.4 or 0.5 difference at the point of lambing. We did the same with Merinos. We couldn't get the high fed Merinos to gain any score, but we certainly took some off the lower. So it was about a 0.4 of a condition score gap, which is what we were chasing. There's a couple of key points I want to get across in this trial. At about day one 30 we controlled the nutrition from scanning to about three weeks out from lambing and then they're allocated to lambing paddocks at 1500. And I'm about to tell you that we saw significant impacts on your lamb survival, but I'm saying it'll be way worse again if you restricted them or made those differences closer to the point of lambing. These girls went out on easy street from three weeks out and we've still been able to identify treatment responses and it's an important point that I'll come back to 'cause the real risk of dying to preg tox is further post that time and we still found differences. So if we focus on the treatment trials in the top left, I wanna draw your eye to the Merino one only. Not only 'cause it's got a good story to tell, but it it just shows you how profound it is for them and then I'll explain the differences to maternal. So that 0.4 of a score made about two and a half times the difference in ewe mortality and about a 20% difference in marking rate. So huge difference. The maternal work, you look at that and you'll say at a treatment level, we should do what they say on Twitter. Just run 'em tough, turn 'em out with the twins, just run 'em tough. Well, interestingly, when we came off the treatment trials and look at all our data, 'cause every trial site had the same condition score assessments, we found the condition score change between scanning and day 130 of pregnancy does have a significant impact on ewe survival. We learned it at the, at the plot level in Merinos, but in the individual analysis it tells us it's there in Maternal's as well. They're not as sensitive, but if you want to negatively gear them, you'll kill 'em with preg tox as well. So keep that in mind when I get to the best practice guide when we work further in, I'll come back to that. Feed on offer, this was one where we got very passionate farmers telling us very different things. They would say feed on offer's important Trompfy, Johnny Keilor says don't put 'em on more than 1200. We want 'em to forage and spread out and eat. If you put 'em on two ton, they'll sit in the corner and eat, they'll all lamb on top of each other. So feeding on off is important but it's a lower target. Then another farmer would say, if they're not on two ton or more, you're wasting your time. My triplets, the ewes, the lambs will die. So we set up trials to compare that. We also set up a trial that I pushed for heavily based on the fact that triplet-bearing ewes in late pregnancy end up with rumen restriction. It's hard to consume enough energy dense feed to stop this preg tox death. So we fed the ewes, the high rations 500 grams a day of a cereal grain from day 120, up until when lambing commenced versus the low being 100. You can see that there's no significant impact of feed on offer on ewe or lamb survival, whether you lambed on 1200 or two ton and we had all the pasture compositions as well. Where we did find a significant impact was the provision of that little bit of grain lite to give that you an energy dense diet, made a significant difference and it makes sense biologically for this sheep 'cause you we're trying to get enough feed into them and she's really restricted at that stage. What didn't make sense is we didn't see a difference in the lamb marking rate emanating out of that, which is making scratch head, but that's trials. But it almost halved the ewe death and it's basically if you've got pasture, no one's practicing this out there at the moment. I think it's worth a look. Mineral supplementation, I'm not gonna go into it because we didn't get a result and I want to conserve my time for other things. Not to say though that you might not get a result in a different setting in a different circumstance. So I don't want to get stuck on that one.

Audience Member:

What are you doing... I'll come back to that in a question time. Yep, so what I wanna do now is quickly go through how our best practice guide's gonna be presented to you and it'll be under bigger issues like ewe survival or ewe mortality and same for lambs. So what I'm gonna walk you through is what is happening, when is it happening, why is it happening, how can we change that outcome and what's it's worth for us to do that? So they're not bad steps actually to think through in a few things, you know, with what's going on. So what is happening in this case with triplets is they're dying at about double the rate of our twins. When is it happening? Most of the losses in late pregnancy and throughout the lambing. What we know is that ewe condition score at the point of lambing is significantly associated with the survival of/or death of this ewe. One condition score lower at the point of lambing will increase ewe mortality in Merinos by three point a half percent. Same thing in maternal's about one point a half. They're less sensitive, but it's still significant when you think about it. If you go to a three score on a maternal, our average death rate's 5%. If you want shoot up here and look at three score in Merinos, I probably won't even quote the number. It's huge, so anything we can do to limit the loss of these ewes, you know is worth pursuing. So I've said what is happening? I've said one aspect when it's happening. The extra kicker though is in this slide, around the when is it happening and when it's happening is in older age, middle to older age Merino ewes, which is the solid line that's kicking up. The two solid lines are Merinos, the top ones, the triplets, the bottom one is when they're twins, the two dotted line is maternal's. So there's basically no significant impact of you age on you death in maternal for twins or triplets. On my own farm I've found it does sort of crank up after six years of age, but we got less and less data out this end. So what is crystal clear in Merinos is from four year old onwards, we're starting to really escalate the death rates in triplet bearers. So I think therein lies a question about what's the right decision for you with your older age Merinos, you're joining some six year olds, are they a group you maybe just back off on the flushing, don't swing 'em through the the loose end for two weeks before you join 'em, this sort of stuff 'cause you could be more twins into triplets and to watch 20% of your ewes perish. You need to do some back of the envelope on numbers to work out where you should sit. So we've said what's happening. We've said when is happening, but why is it happening? And I wanna repeat what I've already said, a triplet energy requirement in the last few weeks is about twice maintenance. They have this reduced room and capacity, yet if you wanna read Twitter at the moment it says just scan 'em mate and chuck 'em out with the twins. You got the twins locked up in the containment pen trying to build up your feed, which is all yesterday's news 'cause we've had a soft break this year, but next year we might not. We might have a mid-June break and everyone's got these sheep and I advocate this to people I work with, you know like "The man from Snowy River," hold, hold right to the 11th hour. So you break 'em out and you've got feet in your lambing paddocks. Do not do that with your triplets. Do not, contain your triplets beyond day 130. And if you do it in a communal environment with other sheep, have fun loading them onto the back of your trailer. Bust them outta the paddocks and make 'em walk. Ewe fitness is important as condition score. We want to make these ewe's walk, but be well fed. So don't do some of the same things we've been doing, and if you wanna hone in on this, a condition score loss in a Merino will increase the ewe death by about 4%, in maternal's about two and a half. So Twitter's telling you this is not happening. I'm saying that's bullshit based on our data. So I'm not saying it has to be a fat ewe project but be really conscious of what's going on here. And remember these sheep were being broken out of these nutrition treatments at day 130 to 135 at the latest and we still saw this. If you continue to hold and apply this treatment for another week or two, those numbers will go through the roof because that's the phase when preg tox is actually really kicking in, so be careful. So we've talked about what's happening, when is it happening, why is it happening, how are we gonna address it? So then again we go to our trial work. I'll put up the Merino stuff 0.4 of a score between our high and low fed. It was worth, you know, two and a half times impact on ewe death, so really worthwhile. So gaining half a score, you know, when we do all our analysis is it's worth at least 2% of extra ewes, gaining between scanning and lambing in 2% reduction in ewe death. Maternal's not quite as sensitive to that. The graph down the bottom, you can't see it, but it'll be part of our best practice guide. And it's saying what is their score at scanning and what's your options from that point on? What's it worth if you let 'em lose or let 'em gain? And the gradients of those graphs tell a story of our R & D. And then if we go forward from that, John Young sent me this slide. He's the economist behind the project last night and we start to bring in some of the economics and the preliminary estimate of scanning and differential management of triplets to hit their targets is worth about $20 per ewe and it pays once you're getting 5% of triplets onwards. But this is the point I wanna reiterate, if we leave the triplet in with the twins, she'll lamb about 0.3 of a score less than the twin-bearing ewe based on the feed budgets. But our research is saying we want her about 0.3 higher to start to optimize that ewe on lamb survival. So you get an idea of what we're promoting, we really wanna maintain that maternal weight of the ewe late to try and keep her alive. We'll have a similar best practice guide for the lambs and so on. Just in finishing, there'll be people in the audience interested in this, but at this point you've got no idea how many triplets you got. And I'm not being condescending in saying that because either your scanner can't do it, you haven't asked, you haven't got to it yet, all the different reasons that come in with adoption. So our survey work shows and I want you to just to focus on that 173. At 173 scanning, there's about 9% triplets, that's in a survey where farmers are putting in their data and a lot of the scanning isn't necessarily slowing down to get all the triplets. We then went to scanners and said what about if you send us in the data where you are really going after the triplets and doing your best to find everything that's there. If we focus on the true scanning rate of 173, in that case, it was 13%. So somewhere between 9 and 13% of your ewes are triplets at a 173 scanning. So what the best practice of guide will allow people to do is say what's my multiple scanning? What's my true scanning and how many triplets are under the covers? And then we'll take you through things that coach you through saying well what's my typical ewe mortality for a multiple ewe? And therefore what's really happening with the triplets? So you might have a typical ewes death in these multiples of five, but really that means 10% of your triplets are dying. So what we get this will allow you to do for my flock is to work at how many triplets I've got, how many ewes am I losing and lambs a similar process which I won't pause on that one too long. And then we can sit down and say times by what they're worth, what's the value of an extra triplet lamb, for example. What's your economic opportunity with triplets? And you might say I'm gonna park it for now. It's not my highest order priority, but what I want you to do is start to build the skills and the acumen and the disciplines to be able to make this work 'cause there's many of us that are at the point now that, you know, we scan over 20% of our used triplet. And the only reason I've ended up at that point, and I'm looking at Apsey right down the back after spending a lot of time with the MLA team, I got focused on my breeding objective and I've selected hard on number of lambs ween for 20 years. And as we've learned, it's a bit of a blunt ax. Whereas today you can go out and you can select for conception litter size or you raring ability. Unfortunately with number of lambs wean, the most heritable component is litter size, so Trompfy has reaped what he sow. So you know, we gotta work on that now and we can adjust our selection. Plus there's a whole heap of management things we've done that have promoted that as well. I'm not saying that's where you should be because it comes with some challenges, but the idea is for you to work out where this fits in your operation and in our pursuit of that few more percent extra year that Bully promoted, this is gonna become more of a challenge for more people. And you know, the world's watching what we're doing so let's get a ahead of the pack and be proud of what we do on our farms because we do give a shit. We don't just farm for profit. We farm for a whole range of reasons and I think this project can can help us to demonstrate that out on commercial farms, thank you.

Moderator:

Thanks Jason, really interesting numbers coming from your research. And if I may just summarize some of the key take home messages that I got from this. So mob size and shelter is important for survival of triplet lambs, correct?

Jason:

Tick

Moderator:

Yep, and survival is of the lamb is not only important but also survival of the triplet ewes.

Jason:

Yep.

Moderator:

So they need to maintain condition score and energy requirements through supplementary feeding that was the main take homes that I got.

Jason:

Righto, let's go to the questions.

Jason:

I think there was one right down here, supplemental feeding--

Jason:

So in the trials, so whatever we did in the high versus low feed, we did the same. So if they were self-feeders or trail feeding, it was the same within that site. But not every site did self-feeders and not every site did trail feeding.

Audience Member:

But you only fed them up until the day they were due to start lambing and then you cease feeding, so--

Jason:

So some fed for maybe three or four days longer 'cause, you know, a couple lamb and and stuff, others just were very concerned so they stopped feeding as soon as they fall the first lamb. But the idea of what we're trying to do is really provide an energy dense diet in that phase where we know it's a a real challenge. So really that project was kicking in when the condition score treatments were stopping, to be honest, though within a week or two of each other, not on the same site to be clear, but connectively, yep.

Moderator:

Any other questions

Audience Member:

Like, just related to that, I'm Sally. I would just like to ask because if you stop then didn't you say that pregnancy toxemia is still a risk for the first couple of days? So then they're coming back like they're you're changing their diet fairly quickly.

Jason:

Yep, so I appreciate what you're talking about there, and we were looking at survival from holding up that like a beer for your photo there Terry, we the survival numbers, you know, or that you mortality number we are comparing from scanning to lamb-marking. So we'd be picking up that bounce down phase you're worrying about. Ideally, it would be nice to be able to provide it or maybe have a tighter range of ewes, say they're lambing over two or three weeks that you're allocating it to, might help to minimize that. I get your concern. I think we definitely... We tried on our trial sites to keep providing he ration for a bit longer, but the challenge is even when you're doing it with self-feeders, the presence of that feeder and the animals coming to the grain has an impact on the community of the ewes and where they'll spread out and lamb in their paddock. So what we didn't want was the supplementary feeding to compromise that behavioral stuff. So we sort of picked a point that we thought we might bail out, reap some benefits and not too much downside. But I respect that if you can get to work in your sheep where you're providing the ration right through in your triplets, it's probably only gonna be advantageous and maybe we would've seen a bigger result, but that's not what we tried.

- Okay.

- Any other questions? While you're getting the microphone there, I really want you to work with your scanners, even if you're not jumping right in the triplet deep end. Too many of us have contractors come onto our farm and the tail's wagging the dog, all right. And I understand it's hard, it's hard to get labor and it might mean that Trompfy he loses weight 'cause he has to do himself if he upsets too many people, right, but for scanning it's an accuracy task. We want them to sit in the chair and count nought 1, 2, 3 nought, 1, 2, 3. It's up to us to present the sheep and keep the sheep up, but pay him an extra little bit of money if it takes that to get 'em to slow down to count nought 1, 2, 3. 'cause otherwise you get a half-assed result and we're gonna go back to seasons where our cost of managing ewes will be higher than in experience for the last two or three years. And if nothing breaks your heart more than you've worked hard on your feed allocation and you've blown up a single that shouldn't been in that group, whatever it is, it's an accuracy game, Joe.

William:

Hello, this is William. Just wanted to ask you whether there are some risk associated to get them to over condition, trying not to restrict them and during their late pregnancy and also for how long would you keep supplementing them after the beginning of lambing?

Jason:

Yep, so similar question, the last one to, was it Sally? Sally, in the trials we did, we basically stopped the feeding say about a week into the lambing in the trials we did. I've sort of discussed that one already. Your first question was about getting the ewes too fat. Is that right? So as far as getting the used to fat and I think I'm picking up on your question, but that's discussed a lot out in industry that that's the issue. You get these triplets too fat then they don't, don't walk, don't forage well at the end and they die anyway. We had some very fat ewes in our data set and we didn't see that issue. But what I would say is the people I've spoken to that have many years of triplet experience, their number one thing is keeping that ewe mobile. So I think part of the research in the future and a bit I'm really passionate about is this ewe fitness area. I'm digressing probably from your question, but the people with the smart sensors at the actually picked up an association with morbidity in my twin bearing ewes and lamb loss, being lack of movement and then lamb loss. This was in a data set about seven or eight years ago. So I think one of the things we wanna understand is the importance of, you know, if our wife scans twins, and I don't wanna sound crass, but we don't sit on the little couch and fill her for a bucket full of Tim Tams. Do we, we know she's still gotta go to the half and puff glasses. She's still gotta keep her fitness up, otherwise she's not gonna have her young and be able to get up and look after the young and the husband if he's a bit slack like Trompfy like the task is profound, right. And ewes, you have gotta do that out in your back paddock with the hail blown up their backside. So they've gotta be fit. So it's not a fat ewe project, but we do have to have to provide or meet that energy deficit gap 'cause if you don't, you are really compromising that you in the saddest way. Honestly, to understand that the sheep out there is metabolizing herself, eating herself from inside out to try and keep her lambs alive. I know we give a shit about our sheep and the solution is not leaving your triplets in with your twins or as Twitter says, put 'em in with your singles. The project is not advocating that, it's busy.

Audience Member:

Trompfy, how how do we get that fitness? So we are wanting them to keep moving. How much is enough? And in the winter time when it's wet, they don't need to go to a trough, how do we make them do some exercises without disturbing it.

Jason:

From my time of lambing in June, we can work it because often they are reliant on some supplementation and water, okay. So we make sure the resources are spread in the paddock. Gotta get out of this mindset where we're doing our feeding rounds and we want the cereal, hay, the grain and the water all in the one corner. So I get home quicker for a cuppa. These is attention to detail, spread 'em out, so they have to walk to their resources and maybe even walk to a different spot to some shade. So I think we can control that really well in the autumn, early winter phase. Do I have all the tricks of the trade in deep winter at Casadin? And the water's running outta the hills. Probably, I'm thinking there is maybe you ewes this grain supplementation a bit, make sure they're getting that energy density, try and feed it where we're getting them to walk. I don't know, you just study your paddocks. You don't want to put 'em in somewhere where they're just gonna set up camp. But we do, you know, for many of us in this room, and I am digressing a bit, but for most of our systems meat production per hectare is what we're chasing. How many ewes we run, how many lambs we mark, and how quick they grow. And you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear on shit pasture. You need sub clover content, you need soil fertility, you need grazing management. And none of that'll come by joining a cult where you lock up your pastures for long days of spell 'cause what'll end up happening is if that's your guideline meat production per hectare, you'll drive clover outta your system if you drop fertilizer input and grazing intensity and increase the spelling. And if you drop clover outta your system, you'll drop meat production per hectare. And while I'm relating it back to this topic, just so you don't think I'm having a rant, you're gonna kill ewes on preg tox if you put 'em out in paddocks with a bucket full of lignin like this. So, and I know you will have looked at Lemo's results on Twitter and he puts 'em in those riparian areas, it's perfect, but there's actually a fair bit of green in there. They're ultra low stocked, so don't bother taking a cattle budget where their lack of discerning mouth comes in and eats all that dry rubbish. A sheep is a really selective grazer. So he's providing a great lambing habitat, but they're still meeting close to their energy requirements in a sheep type that's not as sensitive. So I just want you to understand cause and effect is probably the message to you with things that are going on, down the back.

Moderator:

Did you wanna wait, sorry for the mic so that people can hear?

Audience Member:

Yeah, Jason, just wondering what about during lambing for these twins and maybe triplets, a large feed of lupins at the start of lambing for, you know, a really large feed right across the paddock?

Jason:

Yep, so what he's alluding to here is trying to get that energy in, but maybe not causing any acidosis and that's why he is jumped to lupins. The only thing where that doesn't work, it's probably not the ideal supplement. If you're running them on half decent pastures underneath that, that are already 30% clover and your rumen is already a washed with protein, whereas by feeding some starching at that point you're actually feeding energy dense. It's working for the ewe and it feeds the bugs in the rumen. So you're sort of doubling up on protein. I understand why you've jumped to that because there's less risk of acidosis, but it's probably not the ideal feed for a winter-spring lambing where you've got plenty of green feed and protein. I would be very comfortable with that if you are lambing in April, May and there'd be no break, that would be probably the go-to type practice. So, depends on your timing. Thanks for having me and sorry for being the mouth from the south, but I just wanna see you do great on your farms and, you know, that's what we're about at Bred Well And Kubes and the crew, I love working with 'em because they give a shit about you.

Alison:

Welcome, everyone. My name's Alison Desmond. I'm the program leader for BestWool/BestLamb. And welcome to Barber's Pole session. So if you've got a question about Barber's Pole, you need some advice, Lewis is your man. So Professor Lewis Kahn is a professor at the University of New England. He's also a private consultant. He's had many, many years experience in this. I don't think there's much he doesn't know about Barber's Pole. So happy for you to ask Lewis questions as we go along. If he feels like he needs to catch up, he'll just tell you to hold your questions. It is being recorded. So Louis will try and repeat the question, so everyone can hear. And if you get a bit chilly, come down the front and huddle up to keep warm.

Lewis:

Thanks, Allison. And welcome, everybody. I do really encourage you to ask questions along the way. I'm gonna give a talk on Barber's Pole. But I wanna make sure you walk away with information that's useful for you and actions that are useful for you. And so, that's why I really do need your questions along the way to make sure that we've got that captured. And as Allison said, if we happen to run outta time, like we did with the other group a little bit, then I'll just put the skates on towards the end. And hopefully, it won't be too hectic along the way. Now, I'm going to give a talk that first of all talks about the impact of Barber's Pole. You know, what do they do? What makes 'em so special? How do they respond to the environment? And we're not doing that because like this is, you know, a college class or uni class. 'Cause if we know that, we can out trick the little buggers along the way in terms of our management. So there's just a few things I want you to know about their life cycle. And then, we're going to go into the how do I prevent them? How do I detect them? How do I respond? 'Cause I was giving the talk something about Barber's Pole moving south. You know, keep 'em out, or control 'em, or something like that. It's an and thing isn't it? Like it's, and I want to keep them out and I want to control them as well. So let's crack on. So the first point's fairly straightforward. Barber's Pole Worm, death is the main cause of lost production. If you've got Scour Worms, sheep eat less. They produce less, you may get some scour. That's the issue. That's the problem with Scour Worms. Now, you do get some production loss with Barber's Pole, but the main production loss is death. So they don't produce much when they're dead. And that has a big impact. You can do lots of minus 5%s, 10%. But when you go to zero, it really starts to drag it down. So death is the main impact. Barber's Pole killed sheep because they suck blood. So what I've got here is a picture of a Barber's Pole Worm at the mouth end with what they call a lancet, or a knife. So they live in the true stomach, not the rumen, the forestomach. They live in the true stomach of the animal. They slit the lining of that and they suck blood. And they can suck, in a heavy infection, the whole population, 250 mils a day. So that's about five to 10% of their blood volume when they really get going. And so, what happens is the sheep responds. It starts to make more red blood cells. But it just can't keep up with the amount of blood that's being lost. So all of that blood loss out of the veins means all of the water all of a sudden starts to flow out of those veins. And because sheep spend more time head down, bum up, where does that water accumulate? Underneath the jaw. And so, the first visual thing, how do I know if I've got bottle jaw? If I've got Barber's Pole, I've got bottle jaw. You can get that with Liver Fluke as well, so that's not exclusive. But if we're talking about worm infection, I've got bottled jaw. If I'm losing blood, I've got lethargy, I'm tired. We don't have any oxygen carrying around. So I tend to collapse at the back of the mob. And we're gonna talk about the dog test, or the bike test. And ultimately, I'm gonna die 'cause I need blood to keep circulating around. And if I don't have enough of it, and I can't produce it fast enough, and I've run out of iron to produce the red blood cells, I'm dead. And if you're seeing that, it's the tip of the iceberg. Like with any animal health disease, most of the problem you don't see. It's below the ground. So when we're talking about mortality, if I'm now referring back to where I come from in the Northern Tablelands of the New South Wales, the Barber's Pole capital, if we're in a severe year, we may have 10% of young stock dying. So if you have got, let's say 10,000 weaners, that's a lot of weaners that can roll over in that one year, or you might have 6% across the flock. I'm not talking about lambing losses, just talking about Barber's Pole in those extreme periods. So it can have significant death. It looks like it's all of a sudden. But often it's been building for a period of time. There are some instances where you can go from nothing to death in 14 days. They're uncommon. They're sorts of horror stories that go down in the pub talk. They exist, but they're not particularly common along the way. And I've said that they have a very different impact on the sheep than the Scour Worms. There's thoughts that Scour Worms have been with sheep for tens of thousands of years. Barber's Pole's a much more recent introduction. So the sheep immune system is much less used to dealing with Barber's Pole Worm. So it's not a straightforward. A Scour Worm, typically, sheep get more immune as they get older. That's not necessarily the case with Barber's Pole Worm. So it's entirely different along the way. So if you were to look at the forestomach, so you've got a sheep you may have knocked over. If you've knocked it over to see whether I've got any Barber's Pole Worm, I've gone into the forestomach. I've got some bright sunshine. I've got my glasses on. I've got a knife. It's easy to see those Barber's Pole there in the forestomach. They're red, easily visible with the eye. They might be one centimeter, one and a half centimeters long. No problem at all. Nothing else looks like that in the true stomach. And they look red because they really got that Barber's Pole there 'cause the red, well, that's the blood in the gut of the worm. And the white, they're the eggs in the uterus. And so, they spiral around each other to give it the worm the name Barber's Pole Worm. And they're very fecund. That means the females lay a lot of eggs per day. They can lay five to 15,000 eggs per female per day. If you compare that to the worms that you are more familiar with, Black Scour or Brown Stomach, much lower levels of fecundity. You know, 100, 200. So what that means is that populations can build up really quickly. And we're gonna talk about that and how those environmental factors affect that. So this is the lifecycle. And I'm just gonna swing around that literally quite quickly, and then focus on one section that we're gonna spend a bit of time today talking about. So if we've got worms that sit within the true stomach of the sheep, those Barber's Pole females are laying eggs that get carried out in the feces. They develop through to infective larvae that live on the grass or in the soil. The sheep eat them. They become adults. And so, the cycle goes round again. That's the direct lifecycle, it's pretty simple. The bit I'm gonna focus on is this egg to infective larvae because they need temperature and moisture for that to happen. Yet, if there's no temperature and moisture, it doesn't happen. Yep, thank you

Participant:

Lewis, given the difference you outlined between Scour Worms, is selection for ASBVs around, which is still effective for Barber's Pole as for other worms?

Lewis:

Yes. Yeah, so the question was is selection for Australian sheep breeding values for negative worm egg counts still effective, given that... Very much so, yes. You get all of those worms, all job done in one. Unless you go minus 30 or more negative, you're not having a go, as Alex would say. So we're gonna talk about this period, this egg to infective larva stage. Thanks, Alison, I couldn't see the hand up there. If there are, just cooee out in case I can't hear you. Okay, so first thing in terms of temperature, Barber's Pole Worm need daily maximum temperatures over the 16 to 18 degrees for the eggs to develop. If it's under that, it's not gonna develop. Needs a minimum of 16 to 18. So what we've got here is temperature, maximum temperature. Don't worry about min, max, what happens if. Yeah, that complexity's in there. But the main message is just look at daily maximum temperature. And what we've got is development to L3. So we put 100 out and we got 100. And we can see that the hotter it gets, the more is the development to L3. And it kicks off around that 16 to 18 degrees. So I've put the monthly average... Sorry, the daily average maximum temperatures for each month there for Hamilton, Bendigo, Sale, and Armidale, Armidale just as a reference point in terms of we're the best about this in terms of Barber's Pole. The blue line is the threshold, 16 to 18 degrees to develop. Yeah, and we can see here we are in May, June, July, August. Red's Bendigo, for example, too cold to develop. So we know we're not gonna get any development during that time. So if I've got Barber's Pole now, well, where have they come from? They've come from back in the autumn when it was hot enough for those eggs to develop. So we're often managing something that occurs at a different stage of time. Now, how does the rainfall different? So we always have Barber's Pole. Some places of Victoria's understand the skip zone, for example, often does. But otherwise, it's more of a irregular problem. It might be whatever it is, one in 10, one in 15, whatever it is along the way. And so, I've got the average rainfall the month for those same locations. And as we already know, where's summer rainfall? So we happen to put together moisture and temperature to get development. Whereas, typically, you don't have that summer rainfall effect. And we're seeing it now because the last influence of the La Nina in terms of summer rainfall. So you've become much more like us just more recently in terms of Barber's Pole. And these parasites, they always exist. You know, you often wonder, you dig a ditch. You could be in a paddock of flares or a paddock of subclover. It'll fill with water. And over the years, you'll get reeds that'll grow on it. Something like that. The seeds are always around. It's the same with the parasites. They're just around at really low levels waiting for the environment to be right for them. That's why they've succeeded as a parasite. They can hang out there. Waiting for their time. So if you need 16 to 18 degrees, how quickly do eggs develop through to infective lava? 'Cause that's gonna influence our grazing management that we're going to get onto. And so, in this example here I've got temperature down the bottom, here, from 15 to 35. You can see it okay at the back? Yeah, good. On the vertical axis here, days to develop, none up to 10. There it is, 20 degrees, six days to develop. So if you get one 20 degree day in June, are the eggs gonna develop? No, they're not. Two, no, they're not. Three, no, they're not. Yeah, so we know from temperature where the eggs are gonna develop through to infective larvae. So now we're talking about, well, what's that likely to have on the future, yeah, on the future infection in terms of those paddocks? The next stage is for the larvae that already exists on pasture and soil, how long do they live for? And so, what we've got here is here's days of survival, naught up to 200-odd days. And if we put 100 larvae, for instance, on the paddock, and we had different daily maximum temperatures, and we said how long does it take for 50% of those larvae to die? Yeah, how long does it take? Well, if it was 30 degrees C, which is this brownie line, it'd take about 15 days. If it was 15 degrees C, it takes about 40 days. And if we want to go further and say, how long does it take for 90% of those larvae to die? So we've got a problem with Barber's Pole today. So came from last autumn. How far long ago was last autumn? That was probably only 90 days ago, so it's not a surprise. There's still gonna be infective larvae around. So if we're saying how long does it take for 90% of those larvae to disappear if it's at 30 degrees C, it's about 60 days. If it's 15 degrees C, it's about 120 days, four months. So you can get it, they don't last forever. You're gonna hear that frost kill larvae. No, they don't. You're gonna hear that larvae die more quickly in winter. No, they don't. They die more slowly. And the reason is those third stage larvae that come outta the pellet, they're wrapped up in a sheath. It's like they're in Glad Wrap along the way. They don't feed. When they're in the pellet, they're eating bacteria to become L3. So it's like putting a mob lambs on the loose in paddock. They're fattening up. And then, you're basically wrapping them up. The reserves they've got is all they've got. So the more they wriggle, the quicker they use up their energy resources. So the hotter it is, the more they wriggle. The more they wriggle, the quicker they die. And that's partly why the hotter it is, the shorter the length of time they survive on the paddock for. Is that okay? Okay. So if that's temperature, there's only two things we have to remember, 16 to 18 degrees and the number of days. Yeah, the hotter it is, the quicker they develop from egg to L3. They can't do a quicker than four days though. It's the quickest they can go. So if we look at water or fecal water content because they need also moisture to develop, what happens is the eggs come out in fecal pellets. There's plenty of moisture in those fresh pellets for them to start to develop. But they can't make it all the way through to third stage infective larvae, unless they had some rainfall, or you got wet soil. They need more moisture. If they don't get more moisture, you do not get development. Doesn't matter how hot it is along the way. So more is generally better. When it's hotter or the evaporation rate's high, you need even more moisture and as best closest to deposition. So what we mean is If you had an inch fall on fecal matter that had Barber's Pole Worm eggs in it on the day of deposition and measured how successful the eggs developed, or after four days, it'll be much more effective if it fell on the day of deposition. So it's also susceptible to timing. Now, the reason why Barber's Pole is more sensitive is the other worms, Scour and Brown Stomach, they can hang around in the fecal pellet. It's much safer in the fecal pellets, so it's like a protected environment. Whereas Barber's Pole are programmed. They're straight outta here. The talk finishes, straight out. They don't hang around afterwards. And as soon as they leave the pellet, they're much more sensitive over time. So what are some rules of thumb? You're gonna need at least 10 to 15 mils of rainfall for eggs to be able to develop through an L3, or wet soil. And these things, we're talking about in the paddock. There's never gonna be a hard and fast rule. You might be on a depression on the side of a granite rock, you know, where it's warm and moist as well. So stuff happens in the paddock. I'm talking about the broad brush stuff that all you can do. So you need at least 10 to 15 mils. But bear in mind, wet soil alone can be sufficient for them. So in summary, before we move on to some of the other stuff, we need those temperatures. Higher temperatures lead to faster development, egg to L3, 'cause it's the L3 infective larvae stage that is the problem that infects the sheep, that then develops through to the adult. We need water. We need more rainfall in terms of leading to more development. And it's most effective at the time of deposition. Any questions before we move on to the next bit, which is, how do we prevent it, detect it and respond? No? Okay, is that clear? All right, okay, rock on. So prevention means keeping it out. What do you mean with quarantine? I reckon there's two things. If you're borrowing sheep, and particularly, if they're coming from anywhere from central northern New South Wales, assume they've got Barber's Pole, and assume they've got drench-resistant Barber's Pole Worm. I'm not just saying that, it's real. So assume they have. And a quarantine treatment that WormBoss will suggest is to drench with four drench group. So a drench group is like the clear drenches, the white drenches, the mectins. Yep, I'm seeing lots of nods. Four drench groups, so what could that look like? It could be a Q, for instance, with Startect or Zolvix. There's even more than four. It could be a triple, ideally with Amoxie rather than Abamectin, we'll talk about that in a moment, with Startect or Zolvix. And then, put those sheep in a secure paddock for one to three days. We're waiting for the feces to move out of the sheep, being deposited on that paddock over time. Then we're looking... And if you've only got small numbers, like you've gone and bought some rams, put 'em in a shed or put 'em in the yards. Don't put 'em on grass where sheep are gonna graze. Then release the sheep onto a paddock likely to be wormy. Why do we do that? Well, any survivors of that treatment, 'cause you don't know yet how effective that's gonna be. We're throwing the kitchen sink at it. Any survivors, we want them to be diluted by the worms that are already on your farm. Meaning we don't want those resistant worms to dominate the population. We want them to be the minority. That's why we're putting them into a wormy paddock. And then, we're worm testing those sheep after 14 days. Did it work? Did my quarantine treatment work? Can I now start to mix 'em and move them around as well? Now, if that seems like a big hullabaloo, it is. But that's the reality of trying to keep drench-resistant Barber's Pole off the farm. And now, if I compare the drench-resistant status of Victoria winter rainfall and northern New South Wales, I've accessed the Virbac Tridectin Portal that's just online. There, they've keep their drench-resistance tests. They cut them after five years, which is really important. You don't want to be looking at 10-year-old data along the way. Who knows how relevant that is. There are 14 tests for Victoria here and 32 tests for northern New South Wales. What we've got is the different drench groups along the bottom and the efficacy against Barber's Pole. I'm not talking about Scour Worms here today. This is just Barber's Pole. The higher, the better. And what strikes me is if I'm in Victoria, then on average, my drenches are more effective than where the sheep are coming from if they're coming from anywhere north of the border, particularly, central to northern New South Wales. Okay, so if we look at then the more recent products, and they're over 10 years old now, Startect and Zolvix, you can see... I just want you to look at the blue. So on average they're sitting about 90%. But there are not uncommon where farms, where Zolvix, Zolvix Plus is down at 40% lower, another farm 20%. Startect is down as well. So when I'm here saying these are the quarantine practices, these are the quarantine practices you should be using. It's not just trying to make a problem where there isn't one that exists 'cause at the moment... Alex had a really good talk this morning. He talked about an industry that's moved a long way. And all of a sudden, are we now the bunnies sitting in the road and we seeing the truck coming? Well, drench resistance is that big semi trailer coming down the road, and it's coming. All we can do is slow the development of resistance. Slow it, we can't stop it. Slow the development of resistance along the way. So if I'm you and I'm sitting south of the border, then I'm applying those quarantine practices 'cause you can see on average. Now, I want you to look also here about Abamectin in Victorian winter rainfall against Barber's Pole. it's only 15% efficacy, 14 tests. It'll vary from farm to farm. It's not gonna say all farms are like that. Moxidectin, it's got its own problems. But it's at 60%. I was saying to the other group, you know, if I'm in a front row in the scrum, and I'm the loose head prop, I want my tight head prop, the third member of my triple to be 60% effective, not 10%. 'Cause otherwise, they're not pulling their weight in that front row. So when you do a drench test every three years, like I know if I asked you, I want to you ask you to put your hand up, 'cause everyone's hand will go up, a drench test every three years. Then we want them done on individual groups. 'Cause if you just go and test the triple and see how it's 99%, but we knew that the Levamisole, 'cause it does pretty well down here against Barber's Pole was 99, yeah? And the Aba was buggered, and the albendazole was buggered. It's not really a combination anymore, it's a single active. Unless we test single active single groups, we've got no idea in terms of where we are in use of combinations. Okay, so let's prevent here. Now, we want to be able to detect it. So there's the first one, it's the obvious one, it's your experience. Just your stock people you know. When stock are not necessarily behaving in the same manner, you're looking at those sorts of things on the side that we'll come to. But the reliable method also is worm testing. So you generally gonna collect 10 samples for a worm test. Yeah, WormBoss says 20 in Scour Worm areas. We say 40 with Barber's Pole. Why do we say 40? 'Cause individual worm egg counts can be much higher. So one animal can skew the sample much more. You can get cheap with 30,000 EPG, easy. 100,000 I think is the lab record at the university. There might be 110,000 still alive at that time. So some work we did was up here just to make that point. We had 500 sheep where we took a worm test on every individual animal 'cause it was part of the research project, four, five more times than that. Then, in essence, just on the computer, we said, what if we sampled 10 sheep, 20 sheep, 40 sheep, 60 sheep? The more we sample up to 40 for Barber's Pole, our accuracy improves meaning that the result we get back is a close match to the true value for that whole mob. And the precision improves. Meaning if I went and sample 20 sheep here, and then got the result, and sampled 20 sheep there, they're quite similar. So we need to consider sampling more. Now, you've got a lot of good diagnostic labs in Victoria. They're probably gonna hate me and hate you by saying you need to sample more. And I'm not even going to the role of the bulk test down here 'cause you guys do what you do. But if you don't have a culture, you don't know. Now, you might say, "Well, they've been ticking along at 150, all of a sudden, there are 2000," that's probably Barber's Pole and probably is. Or you can get a culture. And the last group said it takes 14 days to get a culture back, typically, from the labs here. And often, that's too late. And I accept that as well. The comment came as well, "Well, I'll knock a sheep over and see if I've got Barber's Pole in the true stomach." That's fine, but that's one sheep. It's not the whole mob. And so it's, how do you put that together? That's that's the thing that you've got to work on. If you're in the Barber's Pole season, and I've been told that probably should be October through to April, rather than January through to April to better capture the whole regions, then you'd be testing if you see those things there, particularly, those showing signs of Barber's Pole Worm during wet summers and irrigation. And signs, w`e talked about the bottled jaw here. We're talking about the anemia in the lower eyelid. I think I've got a better photo here. So you see the gentle push down of the top on the eye, slightly pulling down on the bottom to expose the lower eyelid. That's what a healthy sheep looks like. They're nice and pink. This sheep had a worm egg count of 31,000, all Barber's Pole, and it's looking pretty anemic along the way. Don't do that. Don't pull... And you're showing the third eye. See it coming out from the corner? hat always looks pale. This is a gentle thing. It's not a bloke thing, you know, where you're pulling it down and pushing the damn eyeball out of the head. It's just gently pushing down on the top to look at the lower eyelid. And then, of course, if you've got a handy working dog, like this fella here or you've got a a bike, you've got that exercise intolerance. Remember, they're sucking blood. They don't have enough oxygen pumping around and they tend to drop and lag. And so, you're relying on all of those things. You know, it's that classic head, heart, and gut. Worm tested the evidence. This is the experience as well. And the heart might be, I'm going away on holidays. So I need to do something as well. Okay, so what's our response then? And if we wanna slow the development of resistance, we have to use effective products. We've talked about that. They have to be used in combination and ideally short-acting, depending on how regular Barber's Pole is for you. And I'll get onto that. So you need modeling to show what's the impact of using drugs either as a single active, so you know that's either Abamectin on its own or a clear on its own, or as a dual active. That might be something like a DuoCare, for example, so a clear white combination, or a triple active along the way. And what we see is that if you used a single active, the blue line, for every drench, after 10 years, you've got resistance levels at high, well above 80%. Drench isn't gonna work. If you've used them in triple, the resistance is still very low. Now, this assumes when on day zero they're all 100% effective. Now, that luxury's gone. We already looked at the drench resistance profile across farms. You might still have it on your farm. But on average, it's gone. But the principle still holds. We wanna use drugs in combination in order to slow the development of resistance. Australia leads away on this. You can't buy many combination drugs in other countries. You want to use them in combination because it slows the development of resistance. And we want them to be effective, going back to the need to be able to do drench tests ideally every three years. So if you've got Barber's Pole as an occasional issue, you know, you're one of those places where it's only when I get a wet summer, I've had my three years, or I've had my one year, then you might find a lot of value about using a Closantel treatment if you now detect that you've got Barber's Pole. Could be in the form of Closantel. if you can buy it here, it could be in the form of Ivermec Dual. We're not really valuing the Ivermectin component of that 'cause it's gonna give you four to six week protection if Closantel is effective against Barber's Pole on your farm. Now, I can't answer that in terms of without knowing that along here. But it's generally a safer bet down here. For example, in WA, which is much like here where it's only a occasional problem, they find that a Closantel treatment can solve the problem for a few years. You've got a problem because we've had La Nina. Yeah, and we've had wetter summers and normal. So moisture and temperature have gone together. So if this is an occasional problem, that's good for persistent control. We're not so worried about resistance 'cause it's only an occasional use. If Barber's Pole Worm is a regular issue for you, we're in this part of the slide. And we've talked about short-acting, effective combinations. And beware of if you're using a combination with Abamectin, we really want Moxidectin in there. Not that it's ideal, but it's a better tight head prop than what Abamectin is as well. Any questions on that before I move on, yeah?

Participant:

Yeah some products say on them 50 grams and others got 37 grams. So is it gonna be one's gonna be a month and one's gonna be six weeks, or how does it work?

Lewis:

Just read the label, whatever they say for their protection. And that's assuming susceptible larvae 'cause the first thing we see with resistance isn't the knockdown, it's the shortening of the persistency of it. So I can't remember which one's the 37.5 or the 50.

Participant:

I think Q drench is 37.5.

Lewis:

It's a really good point. Q has no claim for persistency. Q will not give you any persistency against Barber's Pole from the Closentel that's in it. And that will give you six weeks with an ESI of about 100, or 80 days, something like that.

Participant:

So what don't they make that as well?

Lewis:

Well, that's a question for the pharmaceutical groups that are, that might be in here today or may not be in here today. Why don't they do lots of things? Yeah, this is a commercial world. Any other questions, yeah?

Participant:

What's your view on long-acting ? Do you think that's putting out selection pressure on Barber's Pole?

Lewis:

Yeah, did everyone hear that question? I thought it was pretty loud. Yeah. Yeah, it puts out a selection on... They're wonderful products, persistent products, beautiful products. But there's this thing on the tail. And that's why we came up with the exit drench, head drench, that came out of talking with us. You know, and all that does is it slows the development. But it gets more complicated now doesn't it? You know, I don't just put one drench in, I've gotta put then three drenches in, 'cause I want to do a head and I want to do a tail cover. Anytime you use a persistent drug at a time of year where the temperature and moisture allowed development puts more pressure on resistance. So what we tend to do, we can't use Cydectin LA pretty well in New England 'cause you find a place that it works on. Occasionally, you do. But a lot of places, it doesn't. We use it in the autumn. So we position it just before the winter, and I'll get onto that, to make our winter period longer. So yeah, great products. You know, you're not getting as long of control with your Black Scours, you know. But you pay the price. Okay, how much longer have we got, Alison?

Alison:

14 minutes.

Lewis:

Oh, we're good. Okay, so now I'm gonna rock back to... You know, we talked about the impact of temperature and moisture on development. Now, how do we use that information? If we want to avoid those infective larvae, it's called grazing management. It's pure and simple. And so, it means having a short graze period. So what was the quickest time eggs to go to L3? Four days. So if I move my sheep out of the paddock within four days, they can't be infected by the eggs that got deposited in that grazing cycle that may have started to develop to infective larvae. And by the time I rotate around to them, some of them have already died, yeah? That's it. We want a long rest period because we want larvae to die off as much. Now, we've got a problem. But I want to use my pasture. I don't want it rank. I want high quality pasture. So it then comes into the issue of, well, do I have any cattle on my farm? Can I have a grazing management plan where the sheep have got a long rest period, but the cattle will come in between. So the paddock might be being grazed every 30 days, however frequently you need to graze down here. But the first point is you're gonna say, "Oh, that's more planning," or, "What do you mean fewer mobs, more paddocks. That's too hard." Well, if it's too hard, too bad. You know, that's the issue. If you want to avoid effective larvae, then you need to take up some sort of grazing management approach. I'm gonna get on the last slide. We've already had the question about the worm egg count, Australian sheep breeding values, which are effective. But grazing management, and I'll show how it is a effective tool as well.

Participant:

What about the transfer of Barber's Pole from cattle to sheep?

Lewis:

Good question, so what about the transfer of Barber's Pole from cattle to sheep? Barber's Pole can infect calves. But once calves are weaned, take it that they're immune to Barber's Pole. And even for those calves, they're not particularly effective in terms of pumping out. They will put out some Barber's Pole Worm eggs. But overall, I tend to think, well, that's sort of like a minor rounding era. Cattle are still largely, do not cycle sheep worms. Although, the calf thing with Barber's Pole is true. Yeah?

Participant:

I imagine that cattle have the same quarantine drench procedure? You can be bringing cattle from a... I mean, that be risky. They carry it down.

Lewis:

Yeah, your risk from anyway. It's not just New England. Northern Rivers is also a hotbed for cattle drench resistance. And we're seeing that more and more as well. They're just playing catch up. Yeah, the cattle guys, as they always are. So any other questions? Yep?

Participant:

At this time of the year, what's the rest period for pasture to try and minimize the time of, maximize the time of death?

Lewis:

Okay, so just, yeah. So let's work on 15 degrees C.

Participant:

Next one, okay.

Lewis:

Yeah, we said four months would knock out... Four months would knock out 90%

Participant:

Four months?

Lewis:

Yeah, it's a long while. Yeah, that's why that first point, there are more planning. As soon as you talk grazing management, it's like there's a big pause in the room. Isn't there something I can take with a silver bullet, rather than having to do all this planning stuff?

Participant:

Better at... You know, their immunity is stronger and achieve stronger immunity .

Lewis:

No, possibly, not with Barber's Pole. It's indiscriminate. And also, it can be highly susceptible. The only way to guarantee that is to keep putting that pressure on worm egg count ASPV to drive resistance up, host resistance up, and therefore, worm egg counts down. But immunity development to Barber's Poles a tricky beast. So I won't go into it. If you want talk afterwards, happy to. But it's not as as as predictable as with Scour Worm. Yeah, okay, so we talked about grazing management, as an example... This is just an example. I'm not suggesting you do it at all. We had some work. About 20 years ago, we brought some techno from New Zealand in. Essentially, is creating lots of paddocks. They're moving the sheep from one paddock to the next. And that's the worm egg count. These are Merino lambs. These are worm egg counts of Barber's Pole at weaning from ewe, lamb systems that were either set stocked, or in that grazing management system. Don't need to read the numbers out. It's a big drop in 2003. And then what we did, these were run at about seven or eight years to the hectare. We pumped it up to, I think it was 12 or 13 ewes per hectare. Because you always hear, don't you, that stocking rate dries more worm infection. It's not, it's the exposure to the larvae that drives a worm infection. If you're set stocking, it does. But if you're in a rotation, it doesn't necessarily do that as well. So it works. Whether you can make it work in your system, whether you've got those other aspects, I understand that's a serious consideration for you to take on.

Alison:

10 minutes.

Lewis:

Oh, luxury today. So one of the ways that we use winter, and you might consider just changing this calendar clock a little bit for your own environment, you're used to the concept of smart grazing for preparing weaner paddocks that came out in Mackinnon group. Paul Nevin, Norman Anderson, John Larson, et cetera. Yep? Yes or no? Yeah, good. Okay, well, this is sort of like on a similar event, but in terms of preparing lambing paddocks. So we've already gone into the fact that during those months, May, June, July, August, too cold to develop. Yep, so it doesn't matter what you do on those paddocks. You could put the sheep with millions of Barber's Pole Worm eggs on there. Most of 'em, vast majority of them aren't gonna develop. So it doesn't really matter what happens. It's too cold for development. So basically, it's business as usual. We don't have to move things around. But if I want more than 90% reduction in Barber's Pole Worm, 'cause remember, this is a big number game. If I've got 10% of a big number and the analogy is silver grass. Silver grass got a lot of seeds per square meter, doesn't it? A lot of seeds, so you can get effective herbicide control with 90%. You still got a lot of silver grass left behind. It's the same thing here. You've got a big number to start with, 90%. Four months, not enough. If you've got a small number, it's a really good strategy. So we stick another two months on there. And you talked about Cydectin LA. So if we stick it in the beginning of those months, sure, there's some development here, but it's slow. And by the time we're in today, 61, when even with the resistance, we start to see it breaking down. Those resistant eggs now don't develop 'cause it's too cold. So we really minimize the impact of using a persistent drug by using the cold period after giving the persistent drug. We then put those two together and get six months. And what I show with the bottom red line is all of a sudden we've got a 95% reduction in terms of Barber's Pole larvae that are on paddocks. Now, that calendar thing, you might say, "Well, I don't lamb in September. I might lamb earlier than that." Well, just clock it around. A lot of things in this are very much regional dependent. And that's why I really enjoying the questions that you ask to make sure it applies to your region. What's the theory here? Many of your regions, and with us, we get four months free where it's too cold to develop. So you don't have to change anything you do. But four months isn't enough generally to lower Barber's Pole Worm egg count. We want another couple more. How are we gonna get them? I can either not graze those paddocks. I could drench them and after 21 days, move them out. If I've still got a persistent drug, I'll position it there, rather than at lambing time. And that's what we try to do up in the Tablelands, but are mindful that we are managing this the whole time. For many of you, it's just an occasional problem. So you may be targeting Scour Worms, as opposed to Barber's Pole Worm. And so, this is the classic Paul Nevin stuff. You know, where you did your weaning paddock response. I won't go through that. But they showed very nicely you cut more wool, heavier lambs, fewer worms. Justin Bailey did exactly the same thing up in the New England, where he took that three times stocking rate with effective drenches in January and March. Put some ewes and lambs onto in September. And then at weaning time, the ewes had cut more wool, the lambs were three kilos heavier, and he didn't have to drench any of the ewes or lambs that went onto the paddock that had that smart grazing treatment. So all of these strategies just rely on us knowing, what's the relationship between temperature and moisture for development and survival? We can plan whatever management we, response we want on your own farms just by knowing those two different things. So for those where Barber's Pole is a regular problem, then Barbervax. It's the first vaccine against strongyle parasites that's produced in the world. I've got a conflict of, or declare conflict of interest. I'm involved in the company on the Board. But it provides a non-drench approach in terms of managing Barber's Pole. Vaccination will be about 60 to 70% effective. So it's not a solution on its own. How it works is we provide one first vaccination, second vaccination, third vaccination, it becomes effective. So protection only starts after the third vaccination. And then, revaccinated, the interval is really as required by worm egg counts. Once immunity is reached here, then we can easily have at least 18 months or longer in between vaccines. And they still have that memory immune response in order to be able to respond to the next vaccine. It's part of the toolbox. If you've only got Barber's Pole irregularly, it's not a strategy for you. It's not gonna be cost effective for you. If it's a regular problem and you want to reduce the number of drenches that you're using... I've got a number of clients now that will go all summer with no drenches and just relying on vaccination. That's very useful. It's not cheaper at all. It's a way that we can preserve our drenches. 'Cause for vaccines to work, we need to have effective drenches. They're all part of the same toolbox. So in conclusion, quarantine, try and keep out any Barber's Pole Worm. We talked about detection and and using short active, effective combinations. Just a little bit of understanding about temperature and moisture for development helps us think about, how do we design a strategy that fits my farm, whether you've got cattle cropping or whatever else you've got along the way. And that last point is not there because it's trivial. It's there because I dearly hope that that's a message that we're all pass. And everybody who uses ASBVs chooses rams that are at least minus 30 or more in terms of worm egg, Australian sheep breeding values for worm egg count. Thanks, Allison.

Alison:

Thanks very much, Lewis. We've probably got time for one or two questions before the bell goes. And after the bell goes, it is lunchtime. So if you do wanna talk to Lewis, you've got time. I've had someone ask me about the recording. So it will be recorded. And it will be emailed out to you to let you know when it's ready. It'll take, I dunno, I'm hoping two or three weeks just to edit them all, but you will get the recordings. And they'll come out. Any questions? Yep?

Participant:

Just your question. Isn't there any more prevalence of Barber's Pole down this way due to the cooler and wetter summers we've had, the last three? It seems to me anecdotally, as a farmer, that it's getting around a bit more.

Lewis:

Well, Trumphy invited me, so I guess the answer is yes. I don't know, you'd have to talk to the various labs, whether it be Livestock Logic, or Dave Hucker's lab, or whoever in terms of knowing that there are others here that might make a comment on it. I dunno that, but certainly you start to get wet summers and you're gonna get more Barber's Pole. In terms of Barbervax, we've see in the last few years a lot more sales into southern New South Wales, where we didn't see that before. So we know it is starting to stretch. Whether it's just La Nina, whether there's some changing climate, we'll see. You know, we heard last night that the late drought, what was it? The late break workshop, it had rained on the day. I'm presuming we're just about to have some dry summers given we've had a talk on Barber's Pole. Any other questions? Yeah, there's a question here, Allison.

Participant:

What was the vaccine worth a shot?

Lewis:

Yeah.

Alison:

I think they got it.

Lewis:

Yeah, what's the vaccine worth a shot? I think it's about 80 cents per shot.

Neil:

All right, all right, to make a start, I'll just introduce myself, Neil James. I work with Agriculture Victoria out of Ballarat. And before anyone says about the weather in Ballarat, I reckon it is bloody cold up here today than what it is in Ballarat, maybe not. My pleasure to introduce Lisa Miller. I had the pleasure in working with Lisa for some 20 years in Agriculture Victoria, although she was a bit further south. She's now working with Southern Farming Systems on pastures and livestock and also, I believe, doing some lawn trials as well, which I've had the pleasure of seeing. So she's a very knowledgeable person when it comes to pastures and lime and fertilizer and soils in general. So I'll hand it over to Lisa.

Lisa:

Okay, thanks, Neil. And thanks for everyone for coming to this session. I'm a bit of a fan of sub-clover and I think some of that inspiration and some of that, I suppose, importance of sub-clover came to me through Peter Schroeder who was an advisor at Hamilton. Unfortunately, he passed away recently, but he was even bigger fan than me and he had a book and he called it "Clover." And I do remember that it pretty much, no matter what the conversation was that I had with Peter, he always seemed to mention the word Trikkala to me because he was a big fan of the Trikkala sub-clover and much to the hate, I suppose, of most of the seed growers. Oh, it was the only one that he used to talk about. Anyway, so it's fitting, I suppose, that we've got this session on sub-clover. So pre-COVID Southern Farming Systems was contracted by MLA to create some, I suppose, to modernize some of the information on pastures and trying to make them a bit more exciting. And we sort of developed four packages to do with pastures. And today, I'll be presenting mainly the information from the sub-clover package, but I will touch a little bit on the information in the productive pasture package as well. So if you want any of the information from these fact sheets that I'm speaking about today, they're all on the MLA website. They're also on our Southern Farming Systems website or you can email me and I can send you a document that links to all of the different packages and fact sheets. Okay, so why does sub-clover drive animal production? Well, the first reason is that it's very high in feed quality. And from this table, you can see that it's got really good energy content. These feed test values were taken in spring time in about September, and we've also sort of managed to sample the burr and the seed within the burr. And you can see that even that burr has really high protein content for that time of the year and the seed as well, which is obviously why these sheep love to try and find it and eat out that seed. But that's certainly something that we don't want them to do is taking away from our potential seed bank. And I'll talk a bit more about that. Now, the other reason why, I guess, sub-clover so good for animal production is that it actually breaks down a lot faster in the rumen than even our grass species. So it means that the animals can eat more pasture if they've got good content of clover in there. And by being able to increase their intake, that means more potential animal production. So you can see the graph here. We've got our x. Our y-axix is our intake and we can sort of see the increase in clover content. And with that, we can see how you intake increases with that increasing amount of clover content. And with that, we can get, oh, that's the ewe intake. And with that, we're getting slightly higher ewe weight increase, and also the lamb benefits a little bit as well from that by them being able to eat more clover and having clover in the system. So it's a little bit better for animal production than our grasses. Obviously, our grasses are providing the bulk of the feed intake though. The other reason why we love it so much is because it fixes nitrogen and that's what drives our grass growth and also helps our grasses tiller and spread out. And that's something that's pretty important for persistence and that's something that, I guess, Jim Verona spoke about this morning in terms of the importance for our pasture production in terms of having good phosphorus levels there. If we get good phosphorus levels, drives our clover production and that provides us with our nitrogen. Okay, so I guess one of the overarching tools that we had in our pasture packages that we developed for MLA was on assessment. It was this pasture paramedic. If we're gonna be making any decisions about pastures, we need to first know what's there in the system. So we have to assess what's there. We've developed this kit of information. It involves a little quadrant. We've got a little recording book and a little support manual in there. On the green face of the quadrant, we assess pastures during early winter and early spring. Oh, in winter and early spring. And we have a yellow face of the quadrant that's for assessing pastures in summer and early autumn. So I'll just go through a little bit about the assessments that we're taking using our pasture paramedic because a couple of them are related to our clover. So I guess pasture paramedic, it's a process of quickly assessing our pastures just like a paramedic might quickly assess your condition if you're unfortunately in an accident and it's to make a quick decision. In this case, we're using it to work out whether we're assessing our pasture condition to work out, whether we need to resow it, whether it's fine as it is or whether we need to manipulate it. So on each of the side, on each of the face of the quadrant, there are three critical assessment factors. One's on the amount of sew and grass that's there and we assess that and then we score it based on how much is there. We do the same thing for sub-clover and we're looking for a score of about four with our sub-clover. We're wanting to see at least getting either a score of a three or a four, which is at least 30 to 40% sub-clover. And then there are different versions of the pasture paramedic tool available. This one's in the high rainfall area. And in this case, we're assessing the dominant weed that's there and that dominant weed is reflective of the grazing value that weed contributes to the pasture 'cause we recognize that not all weeds are equal and some do provide a valuable source of for us, particularly in early autumn. So once we do that and score all of our scores together and we've written them down in our little recording book, we add them up, and that'll inform a decision whether that's maintained, what's there, considered pasture manipulation because we have got some species there, but we can do better or we need to resow because we either haven't got that grass content there or maybe that's sub-clover content either. But to make a good stable pasture, we're probably looking at 70% improved grass, perennial grass, and at least 30% sub-clover to try and keep those weeds out and to keep that nice productive persistent pasture. So once we go through our tool of assessment, we might find that we've got low sub-clover content. But before we start to think about, okay, how are we going to increase our sub-clover content? We need to kinda know if it's estrogenic or not 'cause that can affect our shape fertility. So we do know that some of these estrogenic clover is still hanging around in our systems and that's because a lot of them are early flowering. So they've always had a chance to set seed and a couple of them dwelling up and dinning up are quite hard-seeded and that's allowed them to set seed. And Yarloop is one that we do can often find and that's still in our systems because that's sort of suited to waterlogged soils and we certainly got a few of those down in Southwest Victoria. So one of the, I guess, resources that we had to develop is a fact sheet on how to identify sub-clover cultivars or varieties. And that was because we pretty much knew that none of us could identify them and we had to try and find. It was very few people could identify the different cultivars of sub-clover. We needed to really know what was in our system. So what we did is that we developed this fact sheet, and it's not to make you an expert in identifying sub-clover cultivars, but to just help you sort of narrow down what you might have. And what it's got in it is a really handy table of trying to narrow down into six different groups, what we've called six different groups of types of sub-clover. And they're based on it, they're some of their characteristics. So in the table, we're looking at three easily distinguished characteristics to try and narrow down into these six groups whether runners are hairy or not, whether there's a red stripe on the flower or not, or whether there's a green or red markings on the stipule. So they're pretty easily identified and that'll get you into your groups. And then within the groups, we've got the estrogenic clovers written in red. So if you land in a group with a red one, what you can do then is go to that table. And I can't read. That must be the hairy red group up there 'cause it's got the red stipule and the red flower and the hairy runner. And then what you can do is go into that table. There'll be more information on all those different cultivars and their distinguishing characteristics and also pictures of their leaf markings. And then hopefully, you might be able to narrow down to what you might have in your paddock. Okay, so once we've ruled out, I suppose, that we haven't got our estrogenic clovers and we're wanting to improve the clovers that are there, we have to try and work out what might be some of the reasons why we've got poor sub-clover content in the first place. So we developed this fact sheet called How do I determine why my sub-clover is underperforming? We've also got a fact sheet like this for our perennial grasses as well. We also have a good one as a decision guide on whether to use herbicide in the pasture or not. That's quite a handy little fact sheet as well. So I'm just gonna run through the reasons for poor sub-clover. We've got this little chart and it's a rule in/rule out chart. We have different factors that we need to consider. The first one that we've got there is seasonal conditions. So we go through. Has there been repeated poor spring finishes or years of falls or late autumn breaks? And if it's a yes, we come across to here and we can do a little bit more further diagnosis work and if that does sound right. We have a scratch in the soil. See if we've got any seed in the soil, trying to get an idea on that seed bank, whether that's still around or if that's the reason why we were not getting our sub-clover coming back. If that's not the reason, then we go no. The next lot of factors that we go down into is soil condition. So these are the factors for soil condition that we look at. And you can see that Olsen phosphorus level is right up there at the top. It's the most important one of why we often seek sub-clover not in the system. And what this chart, it's not about trying to make the most, it's not the critical factors that I guess that Jim Verona spoke about this morning that we're aiming at getting the highest production possible. The factors that are written up here in this fact sheet, they're the factors where the sub-clover starts to drop out of the system. So at an Olsen phosphorus level of less than eight, we know that through research that sub-clover will disappear out of the system. And also, for a pH level or soil acidity level of 4.3 in calcium chloride, we know that sub-clover will still be in the system because it's very acid-tolerant, but it won't be well-nodulated at all. It won't be fixing nitrogen. So it'll be drawing nitrogen from what's in the soil rather than creating it, which is what we want it to do in our pasture system. So what we can do is some sort of further soil tests. We can look at our plant roots to see if they're well-nodulated. If it's none of these things, then the next thing we look at, the most important thing will be molybdenum. And I had someone that came up to me in the last session where I just presented the same talk. They were speaking about that they'd been putting out a lot of lime and Moly together and they'd ran into issues with copper deficiency. So we never put out Moly and lime together. When we generally get low soil pH, molybdenum becomes less available. So if we put on lime, that makes molybdenum more available. But sometimes people will just put out Moly regardless because it's not as expensive as lime and that can help lift levels. But generally, it's a good idea to put out Moly and copper together because often we don't know if we're gonna induce a copper deficiency or not. So there are a few other reasons there as to why we might have low sub-clover. We look at our sulfur levels. We look at our potassium levels. Boron can be a bit of an issue over in Gippsland, and low calcium levels, particularly on coastal sort of sandy soils can be an issue as well. I'll take questions at the end. I don't wanna run out of time. Once we go through our soil conditions, then we'll go into grazing management. We've got some info there on that. But I'll be going through more about grazing management in a minute so I won't go through all of the information here. The other factors that we look at is pest and diseases. We'll be looking at our redlegged earth mites, a black field crickets, and also our soil-borne diseases. In some cases, they eat the roots of our sub-clover. So the sub-clover never does very well and it's not something that you know about until you dig up. You've either got very poor clover there and you dig up your roots and you see that they're all sort of rotted. So we look at pest diseases. The next thing we look at is herbicides. Some of our herbicides can impact and affect our sub-clover seed production and that might lead us to not be able to getting sub-clover persisting in our pastures. And if we go through all of those reasons and we're finding that our sub-clover is still not persisting, then it's probably got to do with the cultivar that's there and it's probably just not suited to the soil conditions and climatic conditions. So we might have to think about trying to put in a cultivar that is more suitable. Okay. They're finished already, have they? Okay, so some support material that can also help you that we've developed. So we've got more information there on the soil health and how that affects sub-clover, how you replace some of these troublesome or estrogenic clovers. And we've also got some stuff there that can help on trying to remove some of the weeds out of the system that can sort of start to compete heavily with our clovers such as spray grazing. Now, the three fact sheets that I'll be talking about now is more about the grazing management of sub-clover. And yeah, so if you like the grazing management stuff, I encourage you to have a read of these fact sheets. Okay, so we're getting into the grazing management side of things. So our sub-clover is an annual species, so it needs to set seed every year for it to persist and build up a seed bank so we've got it persisting in our pastures. We want a good seed bank of about 200 to 300 kilograms of seed sitting in our soil because that'll help us get through any of those false breaks or those pore springs that we might have when we're not setting much sub-clover seed. So some fast facts, we want 30 to 40% sub-clover in our pastures. We will have a germination rate of 10 to 20% each year and that'll mean an annual withdrawal of about 20 to 30 kilos of seed. Now, a seed grow. When they grow, they sub-clover stands. So they'll produce about 200 kilos of seed per hectare. In our mixed pastures, we're probably going to make an annual deposit of about 135 kilos per hectare. Now, the deposit just by one plant is up to a 100 seeds. And obviously, you're thinking about when you're sewing your new pasture and you're only putting in 10 kilos of seed per hectare or something like that, the management in that first year is gonna be really important to try and really maximize that seed production to try and get it up to that 200 to 300 kilos to make sure you've got a good system there that's persisting through the years. So really, we wanna aim to make a deposit each year and making sure that our sub-clover is gonna set seed. Okay, so there are five stages of the life cycle Okay, so there are five stages of the life cycle of the sub-clover plant that we can influence. So I'll go through all of these. There's the seed softening stage, the germination, the vegetative growth, flowering, and the burr burial stage. So we'll start off with the seed softening stage. You can see a picture of a sub-clover seed here. This is all the endosperm or the embryo. I suppose it's gonna grow the plant for us. And we've got this hard seed coat around the edge of it and it's quite thick and that's what makes the sub-clover impermeable to water. So it stops it, it's making it waterproof. But for us to get it to germinate, we need to crack open that seed. And the only way that we can do that is we can influence the way we do that and that's by having the amount of pasture cover in the pasture because what cracks open that seed is the swelling and shrinking of that seed coat and that's to do with the fluctuations in night and day temperatures that occur. So it's nothing to do with light. Those night and day temperatures being high and low helps to swell and shrink that seed. I've still got 20 minutes, okay, good. So what we're trying to do is soften that seed. And as I mentioned that it's to do with trash levels. So we think about trash levels over our pastures during summer. It can act as like a doona and it's sort of like, I suppose, it's stopping those fluctuating temperatures occurring. And so you can think about when we have a drought, when we've removed a lot of our pasture cover, we tend to get really good sub-clover germination the following year and that's because we've removed off a lot of that pasture cover. So that's what we've sort of gotta aim to do to get this germination occurring and to crack that seed open. So a good target to have is about one to two handfuls of loose litter, scraped up in a square foot area or the size of our pasture paramedic quadrant. So that's all that we need, a light covering. We do want some cover there. So just with this graph, my colleague, Jess Brogdon, did some trials with us when we're at Southern Farming Systems. So that's the means sub-clover seedling per meter squared where we had a doona cover of six tons of dry matter kept over the pasture. We had very little germination rate there We had very little germination rate there where we kept bare ground. We had no litter. We had reasonable clover germination and where we had a thousand kilos of dry matter. We also had a good sub-clover germination. We obviously don't wanna keep the bare ground there. Because by keeping bare ground there, we expose our soil to erosion, whether that's through summer thunderstorms or through wind erosion. So we wanna maintain just a loose covering of litter and so we still get those night and day temperature fluctuations to crack open that seed. Okay, so our aim to get germination was we remove that excess litter, but we don't wanna be grazing hard enough that we eat all that burr. The grazing target that we wanted, that autumn break is about 1,000 to 2,000 kilograms of dry matter per hectare. And we've got a number of different strategies that we can do that. Obviously, we can't let the stock be selective so we've gotta use high stock numbers for short periods of time to try and graze out down that trash level. Then the animals might need a protein supplement to help them do that provided there's not much screen pick in the paddocks. And strategies to do that. Some of the strategies also that we might do is to think about how to lessen that amount of spring pasture carryover and trying to use as much as we can in springtime. We did write a fact sheet up on how to remove pasture trash during that summer period because we know that it can be really difficult to do and we certainly had our backs up against it the last few years when we've had plenty of green pick around in our pastures that the sheep and the cattle are gonna favor rather than now needing those trash levels. Now, the compromise here is that we can't always graze. It's easy for me to say to just graze it all down, but we know that we can't easily do that. So what we have to try and do is try and prioritize paddocks and try and pick the ones that we really wanna get good sub-clover into. And it might be just trying to look after our new pastures and making sure that they're right to go to try and build up those seed bank levels. Okay, so germination, this is pretty exciting stuff, I think. And for an afternoon after we've had our lunch , you can see here the seed and we've got our little first root growing out of the seed. It's gonna try and penetrate into that ground and grow hopefully. The seeds usually buried hopefully. And that would help that seed survival a bit more. But anyway, the end of sperm within that seed, it grows the first two potter leaders. We often call those bunny ears and they're our first sort of solar panels to start trying to create a bit more energy. And that energy that it creates grows, what we call is a spade leaf and there's a spade leaf emerging there. That's that sort of roundy color, round leaf there. So that's pretty important to us, the spade leaf, because that spade leaf, once it emerges, it provides the energy to grow a taproot. And then what happens is that that hole, what's called a hypocotyl contracts down, and it pulls that plant down to secure it into the ground so it becomes more anchored. And then once that spade leaf is up, it then starts to grow what we call first true leaf, and then away the plant goes. So what we're aiming to do with germination is we're trying to get 200 to 300 seedlings per meter squared rather than you counting them. I can tell you that it's equivalent to about three seedlings per palm size and that'll give us about a 40% sub-clover content. Now, the grazing target that we wanna aim for is to not graze until we have three true leaves. That's the ideal. But unfortunately, that can take about three to six weeks. And so often we haven't got any feed by this stage and we're itching to put our stock on the paddocks. So we do have a compromise. If we do have to graze, then we wait until at least we see that spade leaf emerging because we know then that those plants are gonna be a little bit more a anchored compared to when we've just got those bunny ears up 'cause then they're just easily pulled out of the ground. And I guess another strategy to use is to not always graze the same paddock first all of the time and to rotate those paddocks around a little bit so that we do get that good germination, those plants being able to establish within our pastures. Okay, so during vegetative growth during the winter and early spring, this is another critical period, I suppose, for our sub-clover because what it's really going to do is that every potential leaf area, every potential leaf that we grow becomes a potential flower spot and those flowers will go on to produce our seed. So to stimulate leaf production, what we wanna do is to graze those pastures pretty short because by having them short, we allow that light to hit those growing points on that crown and that's what's stimulating our leaf production. And as I said, why we wanna do that is that every leaf becomes a potential flower spot. So the grazing targets we have during this period is that we wanna try and aim to keep the herbage mass at about a 1,000 kilograms of dry matter per hectare or about three centimeters in height. And that's if we're wanting to lift our sub-clover content. So I guess the compromise is if we've already got a good seed bank, then we probably don't need to graze so short. We can go a bit higher because certainly, grazing short doesn't favor our perennial grasses and they like things to be a bit taller and that increases pasture growth if we're having things a little bit higher for the those grasses and having bigger solar panels for them. So we can try and keep the pasture a little bit taller for them provided we've got a good seed bank. If we haven't, we need to try and come in and tweak it and graze it a bit heavily during winter to get that sub-clover content back. Okay, so the Broadford grazing trial that occurred a number of years ago and it was an Agriculture Victoria run trial and many other trials, they sort of showed us that with rotational grazing, we start to lose the sub-clover out of our system because that rotational grazing is favoring those perennial grasses. So the shorter prostrate growing sub-clover seems to really sort of starts to not favor it. seems to really sort of starts to not favor it. So we can see here the sub-clover mass kilograms of dry matter per hectare, and then the three different grazing methods. So with our sort of set stocking or continuous grazing, we have the highest clover content, the two weeks grazing, six-week spell. We've got almost half as much and we're even losing a bit more with that intensive grazing system and that was Polaris and that was being grazed to that four-leaf stage where it was having a bit longer rest period. So the message is that we will lose clover out of our rotational grazing systems. So we need to sort of monitor that and keep sort of tweaking them to try and get that sub-clover back. Okay, so once we get a good dose of cold winter temperatures, it starts to signal. Plants start to become reproductive and we see that when those runners start to occur. So the exciting thing about the runners, I suppose, is just how much sub-clover production we start to get. So each plant can have about 10 branches and each branch can grow about six. How many is it? It's about eight to 16 leaves. Each of those leaf areas, as I said, can produce a potential flower site. And those branches can be up to 30 centimeters long. So suddenly, we've got plants that are potentially up to 60 centimeters in diameter within our pastures. Yeah, it's pretty good stuff. And obviously, this time is the time that we can come in and start to identify our different cultivars. So looking at that one, that one's got some pretty hairy runners. It's got the red stripe here. It's got a green stipule, but I don't know what it is. I'd have to go back to the fact sheet and have a look 'cause I can't remember. Okay, so at flowering time, what we're trying to do there is we're trying to aim to maximize flower development into seeds. So our grazing target is to keep grazing. We don't wanna stop grazing. We wanna ease off the grazing a little bit when those flowers appear, but we still need to get light into the system to encourage that leaf growth. The compromise is that because the burrs develop at different times, we can eat off some of those flowers. So you can see here that the burrs closest to the crown, the oldest burrs. They're the ones that are developing first, and then those flowers slowly developing into burrs and then those flowers slowly developing into burrs and sort of pegging down into the soil. But we could potentially graze off some of these 'cause we've still got some seed developed back there near the crown. Okay, so burr burial and seed survival. I just wanted to touch on this because there are three different types of sub-clover plants and subterranean. of sub-clover plants and subterranean. Our plants are trying to bury their seed in the ground. Both our black seeded and white seeded varieties actively bury their seed. But the brachys, they have these long flower stems called patials, I think. And they're gonna try and hide their seed under rocks or put it down into cracks rather than bury their seed. And they require a little bit different management and I'll show you why in a little minute. So at this stage, we're aiming to try and get that seed protected underground by encouraging that burr burial and we don't want a laxly graze at this time because what can happen is that all of those runners get tangled and a lot of seed can start to form up, being up in the residue of the plant. We wanna sort of keep grazing it reasonably heavily so that those flower stems and burrs so that those flower stems and burrs will start to sort of peg into the ground. Yeah, so that's what we need to do and we certainly don't want to be trying to eat off any of that burr that we see. There will be some burr set on the surface and that's important because for a sub-clover survival because it gets spread around by the sheep and that's what it wants to do is to sort of colonize new areas. Okay, so just to graph here, just showing you, I guess, some of the effects of the brachys. They're doing a lot more breeding of the brachys to try and get them to more actively bury their ground. So you can see Antas, it has a very high rate of trying to put its seedling into the residue. So that's that area there is, how much seed is being set into the residue, and the blue is where it's being buried into the soil. So at the moment, they're trying to breed a lot more varieties with a lot more emphasis on burr burial because that helps with the persistence of sub-clover. Okay, so in summary, for our grazing management, so it's a seed softening stage. We wanna have one to two handfuls of litter by the autumn break. At germination, we wanna graze when the three true leaves appear. We can graze when there's one spade leaf, when a spade leaf appears. But ideally, it's three true leaves. At that vegetative growth stage, we're heavily grazing to try and maximize that leaf production 'cause they'll become more flower sites. When we see the flowers appear, we'll lighten off our grazing. And then for that burr burial stage, trying to get that burr underground by grazing it and try to avoid eating it off. So the last slide I've got and it's the summary of what we've been talking about. So start with your assessment, aiming for 30 to 40% of your sub-clover to maximize your production. Looking at diagnosing, why you might have poor sub-clover in your paddocks? It'll often be because of, usually, the Olsen phosphorus level, the trash levels, and that's to do with our grazing management and removing them. Maybe our molybdenum or soil acidity that would be driving that. And certainly, our rotational grazing systems are where you're using very long rest periods, particularly over winter. That could be a reason for our poor sub-clover. So once we know what's going on, we can devise a treatment plant. And then hopefully, we can go in and implement that and monitor and just keep making sure that we've got that sub-clover in the system. And hopefully, that will keep us producing a really good productive and persistent pasture. Thank you.

Neil:

Thank you, Lisa. And just a quick question where the fact sheets that you spoke about. I know you've got a file down there. But for the audience, where do we go to find those?

Lisa:

Yep, so they're on the MLA website or they're on the Southern Farming System website or you can email me at Southern Farming Systems and I will send you out a link to all of those documents. I have got some hard copies here that I will give to people that ask questions .

Neil:

That's a problem I've ever had. Yeah, it's lovely to see someone after 30 years in the game. I'm still so passionate about clover and, in particular, sub-clover. So congratulations on that. And I know so many farmers that have said to me over the years, I just love to see that clover. Any questions?

Man 1:

Just a question on your nutrient levels, Lisa. Boron you had, I couldn't quite read properly. I think 15 milligrams per kilogram, was it?

Lisa:

Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I'd have to go back and look. I can't quite remember . Yep, is that--

Man 1:

I just thought it was a little bit high.

Lisa:

A bit high, yep.

Man:

Yeah, 'cause boron say it's easily to be toxic over applied. I would've thought about three.

Lisa:

About three, okay. With the boron, we sort of did consult heavily with the guy in Gippsland who has done all the research. So I'd have to go back and check. I have had a few comments about boron before.

Man 1:

It could be different in Gippsland that's heavier soil. So the heavier the soil, the more you need. I'm in pretty light country.

Lisa:

Okay, yep, yep. Boron is not one that I'm, it's not an issue that I've ever come across personally. So we've had to rely pretty heavily on, gosh, who was the guy over in Gippsland, Neil?

Neil:

Leo, Leo.

Lisa:

Leo Hamilton, yeah, yep, yep, yep. So, we had him sending us all sorts of different papers, but I'll take that into account and I'll check that, yeah.

Man 2:

You were saying before.

Lisa:

Yeah, so ideally, you will have taken a plant tissue test and then you'd know. But because people don't take plant tissue tests, we don't tend to know. So we sort of tend to cover ourselves by saying to put out both at the same time. I don't know if anyone else has got any suggestions on that. Yeah, I guess it's just sort of safeguarding against copper deficiency 'cause it's not something that you wanna induce in your cattle or sheep.

Neil:

I get you hang onto the mic.

Man 3:

Lisa, can you just have a little rundown what's happening in ?

Lisa:

Yeah. So we set up a site there. We've got a number of different trials in there and it's basically trying to showcase all the pasture principles.

Presenter:

This could a really interesting and informative session, and to me, it's where the rubber really hits the road. And we need to remember that lots of the people that come and present at sessions like this, it's almost, that's their job. Part of their challenge is to get information out and make it available to everyone else. I think we really need to be super appreciative when we get producers that come along and are happy to share their stories and actually share their experience in running their enterprises. So I'm not gonna go through intros. Both of our speakers will give some form of introduction of themselves as the session evolves, but pathways to consistently productive systems is surely a hook that's interesting to everyone. So what we're going to do first, a little bit of housekeeping we need to do is, just like the previous sessions, we're going to be recording the sessions, so if you've got any questions, we will repeat them before we answer them. But given that we've got two speakers in this session, we're actually going to run from James Peddie's presentation first, which is obviously the meat sheep system overview, and then we'll go through Elise Kealy's presentation, which is more of a wool focused presentation. So they'll run each at about 15 minutes, we'll back them on one over to the other, and then we'll do questions combined for both of them. So I would ask if we can hold questions to the end, I think that'll probably give us the better bang for its buck. So I'll hand over to James. And he's all set up.

James:

Okay, wow. Yeah, thank you for coming. We farm in Tasmania. We moved down there eight years ago, our rainfalls between 1000 and 850 mils. So we, you know, we did that move, partly in response to climate change, but also to try and head towards lower cost DSEs. Part of the return on the business, you've got the profit generation side, but you've also got the equity side, and the equity side, the denominator, which is what your business is worth versus the return. So, you know, trying to make a high returning business, if you can have low cost DSEs, it helps. So the farm operation supports the land ownership business. And what a high profitability system allows you to do is it'll support the land ownership more efficiently. So six years ago, we had a 49% equity. Our business was valued at about $4 million, it's now valued at about 36 million. And our equity's gone to 82%. And that's been compound asset accumulation of 52 and from like, 52.8%. So that's sort of our motivation for doing it. And why we feel that farm profitability's important. So there's three properties, two of them are joining, one's 17 kilometers away. Basically, it's pretty standard stuff. Grow a lot of grass, turn a lot of it into meat. We've really defined our business into being a, it's a ewe business, we run ewes, and where possible we'll finish lambs. If we can't finish lambs, we'll sell them as store lambs. We're trying to, we've gone from trying to breed the best sheep to trying to have the best system. So instead of culling a sub animal performance I'll accept if the paddock is going to be empty if I get rid of it. So it's more about, you know, having enough animals in there. So you can see the ewe lambs down the bottom, we're lowering the ewe lamb percentage of our joining, we believe there's a $110 advantage, $110 advantage in having an adult ewe joining versus a ewe lamb joining, so yeah. So this is our pasture base. We grow fodder crops to finish the lambs, they're all direct sown, you can see the photo on the right that's been over sown with perennial ryegrass in early sub or late sub. And we put white clover in with the fodder crop in the spring. The one left was, that white clover's just come up. It's just feral white clover. It was too wet to sow the fodder crop, we couldn't get the drill in there. But anyway, that's our pasture base. This is our breeding objective. We used to say that we wanted, you know, early maturing ewes with high fertility, worm resistance, early growth, all that. But I'd really encourage you to put some hard numbers on it. I think where we were before was like saying we want to go to Queensland for a winter holiday, whereas I really want to go where it's 27 degrees and I can swim, which means I want to go to Cairns or somewhere north. And I think that's a bit like the breeding objective. Those lambs are 23.6 kilos. You can see the effects of selecting for muscle and the ability to finish. So yeah. We sort of try and have a mindset of constant improvement. Can we do it easier? Can we do it faster? Can we avoid doing it at all? So, and that's just, you know, well we've got wallaby issues at the back of that bush, so there's exclusion fencing. Yeah, as the slide says, just efficient systems. We built this shearing shed when we moved to Tazzy, it's basically a small board with an undercover set of yards. The yards are just, as you can see, corrugated iron with post we rammed ourselves. There's no factory with our yards, but we can handle sort of 5,000 sheep through it quite efficiently. We can sort of draft seven ways and handle the sheep outside the yards. We try and do things concurrently. So the ewes might be, if weaning the ewes will be drafted off, lambs will go over the VE machine, get their first drench and their booster. They'll then go through the scales, be drafted three ways, you know, lambs that we're gonna finish, lambs that we might sell at stores, and then lambs that just need more time to grow. So they just go from one thing to the next. The actual heart of the yards is largely portable yards. If they're not running, we'll change it sort of within, 40 minutes of starting the job. That's just basically our scanning rates and ewe numbers as we've increased. You can see the bottom figure down the bottom 147%. This year, we shored during joining, shearing during joining cost us 25% of our scanning, and we had 11% higher dry eyes. The ewes that was shorn during joining scanned at 137%, whereas the rest of the mob that ran into Easter and was shorn after joining, scanned 162. So again, this is just as our ewe numbers have increased and the proportion of ewes, you can see we're really trying to get as many adult ewes as we can. I think there's parallels with the dairy industry, and having the productive platform running ewes and just trying to get our ewe lambs out the way, we haven't worked out how to do that yet with the genetics we want. Yeah. So yeah. So again, going trying to have the best system that utilize a lot of grass with the spring lambing, we were all September lambing, we're moving earlier so that the lambs are heavier at the end of the season. You know, 250 grams, 30 days, seven half kilos of extra live, you know, if they're a month older. So these two photos, you know, July versus September, I think there's something like eight days apart, so you can see the difference in the lambs. Part of that's a response to improving our pasture and feed base, so we've got less reliance on fodder crops. Next one, that was a bit, not a lot of fun, but you know, that's only happened once. You know where it's actually, we get snow occasionally, but not settling like that. But you know, that was our first year in Tazzy, which was a baptism of fire. Again, you know, feeder allocation, you know, monitoring, you know, we try and condition score at weaning if we can, you know, get put cheap condition back on those ewes if we need to. We allocate, we measure all our pasture ability pre lambing allocated on a per DSE basis, then allocate, you know, the appropriate amount of feed per paddock. This is the farm. That's where we live. It's 17 kilometers from the other farm in the photos. The ewes on that farm last year scanned 165 without identifying triplets. We marked 155%, so I don't know, that survival, if there were no triplets within 94%, obviously we didn't achieve that over the whole farm. Our ewe mortality was 1.8%. Triplets, not a lot to add there. Our best's been 215%, our worst's been 170. I dunno know why, but when as an industry we need to work it out. Okay. Key performance indicators. You can see as you work across, as our numbers have grown, our stocking rate dropped in the 17/18 year, that was when we acquired another 1500 acres. So that was just building that. So basically we just run a few more ewes per hectare. And they have a few more lambs per hectare. If you look down the right hand side, it's all farms we're comparing it to. So, that's, you know, our dressed weight per hundred mils, you know, it just sort of, you're multiplying, you're multiplying on things. So we just grow it and then want to eat it. This is the cost of lamb, cost of production. You can see 21/22 we spent an extra $15 of DSE or $400 a hectare, in response to higher fertilizer prices, we weren't going to use fertilizer. We limed the whole place, and then we ran to a tight autumn, we had to buy extra feed in the autumn. There was wages to feed that feed, lime, extra materials, yeah. So it really blew out our cost of production, which, what have I done there? And it's still on track yeah. So you can see the cost of production in that 21/22 year is almost $7. And the lamb price received is 8,67. So it's only sort of a dollar 70 margin on a lamb. The previous year was $4,25. So that just flows on through. And I really feel where we're heading with a bit of uncertainty and a few headwinds in the economy, that we're getting back to the bad old days of really focusing on the cost of production rather than just production for its own sake. So you can see 21/22, we only had an income of about a hundred dollars a hectare less than the previous year. But with the enterprise costs, you know, the gross margin looks all right but when you put it all in, you end up there in the bottom of net profit per hectare. We've gone from, you know, around a thousand dollars a hectare back to sort of, you know, 35% of that. And that's all been, you know, cost really. So yeah, so that's, you know, it just hurts you. But that's what we do, and how we've done it. Yep, and that, thank you.

Presenter:

James, thank you. And as I say, there will be plenty of opportunity for questions at the end, but if we ask if you just hold onto those for the second, and we will bring up Elise, the microphone's at the,

Elise:

I might go with the left

- Yeah, sure.

- If that's okay.

Presenter:

Yep, that's fine. So I'll hand over to Elise.

Elise:

Hi everyone, my name's Elise. I don't have a title such as Land Producer of the year. I'm just Elise, so I'll do my best and I hope I can give you something to go home and think about. I got a phone call about a month ago asking if I would come and speak about my experience with financial benchmarking, because our family's been doing financial benchmarking for over 30 years. And I said, "Oh yeah, no worries, I'll come and do that." And I made my presentation and I submitted it by the due date, and then I saw the program and the program said that I was actually speaking on pathways to consistently high profits. And I thought, oh geez, that's a tough ask, but if I was gonna do it all I'd talk about was financial benchmarking anyway, so phew, here I am and here's my presentation. So as mentioned earlier, we are Merino wool growers. A little bit about our business, that's a picture of some wool from our farm. We're about 17 micron, 17 and a half micron, that's the wool we like, but we do aim to have a highly fertile flock with a strong focus on reproduction. The Merino ewe in the picture is lambing at 13 months of age. She's not mulesed, she's got no dag on her and she's rearing twin lambs. And that's the sort of sheep that we're aspiring to breed more of. For you to appreciate financial benchmarking, I'd just like to give you a little bit of our journey and show you what financial benchmarking has done for us. So currently involved in our business at the moment, we've got my mum and dad who are still involved in the farm and there's three children home sheep farming at the moment. There's myself and I have two younger brothers who are also home. Each of us also has a partner who are not involved in the family business. I have four young children. My brother Bernie has his first little baby who was born three months ago. And my youngest brother does not have any children yet. Between our family, we're running 6,100 acres that we own and we currently lease just over 600 acres. We're running 17,000 Merino ewes and we have a small cropping component. We're located in Western Victoria at Eden Hope. And our annual rainfall is about 500 mils. So where we came from. Before we started benchmarking, my grandfather was a shearer and he desperately wanted to farm. He didn't have the money for a deposit, but he was able to share farm for six years and that got him a deposit for his first block and got him started. My dad also always dreamed of being a farmer and so as soon as he left school, he came home on the family farm. They marked 200 Merino lambs his first year home, if that gives you some appreciation for the scale of the farm. Really he worked off farm as a wool classer and a contract lamb marker, but he was desperate to farm. So he tried to buy more land and by 1990 he'd purchased an additional thousand acres. But still that would not be considered a large farm. Unfortunately for him, he purchased just the farm, when wool prices were here just before the collapse of the reserve price. And then further to that, it happens right about here when interest rates were quite low. So from dad's point of view, he thought he was on a really good thing, wool was making lots of money, interest rates were low, it was a great time to invest, he went out and he bought a thousand acres. And on one of the blocks of land that he bought at auction, he went $5 an acre above the price that he and mum had agreed on, which in today's terms sounds so insignificant, but it's really still a sore point for mum, she brings it up all the time. So times were really tough. They were really tough. And for the people who went to the dinner last night, we would've heard that in the 1990s farmers made a 0.1% increase in productivity over 10 years. Well, we weren't the only ones affected by the collapse of the wool market and high interest rates. And there was a fellow called Neil Clark at that time and he could see that farmers were going to do it really tough, 'cause they were all affected by high interest rates and low wool prices and he just couldn't see that there was any new technology just around the corner to drag them out of that. And he just wondered what was gonna help them. And so he had this idea or this concept that was called Farm Management 500. And his idea was to get 500 farmers around southeastern Australia in little cluster groups of 10. So quite similar to the Best Wool Best Land format that a lot of people are in. And he wanted to have about 50 groups with 10 people each making up 500 farmers. And we were just extremely lucky that our group was one of three farms with the Balmoral group and the Fiery Creek group that had a fellow by the name of John Marriott as our facilitator, who was also a farm consultant. And to our luck, John was also a lover of financial benchmarking and analysis. And so began the journey. So when the groups first started meeting, the conditions of meeting were that everything that was said in the room had to stay in the room. It was to be highly confidential because these farmers were opening up their books and their financials to other people that lived in the same community. So nothing was to leave the room. And they were trying to fight for their survival so that they could hold onto the land that they'd purchased and just hold on long enough that if they did have to sell, at least they could recoup their money. Because while dad went $5 above their price that mum and dad had agreed on, he also said that if he had have been forced to sell, he would've lost a hundred bucks an acre, which is probably the equivalent of about a thousand dollars an acre or more in today's terms . So when the financial benchmarking started as early adopters of it, it was quite a simple format. But as the group began to understand it more and challenge each other more, it became more and more complex. And so what started off as dollars per head comparison soon became dollars per DSE, then dollars per hectare and then looking at the costs. And eventually the group settled on an indicator of financial performance called a Farm Operating Surplus or the FOS for short. And the FOS is quite similar to the EBIT that a lot of people use now to measure financial performance the earnings before interest and tax. The slight difference is that the FOS doesn't use any financial finance costs. So lease costs being the obvious difference to the two measures of financial performance. And I guess if you were to compare James and I, if we were both leasing a farm and making $200 an acre profit on it, but he was paying $150 to lease it and I was paying a hundred dollars to lease it, actually he's doing a better job 'cause he's paying 50 bucks an acre more so it's his ideas I want to copy, not mine. I'm just giving 50 bucks more to the lease it leasor. And so most of the businesses in our group had at lease components, so we excluded all finance costs. And about that time the Southwest Farm Monitor group started up as well, which many of you would be now familiar with. And John said to our group, "I'd like you to benchmark yourselves against the Southwest Farm Monitor group, and I'd like you to see if you can beat them." And our group said, "No way. They're further south than us, they've got higher rainfall, it's more productive land down there, there's no way that we can take on the Southwest Farm Monitor group." And John said, "Well, I'd like you to try." Well the second year that we took them on the group equaled them and the third year they took them on, they overtook them, which was a surprise to all involved. So then they tried to work out, well what was the secret? How did we manage to do it? And the answer that the group came up with was it was the power of discussion as a group. Because when you just get your financials back, if you don't fully understand them, it's very hard to know where there's room to move. But this model with a group of 10 farmers who are analyzing each other's data three or four times a year, and going around and having on-farm visits was allowing 10 sets of eyes to look at your business specifically and actually see what was happening on your farm, because the things that you thought you were doing really well, perhaps pasture or picking your lambing paddocks, maybe you weren't doing so well, and now you had nine other people coming to check on you. And there's a fellow by the name of Bill Malcolm who has the saying that there's no maximums in maximum profit. Maximum profit comes from optimizing everything else. And if you're just looking at the set of data, you don't know what the optimum figure is. And so maximum profit doesn't come from cutting the most wool per hectare. 'Cause the way to cut the most wool per hectare can be to run the most sheep per hectare. But that if you don't have enough feed for them, your supplementary costs and your costs will outweigh the production that you've gained. And so you need to have optimum production, optimum costs, to achieve maximum profit. So what do we benchmark in our group? We benchmark enterprises against each other. So from our family point of view, we have a small cropping component. We have a self replacing Merino flock, we have a Merino flock with a crossbred lamb and we used to have a meat flock too. And I guess for any farmer your limiting factor is the number of hectares that you have. Anyone can go out and buy more sheep and make more profit per head, or you can yeah, but what's limiting how much money you can make is per hectare. And so when we measure our performance, it should be done on a per hectare basis, not a per head basis. And therefore we wanna work out which of these enterprises is making us the most money and we want to allocate as many hectares of our business as we possibly can to that enterprise. It also gives you the opportunity to be more efficient and run better enterprises. And when I first came home on the farm, we had four sheep enterprises. We had a self replacing Merino flock, we had a Merino flock having a White Suffolk lamb, we had a Merino flock having a Border Leicester ram and then we kept some of those first cross ewes and joined them to a White Suffolk. And our sheep were run on the ewe breed and what they were joined to and their pregnancy type, they weren't run to condition score or their nutritional needs, they'll run on that. And by streamlining it now into two enterprises, we can utilize the feed that we have a lot better, which allows us to run a better business. We also benchmark ourselves against other farmers in the district that we farm in. Apparently, someone in parliament this week tried to say that the Southwest Farm Monitor group data was all made up and that it was just a competition between farmers who are entering false data. If that's what some people wanna do, that's great. I would rather see it as the opportunity. We can benchmark ourselves against other farmers and if I come out on top, well then there's not much for me to learn. But if I'm coming out in the middle of the pack, I've got heaps of opportunities to learn. I can see what everyone else is doing better and I can try and copy that for my farm. And we like to benchmark ourselves over time. And the reason for that is if you just try and get into the things that are making money now, you'll always be buying into the commodities when they're really dear to buy into and then getting out of them when they're not worth anything and selling at the bottom of the market. So we like to benchmark things over time, and make decisions based on long-term price averages. What do we use the benchmarking for? We use the benchmarking data to take it to the bank. They love it. And when Farm 500 first started off, it was funded by the NAB bank because they loved getting their hands on all the data and knowing how their clients were performing in comparison. If we want to expand our business, the data is really useful, because we know what we can afford to pay per land to lease it, or we know what we can afford to pay to purchase land. By using our historical data, we know what returns we can make on average over a seven year period. But if we expand the business and we get a really tough year first up, we also know what a likely income might be for the that tough year, so that when we've just expanded, if we have a bad year, we know that we can still make the repayments that we're committed to. And it also helps with conflict. I showed you our family at the start, there's a lot of people involved in our family business and when someone comes forward with an idea, instead of saying, I don't like your idea, it's more about, well this is my idea and this is the financial reasons behind it. We are a family business but we are a business and we are trying to make money. And if someone can put forward an idea that will improve profit, then I guess it objectifies it rather than subjectifies it. So since we started benchmarking, our micron has gone from 20.6 to 17.6 micron. Our lambing percentage has gone from 75% to over a hundred percent. Our wool cut per hectare has gone up by five kilograms per hectare, which is not huge but as someone pointed out earlier today that's you know, without weathers, it's the ewes that are doing that now. And we're three microns finer. And our wool to meat ratio has gone from 80:20 to 50:50. When I came home in 2012, we owned 1,950 acres, admittedly with a reasonably small mortgage. But now we own 6,100 acres with a huge mortgage. But we wouldn't have been able to do that or achieve that without financial benchmarking. If you're not measuring things, you're just guessing. Thank you.

Presenter:

I wonder if you can just stay at the front. We might get James to come up to the front as well and Elise and if anyone's got any questions, we'll put them to our mini panel if you will. But what a great insight into the role for benchmarking. Very raw, opening up all the figures and also as well covering off the journey to how to get into benchmarking. Did anyone have any questions? Down.

Speaker 1:

Two questions, the Olson P I just didn't see it on your slide. What was your Olsen?

- Our Olson P?

- Yeah.

- Average, sorry average is about 20.

- About 20.

- Yeah, about.

Speaker 1:

And the lamb losses, what do you attribute those to? It's mainly exposure or what would it be?

James:

I think it's mainly miss mothering. It's a fair few multiples being born. But if you get the big things right, if you get the nutrition right, you get the birth window right, they're pretty resilient. Prompy's probably better to talk about, you know, you know, that than me.

Presenter:

Yeah, I mean it's a hard one to separate that starvation, miss mothering, exposure sort of interface, but

- Yeah.

- Yeah, it's a challenge.

- Yeah.

- Kieran, did you have a question? No, sorry.

Speaker 1:

James, your overheads look extraordinarily high relative to other benchmarks. Can you explain what prices those been, those overheads have-

James:

Can, is there another question? And I'll be able to tell you what's in there if you want.

Presenter:

So if there is another question, we'll take that now and just while James does his homework and digs into his bag of tricks. He'll dig up the overhead story. Yep. Back row.

Speaker 2:

Question for Elise, respectful of different enterprises where there's complimentary element to those enterprises, how do you as family business separate those out to?

Presenter:

So, I'll just repeat it for the sake of, but it was just about how do you proportion out the costs from different enterprises within the farm, within the broader farm business?

Elise:

So the very first huge transaction that has to happen every year is our self replacing Merino flock, has to sell the surplus ewes to the other flock to the ones that are joined to a terminal. And so that's an income expense, oh sorry, that's an income to the Merino enterprise and an expense to the cross-bred enterprise. That's purely a book entry that takes place for this data analysis. Obviously our accountant or the tax agent never see that. Then when it comes to the other expenses such as vaccine or shearing costs, that we have the shearing tally book and we shear the sheep in like the cull groups or the flock groups and that's just attributed per head or on a ratio basis, if that makes sense. Does that answer your question?

Speaker 2:

I was of course thinking about business to help the time share business.

- Okay.

- Yeah, so we're thinking how do you proportion out when you're sowing a crop to then ultimately come back in with a pasture, how do you sort of, because that's a reason just sort of wondering how you.

Elise:

Yeah, and so I guess our farm is different in that respect. Our farm is primarily too wet to crop. Our cropping is a very small part of it in sort of three very safe paddocks and it's just the same three paddocks that are cropped all the time. It's not part of the pasture renovation phase. Yep. And then the sheep enterprise has to buy that grain off the cropping enterprise.

Presenter:

Some negotiation between the family members by the sounds of it.

James:

Our overheads on a per DSE basis are $2 more than the top 20%, and they're a dollar or $2 lower than the average of the database. But our stocking rate is about 50% higher than the average of the database. So a lot of it's fertilizer, labor, and just, you know, driven by stocking rate, is.

Presenter:

We've got five minutes, so we do have time for a couple more.

Speaker 1:

Just you said, you're not joining ewe lambs and they're probably worth $110 worse off than you were, how do you name or are you selling those ewe lambs or.

Presenter:

So the question was just to James about particularly management of his ewe lambs and how he costs out that additional $110 cost for lambing down to ewe lamb versus a mature ewe.

James:

So, the additional income with the adult ewe comes higher scanning, higher survival, and a faster growth rate. We're also joining our ewe lambs to lamb at 13 months. So they're a month younger than our adult sheep. We've gone from it being wired in as part of our program and particularly when we're growing ewe numbers, roughly 30% of our joinings, to being more seasonally dependent and opportunistic. I haven't got the answer yet. I'd like someone to gimme the answer, but I want sheep of the genetics I want and the breeding I want, but I want them to come in and gimme adult performance. So, the other thing about ewe lambs is to get them to joining, they're expensive to get through summer. Where whereas an adult ewe, she's, you know, the systems, yeah.

Speaker 1:

So I mean saying that, would you be selling off your ewe lamb and not joining or are you carrying them through that?

James:

Last year we carried through 2300 non-pregnant ewe lambs. Some had been joined, some hadn't. This year we killed a lot of ewe lambs.

- Yeah.

- Yeah. So yeah. But I really only want to breed enough, I want as many adult ewes being joined to terminals, high growth, good carcass quality terminals. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

In regards to Elsie, in regards to your family visits and there's a lot of people within the family and conflict, how is the farm succession managed?

Presenter:

We've opened up the chestnut and we've got onto farm succession. The question was about farm succession to Elise.

- Okay.

- Everyone get your dinner.

Elise:

Dad's down the back, hi dad. So one of my brothers and I have both been home for about 10 years and we have one brother that probably initially wasn't looking to farm but has come home in the last 18 months. When my brother and I both came home at the same time, we went around and saw all the neighbors and approached them whether they were looking to sell, anyone that we thought might be and none of them were. And so that kind of was a tricky situation. And then it just so happened that there was a farmer who'd said to dad many years earlier, one day in town, "You don't wanna buy a farm, do you?" And dad had laughed at him at the time 'cause we were too young to be coming home. And on a whim, dad rang him up and said, "Oh, you're not still looking to sell that farm, are you?" And he said, "Well, as a matter of fact, as I am, can you come for a drive tomorrow?" So we went for a drive the next day and at the end of the drive he said, "Well, do you wanna buy it?" And dad was like, oh, well I'll go home and we'll talk about it and we'll ring you back tomorrow. You tell us a price. He said, "I'll ring you tomorrow night." So we're all sitting at home the next night and he rang up with a price and then dad got off the phone and he said, "Oh, we've just bought the farm." So within 48 hours it all happened very quickly. And that farm just happened to be located 50 k's from where I grew up, but you kinda had to go through town to get there anyway. And then he was a really lovely fellow and he gave us a great opportunity and then we were able to expand on that purchase four years later. And so by this time we kinda had two farms of equal size, 50 k's apart, but you had to go through town to get them. And we kind of realized this model really works for us because if one of us is going to help the other one, you've gotta go through town to get supplies anyway. But we're not living in each other's pockets. We're kind of living separately. So then when the third brother decided to come home, we actually didn't even ask the neighbors. We kind of just looked in a different direction also on the other side of town, which worked really well. So now we all have to go through town whenever we go to anyone's place. At the minute we're running it as one business and we all help each other out. But with each of the farms being separated, sort of that 10 to 15 minutes from town, there's a great opportunity there that when the time comes, which it will have to come, you know, when the next generation get involved that we go to split it up, that there'll be three sort of standalone farms.

Speaker 3:

So do you currently run it as a company or a family trust?

Elise:

It's run as a family trust. There's a, each sort of geographical farm is in its own trust as well as a separate trust that runs a trading enterprise. Yep.

- And I do apologize,

- Does that answer your question?

- I know there were a couple of questions at the end that we didn't get to. Sorry for that. But I would ask everyone again just to thank James and Elise for sharing their own stories with us.

Lisa:

So, this project was developed in response to producers who were keen to cease mulesing and move to a non-mulesed flock, but they just felt like they needed a bit of support with developing a property-specific plan and then implementing that plan. So, the project's not about telling people what to do with their sheep, it's really just supporting them make use of all the existing tools and information that we've got out there. And we've got a lot of really good resources, and I'll just mention them now, in case I run out of time at the end. But there's a lot of great material, there's the AWI desk and the MLA desk out there, which has a lot of this material if you wanna grab a copy after you've seen some of the things I'm talking about. So, just a little bit about the project. We've got four discussion groups, one in New South Wales, which Sally Martin from Sheep Metrix is working with, and three in Victoria. So, the discussion groups meet on farm just to share experiences and improve skills in various things like breech scoring, dag scoring, that sort of stuff. Using DNA flock profile. Just making use of all the tools that we've got out there to help them move towards non-mulesed flock. We've got 10 demo sites running at the moment across those groups. And everybody in the groups, they're all at different stages. Some people have ceased mulesing a while ago, but just felt like they needed a bit of, you know, extra information or just to try and make life easier, manage non-mulesed sheep, see if they could learn a few more tricks and tips and things. And some people have just stopped and other people are still just working through what they need to do to make that move. So, everyone's at different places along the pathway. So, the groups have identified... or the producers in the groups have identified the main challenges for them with moving to or managing non-mulesed sheep if they've already gone non-mulesed, and these are sort of five of the things that have come up consistently. So, up the top there, one of the questions that comes up quite a lot is, if I try and go to plainer bodied sheep, get the wrinkle off them to reduce the risk of fly strike, make crutching easier, how long will that take? How fast can I get there? And what will be the impact on some of the other important production traits such as, you know, micron, wool cut, that sort of stuff. The other ones down the bottom are comparing mulesed versus non-mulesed sheep or lambs. So, some people have been looking at just running a small mob of non-mulesed just to see if their sheep are ready, and if they're ready, whether they can just go the whole hog with the rest of the sheep and just to monitor that over a couple years to see whether it's gonna work for them or whether there's a lot of other genetic changes they have to make before they go down that path. On the right-hand side, down the bottom, there's a trial that Sally's been running looking at the different breech scoring methods for the lambs, 'cause in our little books that we've got all our breach traits in there's a picture of the lamb standing with the wrinkles and she's just been looking at when they're in the cradle, can you use the same scoring system? And pretty much, yeah, she's got the same result whether they're standing or in the cradle, which is good 'cause then they're normally in the cradle when you're looking at them and making decisions. And the two that I'm just gonna focus on today is the dag management one, which is obviously... Dag management for people in the sort of higher rainfall or improved pasture areas, dag management has come up as a big thing and it's not just for non-mulesed sheep, obviously mulesed sheep get dag, get fly strike too, so even the people that are still mulesing are interested in this one. So, dag management from a fly point of view, but more so from that whole crutching ease story. And the other side over there comparing tail docking methods is another one that's come up. People have been very interested in what sort of hot knife they should use, what methods should they use to try and maybe get a bit more wool off the tail, is that gonna make life easier in terms of dag, et cetera, and crutching ease. So, interesting enough, it hasn't been flies per se that has been the main challenge or issue that people have come up with, it's really been that whole thing around, you know, crutching ease, you know, getting plainer breeches and that management of the tail. So, I'm just gonna focus on two of them today. And just as a bit of background, there's a number of breech traits that are associated with the risk of fly strike and they're in this really great little book, so if you haven't got one of these, make sure you grab one from the AWI stand. It's got the breech scores in it, and the visual guides are really handy, we've been these a lot in the groups. On the left-hand side we've got the breech wrinkle, and the dag score is something that people have been very interested in, we've been practicing that. And I suppose that the thinking is that, you know, if we're trying to move to a flock where we're not using any breech modification, we're trying to get the sheep looking something like this, score one and two, low breech wrinkle, and on the dag side, obviously trying to not have any dag, but certainly keeping it down to one or two and, you know, maybe classing out animals that have got the higher scores. So, yeah, we're looking at this end of the spectrum. And then I suppose once people feel like they're on top of those things, the breech cover, urine stain, they're some of the other things that people are starting to think about and select for. So, just on the dag management, yeah, it's been a lot of interest about how to reduce dag in these flocks, both whether they're non-mulesed or mulesed, and I suppose what we've been trying to do in the demonstration sites and with the group discussions is trying to make sure people are clear what's causing dag on their own property, in their own sheep. Everyone's got different genetics, different feed base, that sort of thing. So, just trying to work out what's actually going on in your own flock so we can try and mitigate it. And obviously worms is the, you know, usually the big ticket item, but it's not the only cause of worms, there can be other genetic issues. Some sheep are just very sensitive to worms, so even if they've got really low worm egg counts, they can still scour, so that's a repeatable thing. So, ewes that scour badly one year when the rest of the flock is fine, they'll repeat that. And so people have been identifying those animals and then trying to cull them out of the flock. So, over time you can get rid of those ones that have got that genetic predisposition to be daggy. The other ones are, yeah, there might be infections, it's probably lower down the list, but pastures is another issue, people with improved pastures, whether it's, you know, phalaris, it could be rye, perennial rye grass with the various endophytes it has in it can cause scouring too. So, these are some of the other things we're trying to resolve, whether it's worms driving it or whether it's some feed-based issues. And obviously any sudden change in feed can cause scouring, so that's usually more obvious. And certainly things like acidosis from feeding grain can cause scouring. So, there's a number of other feeding related issues around scouring. So, the first thing we did last year with the dag trials was really just tried to rule out that whole question of worms. So, looking at worm control programs in general, monitoring worm egg counts, having effective drenches, preparing low risk worm paddocks for, you know, susceptible animals like the weaners, or lambing ewes, the priority groups, that's all part of that whole worm control package. But in the long term there's genetic things that we can do to improve dag and that's selecting rams that have got low dag breeding values, ASBVs, and associated with that is low WECs, which is a different issue, but selecting for both is helpful. And culling the high dag score ewes is something that some of the group members have been putting a lot of emphasis on, and we'll hear from Ed in a minute about that. So, in the dag demos, we had two sites last year run with merino weaners from sort of June through to November. And what we looked at was just trying to rule out that whole worm story, so we could see whether it was the feed base causing issues or whether it was just worms. So, we had one group of animals treated with a long-acting drench and the other group were treated with their normal standard farm practice with a short-acting drench. And then we're coming in every 30 days doing worm egg counts just to try and see if the long-acting was holding the line and also to see if there was any issues emerging with the short-acting drenches. So, that way we were just trying to rule out whether... and measuring dag scores as well in the animals, and just trying to work out whether there was something going on with the feed base in the absence of worms, or was it the worms. So, we'll just hear from Edward next, on his dag demonstration that he ran last year.

Edward:

- Good morning, my name's Edward Blackwell. We run a family farming business in southwest Victoria, just at the foot of the Grampians at Dunkeld. We have a merino ewe base. 19...yeah, 19, 19 and a half micron. So, a medium micron ewe flock. Approximately 60% of the ewes are joined into a maternal to produce a self-replacing flock. And the remaining 40%, the seconds, are joined to a terminal for a lamb. Our mulesing journey started in 2007 with the AWI funded clip trial, at the time there was quite a bit of noise regarding mulesing coming from the... from PETA and from the animal activists. The clips were...well, I guess what it did with the clip trial was opened my eyes to what our sheep actually had and the potential that our sheep had. And it was following that year, in 2008, we decided to leave a portion of our drop of lambs un-mulesed. So, we ceased the breech mulesing part of the procedure in 2008 on a portion and continued to tail strip. And following on from that, in 2009, we decided to only tail strip the entire drop after the results we found. We found no real issues stemmed from that year, obviously. What is that now, two thousand and, yeah, eight, 15, 16 years down the track we have had a variety of seasons, variety of, I guess, fly pressure years, some dry years and some wet years. So, I think we've tested in all aspects of climate, in terms of the breech mulesing side of things. And then the tail stripping itself we phased out in 2016, I believe. I'm trying to wrap my brains here, 2016 or '17. So, we're a good six years into no surgical procedure on the backside of the lamb. And, yeah, we're comfortable enough with where we are and I guess one of the major things that we wanted to take out of this is we didn't wanna become chemical reliant. So, at no time have we, apart from after the lamb marking procedure, have we blanket treated our flock. In terms of fly strike, we're probably more reactive rather than proactive. Whether that's a good thing or bad thing, that has been tested a little bit over the last three years with some wetter summers. But it was our mantra that we really wanted to treat the cause and not the symptoms, so we felt that by using chemical we would be masking the symptoms which wouldn't allow us to treat the cause of what the problem was. I guess that's been our journey to non-mulesed, and there has been a few... underneath all that, we've done some significant classing on dag and wrinkle over the years to ensure that our animals have become plainer and, I guess, more suited to being non-mulesed. I touched on it briefly earlier, but I guess one of the bigger things was classing out on dag and wrinkle. I guess that's been our biggest, I think that's where we've made the biggest gains to be honest. And that's been hard work, crutching our own sheep. And really when you are crutching sheep, you find wrinkle where... Well, if you find wrinkle where you don't want wrinkle to be, it's quite easy to identify that animal and take it out of the breeding system, and those ewes have then gone on to become part of a terminal flock and we're not breeding replacement sheep from them. So, not only wrinkle, but we're also been passing out on dag, well, since 2008. So, I think we've made some quite big gains in terms of those animals that are, we call them serial offenders, and we identify them and take them out of the system and that's, I guess, cleaned up our flock significantly, our self-replacing flock significantly. In terms of an extra crutching, we're a summer shearing and winter/spring lambing flock, so there's generally a pre-lamb crutch, although the last couple of years, with shearing delays and the like, we haven't seen a lot of benefit in the pre-lamb crutch. So, we've dropped that out of the system, particularly on the winter lambs. And then before they go through the shed in summer, we will clean them up and that's more just a cleanup crutch, obviously it's still gotta be done, but I guess that's not really all that different to what had happened in the past on the property. So, I guess, we haven't really thrown an extra crutch at them. And as I said earlier, we really didn't wanna go out and blanket treat them with chemical to counteract any fly strike issues because we felt that, that would mask a lot of the problems, and, I guess, as with dag and wrinkle fly strikes, it's a one strike and you're out policy for us, and in most cases when you're treating those fly strike animals, the reason they've been struck is quite clear when you crutch the fly strike wool off them and treat them so they go down the same path as the dag and wrinkle sheep. Yeah, so the opportunity to become part of the PDS, and for us, we really wanted to focus on dag because we felt that we're just not consistent enough in managing dag in the merinos. And, I guess, it's a cost, it's an extra cost of they take longer to crutch, which they can be more difficult to, I guess, take that wool off them. And then, I suppose, really it just adds to that fly strike pressure and it adds to stain and dag coming through the shed at shearing time which can downgrade your wool or creates extra work in the shed. So, dag for us, and trying to limit the amount of dag that comes onto our animals has always been front and center. And, I suppose, over the years we've identified a couple of times when dag really starts to come in hard and fast and we wanted to just see if we were missing something or if there was something else we could do that could help us to limit the dag. So, when the opportunity came up to become part of this PDS, even though we're a long way down the track in terms of non-mulesing, the dag side of it, we really wanted to find out what we were doing. We thought we were pretty good with worm egg counting and keeping on top of drench and worm pressure. So, we didn't know if it was worm pressure, we didn't know if it was fiber, we didn't know if it was, I guess, plant morphology causing issues, grazing pastures too early, so we wanted to try and eliminate one or two of them. Obviously, being a PDS, the complexity of the project, you wanna to try and keep it as simple as possible, so we really focused on the worm management side of things this time around. So, moving forward post, and, I guess, it is only one year of data, but moving forward the takeaway message for us was that monitoring for worm egg counts, which we thought we were good at, we probably were a little bit behind the eight ball and a week in a merino weaner, or a merino hogget's life, in the middle of August when things are cold and wet and miserable and they're starting to pick up, they can pick up very quickly and once you start with dag, I guess, it's that accumulation. So, what we found was that by, I guess, ruling out worms with long-acting drenches, we found that not only were we getting a live weight gain over our weaners, but we're also limiting the dag. So, I guess, what we found was that, yeah, we just need to be a little bit more vigilant in our worm egg counting. It's a hard one, you know, when we're trying to keep our resistance of our drenches up our sleeve and use products that are gonna work for us and be reliable for us. We don't wanna overuse them, so we've been strategic in our drenching and prefer to use short-acting, particularly in the weaners and the hoggets because they're not bound by being in lamb or being pregnant at the time so they can be run in and drenched at any time. But we didn't wanna go out and blanket treat with long-actings 'cause it's not gonna do our resistance, I guess, our resistance on the property any good. So, yeah, it comes down to a lot more monitoring for us and rather than coming in at five weeks, we might be coming in at three and a half or four weeks after a drench and monitoring and making sure they're not picking up. And that coupled with better pasture management and better nutrition, hopefully we'll keep the dag off and keep that accumulation of dag, because once it starts, we've found that, you know, if it starts early in the year, gets on some animals, they just keep building and building and by springtime when you're trying to take it off, it can be a bit of a chore.

Lisa:

Thanks, Ed. Ed's in Queensland, I think. So, that's why he couldn't be here today. So, somewhere warm. Just to wrap up Ed's presentation, this is the results that Ed collected over the trial. On the left-hand side there on the graph is the worm egg counts, and along the bottom is just the timing, so the trial ran from June through to November. High worm egg count at the start. So, the two treatment groups were set up, the short-acting drench is the control, the blue line, and the long-acting is the orange color. So, that's when those treatments started. And then monitoring WECs every 30 days just to check if the long-acting was working okay and also see what was happening with the short-acting. So, after the first 30 days, the short-acting group needed another short-acting drench, so that was administered and they are monitor again. And then the timing over in...over here. The day 90, it was a bit too wet to get the sheep in the yard so they didn't get the separate WECs, they just did a bulk one out in the paddock, but I suspect that the short-acting ones were on the march again, as you can see from that final count in November. So, I just showed the long-acting was working, like he said, he's not relying on long-actings, this was just to eliminate the possibility that worms were causing issues there. And the end results were where the worms were ruled out of the equation or suppressed, the sheep were nearly two kilos heavier, or it's a dag, nearly a dag score less daggy. So, in this particular instance last year it was really showing that worms are probably the main driver of the dag and not the feed base, but that's something that we wanna look further into. The second dag demo is run over at the Ryan's property over near Baynton, near Kyneton. Similar findings, same sort of setup, the sheep with the long-acting treatment, two kilos heavier. More frequent WECs meant that they picked up the rise in egg counts in the short-acting group probably quicker than they would've normally, just coming in a bit earlier. And so they were able to nip that in the bud and stop the worms escalating and the dag starting to build. And normally the dag is a big issue in this flock, and this is a mulesed flock too, so they're trying to get on top of the dag before they move to non-mulesed, and also changing genetics to get less wrinkle on the breech. In this particular trial they also looked at feeding fiber in the form of vetch hay, and this is something that was new to them, but very common with a lot of the producers in the western district are feeding fiber to try and prevent some of that dag forming. So, they wanted to try whether that was gonna help with the dag pressure. And the net result was the group that were fed fiber were two kilos lighter and there was no difference in dag score. So, that sort of, I suppose, in this particular case, just showed that it was worms driving the dag and not the feed base. But the feed base is something that, obviously, a lot of the producers are worried about, whether it's the rye grass with endophyte causing scouring, which it can do, or sometimes phalaris can be an issue for some people, and capeweed. So, there is some feed-based stuff we still wanna explore, but in the two cases last year it just showed that it was dag the main driver. I'll just hand over to Brendan who's gonna talk about what he did with the tail.

Brendan:

Good day everyone. We run a superfine merino wool flock, just south of Ararat. And we transitioned to non-mulesed about five years ago now, just cold turkey, because we put a focus on quality of our wool clip and at that stage we were getting our wool into the Italian contracts, and at that point in time, overnight, they pulled the pin on people that were providing ewe wool clips from a mulesed flock. So, that was inherently why we decided to go down this route of going un-mulesed. And being up for the challenge and, I suppose, a bit brave, I'd just come back from a trip in New Zealand with my Best Wool Best Lamb group and they had just banned mulesing essentially, so that was a big question we asked a lot of producers over there, and the take home was that the sky didn't fall in and they were able to manage it and a lot of them had been managing a similar merino flock to ours for maybe a decade before that. So, we come into this with quite a bit of confidence and then we met Lisa and started going down this transitioning to un-mulesed sort of a flock or learning exercise just to see if we could pick up any silver bullets, I suppose, or just to see if we could make that transition easier if we could. And that prompted us to go down a tail docking demonstration because we were still crutching our own sheep at the time and we still sort of are, but we just felt that if there was a way maybe we could change the backend within reason, or the tail, to some extent we might be able to make it a little bit easier. So, we tried four different tail docking systems, the standard Tepari, standard Leader gas knife, which is probably most common, which we were sort of using at the time, the Tepari gas knife, which Ed had been using for quite a long time and that was seen to be maybe a better option to helping pull a bit more skin into the knife and get a barer tail. Rings just as a control, I suppose. And John Steinfort had been dabbling with a new gas knife at the time to try after his freeze branding or to supplement or help that process. He had a gas knife that we threw in there too. So, John came down and he did the demo. We had the same person doing each of the tails in a completely random order, one after the other. We ear-tagged each lamb and we measured breech wrinkle, breech cover within that process just to try and eliminate any other issues or differences within the trial, I suppose. Tail length. There's been a bit of chat, I suppose, about what's the right and wrong tail length to have. So, by having John do all the tails, we had a consistent length with what, I suppose, is MLA's best practice. And there's some positives I think to having a bit longer tail with reduced prolapses in your ewes. I think that's quite highly publicized. And then also there's a theory that it helps the dag or the crap come out of the sheep, be funneled out to some extent. So, that's sort of, we've gone down that path and I think that's worked quite well. We also did some tail scoring throughout this process to try and objectively say one way or another, "Yes, we've done this methodology, which one can we physically see as a better result to some extent?" We measured dag score through that process, a tail score. As we can sort of see that illustration there, there's the scoring method from one to five, one being less skin or less wool on the tail, right through to five. So, that's the measurement system we used or technique. We also recorded any instance of fly strike or feedback from shearers or crutchers over the journey just to see if there was anything dramatically different from that process. So, these are the tails or how it's sort of shaped up. So, this one up in the top corner, that's the rubber ring tail and you can sort of see it sort of pulls all the wool and pinches the end of the tail, and that's a tail score three. And then for a comparable we've got the standard Leader knife there, which just takes, as most of us notice, takes the end off the tail. The process that we docked the tails, it was the same all the time, we didn't try and manipulate any more skin into it or whatnot, it was just, like, as the tail knife should be, used as a standard. This is the Tepari gas knife, and you can sort of see a little bit, it pulls a little bit more skin into the middle of the knife so you sort of get a little bit more of a bare area at the end of the tail. And then John's knife, it is a single-acting knife, so not too dissimilar to your standard Leader gas knife, but it just has, like, an iron that's like a V and it sort of just, it takes a little bit of skin off either side of the end of the tail, and we sort of thought that might've been quite a good system moving forward to help reduce dag in that instance because we were taking a little bit more wool off when removing the tail. The results of the trial, it didn't show any significant improvement or positive correlation to reducing dag. The Tepari did have a slightly better measurement, but from a tail score point of view, or slightly better dag measurement, but nothing to to sort of say one was better than the other. And that was probably the same coming through with crutching and shearing. And anytime the sheep were in the yards or we had a contractor in the yards, we sort of just mentioned that we're doing this trial and if you could notice a difference one way or another, you know, we'd be interested to have some feedback, and, yeah, there was no sort of findings there. One interesting thing that did come out of it was our sire group. So, the way that had worked is we had joined some of the ewes to a polled superfine merino and some just the traditional horned superfine merino. As you would expect with a poll being a bit plainer, for a growing animal, we did see a reduction in breech wrinkle from just that one cross in our flock. So, that was not something we expected to see, or we maybe hoped to see, but we're transitioning to a poll flock hopefully just for the production gains that we're seeing. To see the breech wrinkle, I suppose, reduce so quickly, that was quite a positive thing even though we didn't really expect that. So, to conclude, yes, there was no really major difference within the tail docking methods and no consistent trend. Yeah, with reducing dag and probably it's sort of maybe what we sort of expected, or, if anything, it probably just meant that it doesn't really matter too much if you take into consideration just that small procedure, overarching management maybe has got more of a role to play than just one little thing. So, basically, yeah, that's what it come down to. I think not much was overall.

Lisa:

And thanks Brendan. And just to cap off there, two other sites were run as well, a Sally Martin site, another Victorian site, and pretty much the same story, didn't find much difference with the different methods in terms of dag or urine or crutching ease. Two of the other sites did show that the Tepari had slightly more bare area using our newfangled tail scoring method, which is not something that Sally Martin's group has come up with, that we've been trialing. So, the Tepari showed slightly more bare area in those two other sites, but no correlation with dag or urine and no, you know, no correlation with the crutching ease. So, I think it comes back to that personal preference, some people prefer the Tepari, other people don't like it 'cause it's too heavy. And also people use these knives in different ways, so how you use them also has a bit of a bearing. Some people like rings 'cause there's no wound, so I think it comes back to personal preference. And just to finish off, 'cause we're going home, if you want more info, there's a fact sheet I've got on the chair up the back of the room. It's got a QR code on it. If you'd like to register, put your name down to receive updates about the project, please click on the QR code. If you don't like QR codes, I've gotta just write down on the bit of paper at the back on the chair there if you'd like to get more info. And just to thank MLA, Sarita, for being such a big supporter of this particular project. It's been great having your support and MLA for having the PDS program and to all our producer advocates who, Edward's one of them who you've heard from, but Scott Nicholson and Mark Ritchie and our demo site hosts.

Moderator:

Thank you very much, Lisa and Brendan. Are there any questions from the crowd?

Audience Member:

I've done some tissue pasture tests this year having had three or four, going on our fourth wet year, 'cause we have had more scour over the last couple of years. We're up on our egg cell counts and tests, so. But just wondering, we have through the tissue pasture tests, we're seeing a high potassium. Do you think that bears any relevance to high dag scores?

Lisa:

Yeah, it can potentially be a factor.

Brendan:

How high?

Lisa:

How high?

Brendan:

What's the potassium level?

Lisa:

Oh, what's the potassium levels? Got a bit of a .

Audience Member:

Haven't got the results here with me, but on a ratio, I believe you do a ratio of potassium to calcium and magnesium. I don't know what the ratio, what the high is, but the nutritionists have told me it is high. But just also wondering what you would believe to be the best management of that.

Lisa:

Yeah, well, I suppose if you've got more clover in the pasture, there should be more calcium and magnesium, where if it's more grassy, I suppose, that can drive up, I suppose, the potassium level. So, maybe looking at pasture composition. But I'd try and rule out worms first because the guys that have done this trial thought, "No, no it's not worms, it's the feed base." The phalaris guy said, "No, it's the phalaris causing it." The rye grass guy, he said, "It's the rye grass causing it." So, we just wanted to have a first cut, like Ed said, the PDS is you gotta have a pretty simple model to be able to run it as a demo site, it's not a research site. So, we wanted to rule out worms first and the two demo sites last year, the dag ones, it showed that worms were the driver. We had, you know, reduction in dag score, the whole story. And the fiber didn't play a part in reducing dag that year. But it's something you can try yourself and if you wanna get some protocols, we're more than happy to support you, run a demo and back you up with what to measure and that sort of thing to work. I think this is an important thing for people to be able to work stuff out for their own environment, 'cause everyone's got different pressures and different feed bases. And it could be different from year to year too, so we're just trying to get to the bottom of it and just get the low hanging fruit, I suppose, before we make things more complicated. But, yeah, try feeding fiber to one group and just see whether it does help. But like I said, in this particular instance, it didn't help with the scouring, but it could be something you might wanna try and maybe just look at the composition.

Moderator:

Any other questions?

Audience Member 2:

Lisa, you might have addressed this. Do you think that non-mulesing is getting a blame in any flocks for an increase in dag, incorrectly, unfairly, or?

Lisa:

I don't know how to answer. Yeah, it's hard to say because, I mean, we've got flocks that are mulesed that are pretty daggy, so I think that's the whole point, and the person who's mulesing was very daggy, wanted to tackle that before. So, I think if that's an issue for that farm, it's something they need to sort out what's the driver and whether they need to do the genetic work or the worm work or whatever it is, and then go down that path. Some people have gone cold turkey and just jumped into it and then, you know, they've had to sort of mop up afterwards, so I think it just depends. It's probably better to be prepared and have that out of the equation before they cease, yeah. Do you wanna comment Brendan? You might have other comments from the-

Brendan:

Yeah, it's... Look, we've always had dag to some extent and I think it's just more difficult to remove that dag because there's just inherently more skin, but I'll say that it's only in the first 12 months of that animal, like, that we have that trouble. Like, our two, three and four-year-old ewes, they've got better immunity to worms, they can handle feed better, et cetera, et cetera, and they've sort of grown into their bodies a bit more and that mulesing factor or the un-mulesed factor disappears, it doesn't become an issue. So, for us, our the hardest, and I think Edward probably added to this, the hardest part of the going down that non-mulesed journey, it's looking after that animal for the first 12 months and getting it through the first crutching, or it's first shearing and managing that task. And inherently, it does...well, in our sheep, it does make the crutching harder, I think. But, yeah, we're managing, we are able to manage it. And it's just a fear, I suppose, because it is a little bit harder in an industry and in a task that's hard in itself before it gets to that point. So, I suppose, there's a bit of a fear there, but, yeah, I'm not sure if that's answered your question, but, yeah, it's tough to some extent, but don't be afraid of it.

Audience Member 3:

How are the shearer training institutions helping to transition to non-mulesed?

Lisa:

Yeah, I think-

Audience Member 3:

Which is a bit of a dig at-

Lisa:

Yeah, no, I've-

Audience Member 3:

Difficulty getting shearers-

Lisa:

Yes, I've heard Emily King, who's AWI, that's here today, I've heard Emily make the point that in the shearer training schools they are making sure when they're learning to shear about how to handle non-mulesed sheep in terms of the blow around the tail, 'cause I think that's the thing that people have noticed with shearers, if they don't clean up that tail as well then that's when the dag thing can accumulate and it just creates a problem. So, and some of the differences we saw in these tail docking demos, the way the tails look was more to do with the way they'd been shorn rather than the actual tail docking method. So, having that, you know, that blow around the tail, and Emily assures me it's part of the shearer training package, so you can go and talk to Emily if you wanted more information.

Moderator:

And I think we've got time for one last question.

Audience Member 4:

Yeah, just Brendan, how many merino lambs are you mulesing over the board rather than in the cradle?

Brendan:

Yeah, oh look, there's some, that's for sure. Like, there's definitely. If you get a merino lamb that's score five for dag, you do take some skin, there's no way around that. So, you could argue that there's an animal welfare issue there too. So, yeah, there's a number, that's for sure, but it probably...and that animal would get culled out. But, yeah, we've just gotta be onto our management, I think, probably a little bit more than if you were still mulesing to some extent, yeah.

Phil:

Brilliant, thanks. And thanks to to the group for inviting me to speak to you today. We're pretty excited about the technology that I want to talk to you about. I guess having been involved in war research for 30 years, I've seen, you know, robot shearing, I've seen BioClip, I've seen an enormous amount of potentials come and go on the basis of, you know, finding an alternative shearing. So I'm pretty, you know, excited but cautious about what I'm gonna talk to you about. But I am excited and I wanna share some of that with you because the group that I've been working with at Adelaide Uni, we've been working on working towards what I'm going to talk about for some time. And it's probably been the last 12 months or so that we have made what I think is a very significant breakthrough in finding something that's a bit different. You see up till now, we've looked at shearing and we've said, how do we replace using combs and cutters with different ways of using combs and cutters? What I'm gonna talk to you about is an entirely different approach. It's an approach based on the idea of instead of breaking the fibers, either with biological agent like BioClip or with a robot with sharp combs and cutters, what we're talking about here is the idea of making wool weak for a very, very short period of time. And it only has to be a very short period of time for this technology to work. It's a little bit like putting a tiny little chink in a piece of fancy wire and then putting some tension on it. It's gonna break it that weak point, even though it's very, very short period. So what I'm gonna try to do is to leave as much time for questions as possible, because I think that's the best way to judge what people are thinking. But I would just like to acknowledge the people that have been involved in this, and that's, I'll just flick to the slideshow, if I can. So the people that have been involved in this technology are Dr. Sarah Weaver, who literally has worked on this with me for about 15 years now, and Dr. Hue Thi Do, who's just joined us recently with some skills that we needed related to pharmacology and some of the biological agents. So AWI has been funding this research at various times through its infancy and they have joined with us again with very strong and positive support of the project since we've made this breakthrough. So great support from them. University of Adelaide and the Davies Livestock Research Center at Roseworthy has been strong supporters of us through some, you know... There's always bits in research where it's hard to get funding because you've gotta jump across a gap, but no one's prepared to fund. So we've done that. So if you look at the title of this talk, wool bio-harvesting, could it be the solution? It immediately begs the question or begs the answer. There must be a problem. And I don't think I need to convince any of you in the room that there is a problem. I don't think my phone ever goes without ringing several times every week, plus several emails from producers who are very concerned about not being able to get shearers, not being able to get them when they want them, not being able to get, you know, highly skilled shearers, and even keeping them on the property has become issues. And so I'm inundated. I feel your pain. And yeah, interestingly, the other group that contact me a lot are the meat producing guys who don't have clean skins, who want me to get rid of wool and leave it in the paddock, which is kind of humorous when I've spent the last 15 years trying not to make it fall off in the paddock. So it's been an interesting journey. So I wanna just do a little bit of history so we understand where these ideas came from. And it's also quite informative because it tells you that this isn't an easy thing to solve. So let me just take you to some of the other industries. Let's look at wheat. You know, on the left there, you've got wheat harvesting, 1850. And on the right, typical modern day harvesters working at high efficiency, high speed, and so on. The great industry, which living in the Adelaide Hills, I'm embedded in, you know, harvesting with buckets through the heat of the day, diminishing the quality of the product and taking a long time and high cost to deliver the product to the winemakers. And now, typically harvested in the night when it's cool, better quality product. And that's what I wanna keep coming back to with this technology I'm talking about. If you can not just provide an alternative to shearing but provide an alternative to shearing, that gives you better quality of wool. It's a win-win. And that's true of grapes. They can come in and harvest hectares when the is perfect and when the quality is just right for the downstream processing. Here's picking strawberries. I've picked this one 'cause this is typical of technology gains that are happening at the moment is picking strawberries in 2023 with robots that identify like humans do, ripe strawberries that are absolutely ready for the market. And our competitor, cotton in the 1880s and cotton in the 2020s, very, very different. And then there's wool in the 1880s. I had to find a couple of pictures that would demonstrate to the engineers we're working with what we're dealing with, and they'd never been in shearing shed. So it was good to show them this and then get 'em out there into the shearing shed, which horrified them in terms of trying to find solutions to harvesting wool easily. But that's the 1880s Robert's painting. And they went, well, what's the difference? And basically, it's obviously we went from from blades to combs and cutters. And then we had a huge technological jump when we went to wide combs. And that huge technological jump took time to get past the industry. Now, I'm putting this up not to say that there's something wrong with the wool industry or that, you know, we're dumb or something. But simply to say this isn't an easy thing to solve. A lot of people have spent a lot of money over a lot of period of time. And so I'm just saying don't underestimate it. It is not easy to replace the skills of a shearer and the efficiency of combs and cutters, but that's what we're trying to do. And when I'm just saying don't underestimate the challenge that lies before us, I think we're a long way towards it, but there's a long way to go. So BioClip you would've heard of. And I was around when that research started in the 1970s at CSIRO prospect in Sydney. And I put this up simply to say that technology took, you know, 20 years to go from the lab to a product. And then there were issues which had to be dealt with like nets. And then you've got labor to replace the nets and not all classes of sheep and the cost. It was withdrawn. I think there's some interest in looking again at BioClip in different ways, but, you know, that's a typical timeframe, you know, that we're looking at. From lab to farm, you know, at least 20 years. Robots. The problem with robots is you're dealing with combs and cutters very, very close to the skin. We know the skills of shearers more than 2,000 movements in a shearing to keep that skin tight, to keep the legs straight, you know, to keep the second cuts down, you know, all of that. And I can tell you I understand it 'cause I'm a lousy shearer. So BioClip works by... Sorry. BioClip works by attacking the cells. And this is a wool follicle. This is skin here. This is the fiber growing out here. And the cells down here are just squishy little cells. As they move up here, they start to get longer and thinner and they start to get harder. And I'll come to this region here, which is what we're attacking. This is where they become harder, but down here, you hit 'em with BioClip. These cells get a hell of a shock and they stop dividing and the the follicle goes into what's called catagen. It starts to regress. It shrinks. It thinks it's falling out like the hair on my head. And then the wool, in fact, falls out some days later. We took a different approach. We decided we could weaken the fiber and then find some mechanical means of plucking those fibers so that you don't have to be close to the skin. You don't need combs and cutters. There's no cuts, no shearing cuts, no second cuts. It will all break on the day that the treatment was applied. And that's why I mentioned the wire. It only has to happen. This all happens from there to the top. Happens in about five days. So they spend about a day or just over a day in this region here. So we tried hundreds of compounds. We tried everything that made sense to target that region. And, you know, that took us a long time. So before I go into what we found, just let me give you a sense of, so that you know how it might work on your farm. The way we would see this working is the sheep come into a race at day zero. They're injected with the compound under the skin exactly the same way as you do your vaccinations. So they run along the race, bang, bang, bang, with either an injectable solution or more likely an injectable slow release pellet under the skin. And then you can wait. You can wait for a period of time, which is this period underneath that zone that you treated. So here's day zero in here. Here's the time we wait and then we pluck. And then we've got this period of time between when we inject it and when we harvest, which will be the pile of wool left underneath the wheat zone. That can be any time because it'll break at that point. Unless you've really stuffed up your wool and you've got wool that's less than 10 Newtons per kilo tex because that's where we're getting to. It'll break at that point and you'll be able to harvest. So you could do that at your convenience. It might be two weeks later. You might think two weeks is enough to keep them warm in a cold environment or protected from sun in a hot environment. Or it might be, you know, eight weeks or six weeks. They come back in. They run down the race. And then there's two options. One is just a handheld easily used with current handling facilities with unskilled labor that clicks into normal down piece shearing rig and off it comes. And then it gets sucked up and delivered to classing tables. That's the plan, that's the idea. It gives you flexibility. It's easy to do. It's technology you already use in terms of injectables. And what you need is a plucking device, which I'll talk about, or an automated plucking system working with more time efficient automated harvesting machine. So I'll just mention this because it comes up in the next couple of slides. How do we work out whether the wool is weak? We've got a really, really robust and it seems subjective, but we can do these within half a score. So we pluck a staple of wool and if it breaks almost like you literally just move your hands slightly and it breaks or it breaks with a little bit of effort or it breaks with you. You pull in, the skin starts to move a little bit and then it breaks. Or the skin rises significantly and there's a fair effort required to break it. Or the fiber doesn't break despite a large effort, the skin pulls up and the sheep flinches and, you know, you clearly... So we would say that you need to be down here at about two and a half to be harvestable by a simple machine. So apologies for the complexity. This actually isn't complex. This is the harvest score along the bottom that I just mentioned. From one to five. There's our score of two and a half that we reckon is the cutoff. And this is the relationship between pluck score and staple strength that we've done on a heap of sheep. And you can see here that obviously as the staples get weaker, the pluck score comes down and then it enters our magic zone. And that magic zone is about 13 Newtons per kilo tex or a two and a half pluck score. And just to give you some context of that, 13 Newtons per kilo text is classified by AWTA as rotten wool. This is where you guys would hope to be most of the time from 30 to 50 or 60 Newtons per kilo tex. So you're going from 40 Newtons down to, you know, 10. We also think now with our new knowledge that we can dial this up and actually get it down even lower so that it's even easier for the harvesting system to work. So let me just give you some context of the zein story. You might've heard of this protein that we talked about. Well, we've been working with this protein for a while because we knew from early work in CSIRO and I worked with Peter Reese and his colleagues on this protein, and we knew that when we supplied the amino acids from this protein, or in fact, if we supplied the protein itself past the rumen, that with a very short treatment, the wool became weak, right? So here's an experiment we did. Here's the pluck scores on the left. Here's the days after treatment. So here's the day we treated. One day later, here's the controls up here. They don't change. They're four and a half to five. Here's the ones we treated. They come down to three within a day. They're below the threshold within a day and a half or two days, and they stay that way thereafter. So it works really well. But the problem was we didn't really understand how it worked. So we didn't know how it worked and we spent a long time thinking about it, reading about it, studying it. And we finally worked out where the amino acids are operating. And it's at that point where the fibers become hard. That's important because we actually know biochemically exactly what the target is. We know the biochemistry and it's very complicated biochemistry, but that doesn't matter. What we do know is the target and what we need now. Once you know what the target is, you see firing with the zein amino acids is like firing a shotgun somewhere and it hit somewhere. What we've done is we've found the target. So now, we can use a really, you know... We can use a 22 and hit the target really accurately. And we've identified a number of the bullets. We're refining those at the moment. And that's the work that's going on as we speak, literally as we speak. Sarah and Hue are doing some trials with those bullets at the moment. Now I wanna just show you something, which was from a long time ago. It was when we were doing those early experiments with zein and we thought, well, we might as well see if we can make a little machine that works. And you can see it's a Heath Robinson, you know. This is a back of the shed job at this point. That's a Makita drill or a Black & Decker or something. And this is this little machine, which is a plucking machine. And don't get tied up with, oh, God, I can't imagine using that. It looks the same as shearing, but keeping your head that while you watch this, this is not cutting wool. This is plucking the weak point. So when you see wool come off, your brain goes, oh, yeah, it's being shown. It looks just like shearing. What's the point of this, Phil? You've wasted all our time. This is plucking and it's by no means. This isn't even prototype one. We're onto about prototype five now. But I just wanted to show you this one because it shows where we got to and why we were excited early on, but then hit the brick wall because we couldn't come up with a biological part. Now, we think with the biological part working, this is the bit that's holding us back a bit. No combs and cutters, right? All right, so what you'll notice is just how even the pile of wool left, that's the protective coat is. And that's important because what that means is if you have done this year and you did it last year, the wool that's broken is about four microns finer than the wool underneath it and above it. And if you do that one year, you get one end, four microns fine. If you do it two years, both ends of four microns finer. And that's gonna have tactile effects on the final apparel product that are positive. In terms of uniformity of wool length, these are all breaking at exactly the same day. So every follicle on the day that we treat is affected. And so when we break it off with whatever plucking machine or whatever instrument moves across there and smashes the wool off is exactly the same. Well, exactly the length that it was meant to be by the follicle that made it. So that's pretty exciting. So if you make wool this week, the first question that AWI said to us was, well, that's great, but the wool's gonna fall off in the paddock if it's that weak. And I can tell you this wool is very, very weak. When you grab staples of that wool that Russell was breaking there, they were very weak. The answer is no, we've just done this experiment. Here's the experiment. We were supplying the amino acids. In this case, it was directly into the bloodstream. It's very theoretical at this point. But we've just approved the point that these sheep we're running around at Roseworthy in pretty small paddocks. We ran them in and out of the shed. So there was lots of interaction with ring lock fencing and with yards and with people and with other sheep for up to 10 weeks. And there was absolutely no difference in fleece weight. And there was no wool left on the paddock. And you think, how the hell can that work? And the answer is that while one staple is very, very weak, no forces applying in the field or very few forces applying in the field, including saltbush, grab individual staples, they grab big chunks of wool. And so if one staple is say, 4 Newtons, what tends to grab in the field is maybe 100 staples, which is 400 Newtons. And that's a hell of a force to apply. So if you grab this wool, you have to grab a pretty small amount to be able to pluck it off. And that tells you that the machines that are gonna operate here can't just... Originally, I thought a great idea was we'd just make this weak point and then I'd get a bloody great big Dyson vacuum cleaner and just go and suck the wool off the sheep, which would've been terrific. Except all it did was go and fill up the vacuum because it was too much wool at one time. You need to tack little bits at high speed over a longer time. So this is why it's takes a long time to find an alternative. It has to be simple. It has to be easily applied. Now, we initially looked at feeding and we quickly were dissuaded from that by the fact that variable intakes of sheep would be impossible to control. You know, shy feeders once will eat twice as much as the others. And Merino, as I can tell you, the fussiest eaters on the planet. Some will get stuck in, some won't. Cross-breeds and pure breeds, you could get to eat anything. But these guys are fussy. And I know that's a fact now because we've just done a feeding trial with zein last week and it worked really well and the wool became weak. But the Merinos ranged from score one to score four. Cross-breeds were all one and pure breeds were all five, which tells you that this technology probably isn't gonna work on meat breeds, you know, that don't have a lot of Merino in them. I think it's gonna depend on how much Merino you've got in your composite and we need to study that. We still don't know the answer to that. But we do know feeding's not the way to go. Drenching is not the way to go. What we would've had to drench using the zein approach was too much. It would've been drenching, you know, 500 MLs of fluid or something. Injection's the way to go. And now, we've identified the target, that's the way to get hit it. It has to be effective in all classes of sheep. Lambs, hogget, mutton, wet rams have no negative effects on reproduction, you know, causing abortion or something. No negative health effects. And so far, we've had no negative health effects. No effects on meat. Quality has to be safe. In other words, residue times. And we're taking data already to make sure we can get past regulations for APVMA approval. Has to be cheap. And that's the question at the moment that we just can't answer because depending on the bullet will depend on the synthesis of that in high volume amounts. We think that one of the bullets can be made very cheaply, but we can't guarantee that at this point. But our aim is to make this cheaper than shearing. So what are the benefits? I mentioned some. There's no combs and cutters. There's no issues for the operator. You don't have to straighten wool out. As long as it's reasonably in a normal handling system, that wool will break provided you can get a starting point. And we're looking at whether you start at the bum of the sheep, at the crutch end, you know, the bare end under the top and work from there around. We're working on that. So unskilled labor could do this. We're looking at a high throughput system as well. Now, that's well and truly down the track. And I don't wanna over promise, but if this works at the really basic level, I can't see any reason in my long-term vision of how industries have gone thinking of harvesters and so on. I can't see why we couldn't get to a point where we had sheep coming along a conveyor belt VA type thing, the machine dressing the sheep and it would be a robot type machine, but it doesn't have to be as clever as the robots using a comb and cutter. And I've already talked to the engineers, we're working with engineers on these ideas. They've already come up with some 3D printed models that we're testing. I think given the conferences talking about down the track and exciting new potential, I would get excited about the wool industry becoming high throughput, shearing with wool harvesting with almost no people involved. You know, the wool comes off, gets sucked away. I see ultimately it going along a conveyor table like all foods and all products do now and they're sorted on the basis of video analysis into, you know, stains, you know, pieces, you know, short bits, and even potentially micron. But that's me running off and kinda getting overly excited, and producers always keep pulling me back saying, you know, get your feet on the ground, Phil. But I think we should, as an industry, be excited about the potential for revolutionizing this great industry and we should be excited because I think there is the potential there and there's no reason we can't do it. Flexible timing for producers is great. Small groups, potentially cheaper, and no nets in handling. So where we going? Regardless of whether our bullets work this time, I think this approach is right. I think we've proven you can create very weak wool, which stays on in the paddock and it can be removed by simple plucking machines with non-skilled labor. We've got the right target. I'm certain of that. We're trying to find the best bullets. And I think that it's gonna take something like 12 to 18 months to refine those bullets. And we're working flat out. The lab guys are working flat out on that. They've done a remarkable job. The federal government has a scheme that puts funds into accelerating high potential commercial research, and they've jumped this to the top of the queue. Of all the industries in Australia, they've jumped this to the top of the queue. And we're getting fantastic support from a group called Metabolomics and Proteomics, which is a national group that can measure these bullets down to levels of Nanomoles, which means, you know, half a drop in an Olympic size swimming pool. That's the sort of technology we're talking about and it's working for the wool industry now. So we need an efficient engineering system, the phase one device. I think we've already got it but it's going to be refined. The engineers are refining that at the moment and I would say they're gonna come out at the same time as our bullets. The phase two automated thing I think is it will rely on the same technology as we show here, but it will take two to three years to develop that. And then the fund starts, then we've gotta run this out across regions, sheep types, reproduction, health, more quality welfare. And then we've gotta run with the large scale production of the injected agent and get approval. Not trivial, not gonna be here in three years time, I don't think. But man, it's running pretty quick. So this is a big challenge. Cheap, safe, transferable to current system, so you can use it as quickly as possible. We're trying to give you, I guess, the BMW before we give you the Mercedes. Oh, it's probably a Tesla now, isn't it? So we're trying to get you in on the ground level and have something work that you've got confidence in so that we can then move to the next step. We believe we've got the right approach, we've made good progress, but there's lots of questions. How long will it take? How much is it gonna cost? What will the removal system be? I get asked more by cross spread producers than anyone. Will this work in cross spreads and composites? We've got a couple of answers to that in the last week actually, which is part good news, part bad news, but happy to talk about those in question time. So let's go to questions. Happy to take any questions and do my best to answer them.

Host:

All right. Thank you very much, Phil. Why don't you put our hands together and thank Phil?

- Just trying to get rid of this here.

Host:

I think we're all aware that across our agricultural industry, access to skilled labor and workforce is one of our key challenges and you, as producers, face that in the shearing sheds more than as much as anywhere. So what part of our theme was dream big, think big next 25 years? And I think Phil's really challenged us to think about the shearing aspect of our industry and where it could head in the next 25 years. So we've got an opportunity for questions now. So Phil, as I said, we've got a camera, which is gonna rotate, so if we can put a hand up with a microphone, we can actually put the camera on you so Phil can see you ask the question and then Phil will hear and be able to answer. So where do we start with the questions? We've got one I think, Rob, in the middle here. Yeah. I'll just back a row, I think. Yeah,

Robert:

Yeah, Robert. Thanks, Phil. Yes. Great vision. We've heard here today about Florilina, the oral lice control product. Traditional lice eradication programs rely on treatment of short wool and, you know, do you see an issue around that?

- Just trying to frame your question, treatment of short wool. I'm not quite sure what you're asking.

Robert:

So it's usually within 14 days of shearing. So, you know, I guess there is that approach to you have to get that fleece plucked pretty early.

- Oh, I'm with you. Yeah. The coat grows underneath pretty quickly in that, you know. There's no negative effect of the treatment on wool growth. Immediately, we stop it. So it grows straight away. There's no sort of three weeks for it to recover or something like that. So it grows straight away and after two weeks, you've got a reasonable covering. But whether it's enough for sheep in walker, you know, I would leave to people there whether it's enough to cover sunburn. Certainly, three or four weeks is. I'm not sure if I've answered your question, but I think it would fit with .

Host:

It'd come down to sum of application too, wouldn't it, Rob? But it'd be the just getting it the right time.

- Yeah, that's right. That's right.

Host:

Terry Sim down the front. Have we got a microphone, Ali or Bindi? Sorry. Oh. Yeah, thank you.

Participant:

If your system only does shearing once a year, how do you tackle crutching? That'll have to be manually done by shearers, won't it?

- Yeah. Well, yeah, shearers or producers themselves, yeah. This is not able to fix crutching because it treats systemically, it does the whole body, right? So you've you've still got a crutch. You can't apply it topically or something like that. At the moment, we don't have that system working.

Host:

Yeah. All right. Terry.

Terry:

Could you fill us in on where you are with the crossbred composite work? A lot of crossbred people in the room, we'll wanna know, well, is it gonna work for me or not?

- Yep. So from a theoretical basis, this product works on follicles that are growing at the time you treat, okay? So if a follicle is resting, if it's just sitting in the skin in the resting phase, it won't be affected because the biochemistry is not working in that follicle. So theoretically, it will depend on what proportion of the follicles are in the growing phase. And that depends on what proportion of the genotype is Merino. We've just done a trial with some pure white Suffolk and we did some cross-breeds and it really was just some Border Leicester Merinos that we could get hold of. We don't know a great deal about their genetics. And the purebred White Suffolk had absolutely no effect on them at all. They all stayed score five for the whole time, even though they ate the most of the product. The cross-breeds, four of the cross-breeds worked brilliantly. In fact, they worked better than the Merinos. One of the cross-breeds didn't work at all. So we're at a point at the moment, we can't answer your question, Terry. We need to go down the track of getting the product, sufficient of the product available to us to be able to do those sorts of things. Then we could do, you know, genomics and work out what proportion of the DNA from Merino and, you know, other breeds are in the composite.

Host:

Thanks, Phil.

- Does that answer your question? Yep.

-Host:

Yeah. Phil, I think Georgie, was it?

Georgie:

Yeah. Phil, Rebecca loved your presentation and I'm really happy to see you here today. So thank you for being here. The wool harvesting, do you think we'll... I love your vision and please keep aiming high to mechanize this process. Do you see that there'll be perhaps a truck backing up to the shearing shed with the plant onboard so that we're completely getting rid of our traditional shearing sheds?

- Yep. That's probably where I see it. Although the engineers that I'm working with, now, these guys, I call 'em propeller heads. They sit in rooms. They're actually here in Adelaide and they work for the defense industry and they do all the fancy stuff on, you know, attack helicopters and F/A-18 fighters and the submarines now. And they sit around, they think stuff up, but they go from thinking it up to making it. And when I took this problem to them, we had huge brainstorming sessions and they came up with ideas that were just beyond belief. And I kept saying, guys, this has gotta be cheap. This has gotta be either to be able to be purchased by every producer so that they've got this in their current systems or it's gotta be able to be used by a contractor. And they assure me that the sorts of robotics they're talking about, and they're talking about having sensors in the machines as well, which like imagine you treated a sheep and it wasn't fully treated and there were some follicles somewhere in there that weren't fully weak. The sheep would be... You know, the welfare issue would be huge. It would pull some skin off. These machines can stop in like a millisecond or a nanosecond of detecting that there's too much force required. And that's the sort of level that they're down to talking about. If we go down to that track, even though they say they can make it cheap enough for everyone to own one, I suspect you would be buying in a system that did the harvesting classing all in one go.

Host:

Alright, thank you, Phil. And thanks, Beck. There was a question just behind you. Oh, sorry, Lyndon. Yep.

Neil:

Neil Harris. Congratulations, Phil. Brilliant stuff that you're doing there. We look forward to a good outcome. Couple of questions. Has any of this wool passed down to the processing line to see our processes perform with it? And I can imagine with the two finer ends that the feel factor of the garment and so forth will be quite unique and quite comfortable, so which could add another layer of value to the commodity, but just interested in what some of the processing feedback is. Thank you.

- Yeah, we haven't done enough. We haven't had enough to give them to do trials, to be honest. We speak to them a lot because GH Michelle's are here. We speak a lot to those guys. And everything that we're saying to them suggests it should be better quality. It should have, as you say, a finance can only help with tactile. The evenness of the fibers can only help them. One of their biggest problems is that variable fiber length that ends up as you end up with noil, which is downgraded hugely in the first, you know, cuts and combs. Everything about it suggests that it should be better quality. But I can't give you data on that at the moment. But, you know, once we get in the next 12 months, we should be able to start treating larger numbers of animals and getting sufficient fleeces to start doing those sorts of trials. And I reckon they're gonna be amazing. And you're not gonna have skin pieces. You're not gonna have, you know, second cuts. To see these sheep after they're harvested, I've worked with sheep, you know, all my life in research stages and it's just incredible.

Host:

Thank you. Thanks, Phil. Thank you, Neil, for the question. Good one. Back out the middle. Yep.

Tony:

Yeah, good afternoon. Tony's my name. Just a bit of an observation rather than a question. We all focus here on wool and meat and what have you, but I guess there's also value in the skin of the animal. And I guess anything that any animal that's been harvested in this way from birth, maybe there's a premium in the leather industry.

Host:

Phil, any inside skin value?

- No. I can't think of any negative effects because we're just targeting that process just above the follicle bulb. For a very short period of time, the fibers are gonna be even on the skins after harvesting. And if that's of better value for skin trade, then it's gonna be better.

Host:

Yeah. Thanks, Phil. I think we've got one more question behind you, Beck. We have one in the middle there. No? I might've misread it over the up the back. No, I think we're all good. All right, everybody. So Phil, thank you very much, Professor Phil Hynd. Can you put your hands together again please?