Putting the Pieces Together at Jigsaw Farms

Putting the Pieces together at JigSaw Farms

- [Mark Wootton] So, just so you can all relax, that's your take homes, I do 'em at the beginning and then you know, so if you go to sleep that's okay, there's some nice pretty pictures in between you can look at. So, in the future, this is what I reckon, I should have 10 commandments, I thought it'd be a bit more religious but I couldn't think of the 10th although, I have thought of the 10th, I reckon number 10, just as an aside, is to have some zonal mix where you actually have your farms if you were designing the perfect outcome, so you can pick up some of the good or bad climate areas. So you gotta understand that climate is changing, humans are the main cause of it. I won't back away from it and I can argue til the cows come down but I won't do that today. Plan for future climate, it'll be more variable and extreme and that's one of the hardest things in the planning that we're doing is dealing with those extremes and what we're gonna do in those. You have to have confidence that meat and fibre production will be part of the future and we do, and I think in an increasing way. Carbon sense is economic sense. I think if you get your systems right, by and large if you can get your carbon intensity right, you've got feed efficiency and if you've got feed efficiency you've got a pretty good economic system. Consistently retain 30 percent per annum of net profits which we're not there but it's a struggle but if you can do that, at the moment we store a bit over 2000 tonnes of grain and a lot of hay as our buffer, after 2006-7 I was never going there again, and the consultants all tell us, you should put your money in the bank and have it as a reserve for that rather than holding actual physical fodder but if you could get to that on a regular basis I think you'd be pretty well set. There'll be people on this room that do that quite easily, I suspect. Breed a flexible ewe that can provide multiple income streams and I'm agnostic about breeds and whether you should be Merinos or not. We've gone down a particular path for a variety of reasons but I acknowledge that everyone, as long as you're passionate in your area and you're committed to it, you can do whatever system that suits you and hopefully your climate area but I'll explain why we've come to our decision. Emission intensity, you've gotta understand your footprint and you have to have an adaption plan in place and more importantly, the plan you need to act on it, so if you're not quite there and you did wanna review how to go about it, that more lambs, more often programme is a terrific one for that and you need to be flexible, don't chop and change, we go broke when I have mad ideas in the middle of the night and wake up with them and try to change things. If you can avoid that you're pretty good. So, quickly, I'll talk about what motivates us, what we're doing about it and maybe touch on what we need to do in the future. So I'll fly through some of these. So this is, you've all seen this, this is from the BOM site, this is the latest 2016 data, you wanna run a trend line through it, oh, I'm on the wrong one, it's jumped, where's my-- Hang on. I'm out of sequence. I'm a dill. Okay, this is where I need my arrow, is it that straight one? So, I'm born, I'm 1960, I'm 57, so I'm here, you can put wherever you are on your chain. On your left axis here you've got your mean temperature and for any of those who've followed the politics of Paris and this conversation about where we're trying to get our emissions to, we've signed off on getting to two degrees although between you and I, the commitments won't actually do it, the commitments are about up here somewhere but presumably they're gonna keep working on them in terms of lowering our greenhouse footprint and then what they're saying for a safe climate, you should be at one and 1/2 degrees but if we keep doing what we're doing now and we go as business as usual, which is based on going up here which is on the, what they call, an RCP 8.5 which basically means that our emissions will keep continuing as they are now and we don't change them that's where we're gonna end up and so all I did was presume, I've got four kids and I said they're gonna live til, they tell me they're gonna live to 100 in their generation but I've put them living to in their late 80s or 90s and if we do good action they'll be in the safe zone, if we don't you transverse it up here, they're in serious trouble and if they have children, which they may or may not have, if we don't do things they're gonna be in serious strife. It's fairly sobering. The next one is just a straight line data of what the weather is. You've all seen that but basically the trend line's fairly self-evident. Now, if you go onto the BOM site with CSIRO you can go into, go down the climate change box down the bottom and then you can go into putting in your local areas, your area and you can actually put in your town and then under different scenarios it'll tell you what it's gonna be like in the future. So all I did down here, was I went to Hamilton where we're from and it projects what's going to happen in terms of the variety of weather that you can imagine and therefore, in theory, you would design your system accordingly. Now, you can do it for where you're at and you can do it depending on how optimistic you are, if you think that we're gonna slow down our greenhouse gases then you would be able to bring it back, if you think that you don't accept any of that, well it's just a risk management exercise, you can ignore it and move on. If you also go into that site, you'll actually get your localised predictions in terms of risk factors for going forward for our one in Hamilton, the 2030 one is that natural variability, so which is the main impact of what we do at the moment that will still dominate over the greenhouse gas effects but as you look further out into 2050 to 2090 the greenhouse effects start coming in and we get, in practical terms, we get a decrease in winter and spring rainfall. There's temperature and that's at a very high confidence level, they've moved that up now. Temperature will continue to rise and there'll be warming 2050 to 2090, about 2.4 to 3.8 degrees, so if you remember that slide before, that's using that guidelines. So, in base terms, it's gonna be warmer. But probably the most difficult ones for them to actually say forward is, it's about the extreme heat which is gonna be difficult to manage and the evaporative rates in your water systems but there will be fewer frost so long term wise, we may be moving into more of a cropping area where we are. Then I chaired our local catchment management authority for a number of years and this was quite important, obviously, to an NRM group. This is your river systems and it's very difficult data to look at but basically, brown's not good which is like life a bit really, isn't it? And yellow isn't as bad but that's about vulnerability so if you look here, is that Hamilton? I've lost my site.
Yeah, so we're up here, so we're in this North West zone, the river systems, the Glenelg and all of this, they're quite vulnerable compared to, in some of these projections going forward, compared to further South and South East and the reason I show you this is that this directly relates to production systems that you could or shouldn't run. So, just to go back a little bit on what I just said before. In South West Victoria we're gonna have CO2 result extra plant growth, good stuff, it'll go up cause you've got more CO2, bad news is it'll be moisture limited and that's that Horsham trial work they've done in the chambers showed that unless they came up with new grain varieties you just can't get the extra yield, even with the extra CO2 unless you have moisture. You get an increase in frequency of hot days, warmer winter but shorter growing season, feels a bit like that at the moment, doesn't it? Well not the shorter growing season but the warmer winter for us, we've actually got very good grass production at the moment but we're looking for a little top up rain, and more variable rain. The summer rainfall one, I think, is the most dodgy in the data, I wouldn't back my whole system on it. Now, just to repeat that, this comes out of the new rural industry study which was done in 2010 and what they did was they look at a whole bunch of things that would be modelled, if you did this, if you did that and if you change your system, if you had wool, you didn't have wool, what would actually happen in the models if things happened and you've got-- I find it really hard to read in this, 2030 modelling, shorter growing seasons,

reduced farm growths margins. That's based on current prices which were back in 2010 so that may not be 100 percent accurate because of the increase in both your wool and the protein levels. 2000 to 2009 were not dissimilar to what we have in 2030. Graham Anderson who some of you may of heard do his climate kelpies, have you seen that? If you wanna understand where they go, knock on to that site, climate kelpies, it's fantastic. Really simple. They use these weather dogs to show you what's happening. He argues that if we've dealt with 2000 to 2009 effectively there's a fair chance you're gonna be right in 2030, if you've been profitable through that period which you need to reflect on. Stocking rates will need to be reduced to keep the ground cover. We used to work on a 90 percent, we're moving to 100 percent ground cover rule now. Changing livestock species seems to have no real benefit which was interesting because I thought that there would be certain ways you could deal with season length that would actually change that but they didn't find that. So, again, chopping and changing is dangerous. Meat production seems to do well in good years but falls in poor years. Wool does give a bit of a little shock absorber in those figures coming out of that which is a bit of a buffer. Better animals, genetic improvement that is, will, obviously, lessen impacts. Lot-feeding, you know this stuff, you guys, if you're not doing confinement you're probably not protecting your pasture. Significant advantages. Greater winter growth, calving and lambing times marginally earlier, we've actually moved ours a little bit earlier at the moment and increased scale can reduce enterprise impact and that's just about benefits of scale, I think. So, what do we do? And I'm gonna try to do this in two minutes. At the top was 2005, that's what we were doing, fairly straight forward. The prime lamb was coming predominantly out of first cross ewe. Some we bred ourselves, some we sourced locally, some we bought at Naracoorte, as ewe lambs. 2017 we've gone to 50 percent Merino to Merino and then 30 percent, I've done this at 100 percent so the trees are part of it, I've said the whole land operates and then the terminal lambs over crossbreds or some of, it's complicated, but some of what we call our old super ewes which are full Merino but they have some very good meat characteristics and that's on that trend and the beef's come out. Last year, in 2016, I had two significant events happen in my life, or in our life. I had a heart issue so I had to have some bypass surgery done which sort of changes your view of the world a bit and I had a man in a helicopter land on our front lawn and offer a very good price to buy a lot of our land and one actually happened before the other, I don't know if that was related to be honest with you. and as a result of that we were 16 and a half thousand acres or about 90 thousand DSE, and we've ended up selling to him and we also sold a block to a neighbour to give them a run through, probably one of our best blocks of land actually, which was all in a sort of a readjusting and four kids, you know this stuff, they're all adults and trying to work out succession planning and so it was all coming together at the same time. It's a chaotic period but it did give the opportunity to sit down and we had, at that stage, a third of our system was cattle and two thirds were sheep and I sat down with a local consultant and we went back and did our gross margins on all our systems. I probably was wedded the most to my cattle and probably wedded the least to my Merino sheep and there's a couple in the room who will attest to that but what did come out through that process is on gross margins for our system, North of Hamilton, so a few qualifiers there, Merino sheep, where you have good reproduction figures and we're now just on 100 percent in our Merino system, with good growth and good muscle and particularly selecting for genetic fat which we're doing all of those things, they came through as the most profitable system we could do by more than fifteen dollars on gross margins per DSE. So, that was for us at that time with the genetics we had at that time and what we run, and so we also had the opportunity, if you didn't realise, cattle had been worth a lot of money so we quit the whole herd, everything stock, lock and barrel, 1200 breeders, all the followers, everything all went in one hit and we also sold all our middle and younger crossbred ewes and we're running out our old cross bred ewes so there's a few in the system still. So it was a decision that we had to, we'd sold 40 thousand DSE of country and you had to make these decisions. It's a pretty sobering thing to do in a relatively short period of time and it was based on just sitting down and working with figures and trying to take the emotion out of it. If you were doing an analysis of why we did it it was because the genetics worked and we did have lots of markets, that market for us is a very considerable market for our Merino operation, very profitable, arguably probably our most profitable . And I'll talk about genotypes and feed conversion in a minute, why we got there but it is related. So that's that wool side of it. Now, to make life even more difficult, and this is about to be published, it's actually in the CSIRO and I've just put it up there so you don't, I don't expect you to-- it's a horrible document to read from where you are but just to show you the CSIRO animal production sites and the great little trendy title, could say Jigsaw Farms offsets but it didn't, it's called offsets required to reduce the carbon balance of sheep and beef farms through carbon sequestration in trees and soil and it's Natalie Doran-Brown, myself, guy called Chris Taylor from Melbourne Uni and Richard Eckard who some of you might've seen do it.