Managing Self- Replacing Maternal Systems

Managing self- replacing maternal systems

(Presenter: John Keiller, Composite sheep breeder)

- [JohnKeiller] I got asked to just give a bit of a history of composite sheep and what sort of makes me think and tick I guess, and what my story is, and how composite sheep are where they are and where I think they might go into the future. So we had Border Leicester Merino sheep for 30 years, that was the background of sheep in our area. I went overseas, to the UK, I came back in 1990, and I wanted to change my animals. It was at the start of performance recording with LambPlan, which was just kicking off. I didn't want to go to the grade with the same animals, and I knew I needed change to get some of these things to happen on my farm. This is what I needed. I needed some more meat, I needed less cost. More meat per hectare, less cost. I needed more lambs alive and less ewes dead, I needed animals I could control in that area. I knew I needed more growth so I could harvest pasture better, so I need faster growth and heavier weights. For us, we need internal parasite tolerance, resistance, resilience. I knew I needed a simple system, so that I just knew where I was all the time. I need to control risk, and I knew that genetics were going to compound and make things hell. So these are some of the things that self replacingsystems allowed me to do. I've been able to control the DNA, on farm expansions it's very easy to lease or purchase, you know exactly the animals you have when you move onto the place. You can buy a place or lease a place on Saturday and put sheep there on Sunday or Monday. If you have fire or drought, you lose animals, something happens, you keep all your ewe lambs, you mate them, and you're back in the game. It's not like you've got sheep and it takes you three years to restock. Lower cost of production, health status, and we can add value to some of the animals we sell. So, for hardy animals, for us they've always had to be out in the paddock. So rams that perform well in sheds, their daughters perform well in sheds, that's no use for us. Rams under silos are always fat, their daughters have to be run like that, they're no use for us. Changing environments, because we've got a changing environment there's always risk, and so we need some animals that we can actually change to the condition scores on a time. We've got the ability to get in lamb and survive. Our parasite tolerance now has meant that this last spring time, our adult ewes, we expected to have to drench the whole the lot on the first summer. Reduction drench, and they came back and they're low. And we go, we're starting to feel the value of that coming through the flock, because we've spent so much time and effort over time. And there's characteristics that these animals have. Now just by being performance recorded that you like, because they keep turning up a the yards. Every time they turn up at the yards, they must be alive, that's the first rule. It's always the rule too. Just a bit on current production. This is two 2015 and it's three of 2016. These are straight off stud records, these are some singles. Birth weights would've been too high for optimum survival. They're growing at 440 grams a day, they're 50 kilos at about 90 days. So 87% survival of those, and 11 ewes to the hectare, our single stocking rate, they're doing 500 kilos to the hectare of lamb. That's at weaning time too, with some growth time after that. This is our singles, twins and triples in 2016 after stud records. Interesting to see that our stud twins are still too light for optimum survival at 4.3. They were too heavy that year. Triplets here at 3.5. At these sorts of survival rates and those stocking rates, we're doing about 400 kilos per hectare of lamb. And they equate to around 20, a little bit over 20 kilos of carcass weight per ewe joined. And this is just from Sandy McEarchern, came through MLA the other day. Our ewe stocking rates are about right on here, about 8.3 for an 830 millimetre rainfall. We're doing 24 kilos of lambed dressed, or sold, per ewe joined. And that's at weaning time with some growth, so we're doing above that. This statement here, 250 grams a day. Producers get caught up in weaning percentages without measuring growth. I think we need to have another look at that. And we're just talking so much about more lambs, more lambs, more lambs, but those growth rates are allowing our properties to get very good returns, and that's the top 10 producers out of 60 producers in Southern Australia, down into Tassie, with prime lamb systems. So that's what the top 10 producers were doing, so that's pretty hot of the press. 2,000 stud ewes with twins in them the other day, there's a $25 per ewe genetic difference in them, maternal ewes from $115 to $140 maternal dollar index. You can't tell me where the best sheep is. I can read ink on paper, black ink on white paper. We've got sheep in there that are gonna do no money at all. We've got sheep in there that are gonna have one lamb at 120, two at 100, or three at 90. They all walk past, they're white and they're woolly, we just have to get into the numbers. We have to measure them, and we have to just keep pushing into that area. This is what I'll talk about now, every day thoughts. This is what I think about. Pasture consumption, ASBVs, yearly action plan, some survival and pregnancy scan, and some ewe lambs and a bit of blue sky. Growth is the characteristic that sets or system. We lamb our lambs down at a point, and they've got so much time to get to when the pasture dries off. So it's that patch of time. If they grow faster we can lamb later, to get to the fixed point of time when they're finished. If they grow slower, we have to lamb earlier. But growth's got very interesting things. What it does is it changes stocking rate, it changes pasture utilisation rate. And so there's a three-dimensional loop that operates around growth. And what growth does is that, one of the things it does is it allows you to change your reproduction rate. Because, this is January to December, shorter day length. Number of ewes cycling and reproduction rate. So the later we join, the higher the reproduction rate. So if we can have fast-growing sheep and we join later, we get higher reproduction rate. And then, by having higher reproduction rate, we then have the ability to eat pasture. There's our spring curves in the last few years. And so what we're really doing is in our system, we're dropping lambs here, and then we're trying to eat as much in the spring as we can. So it's your job to decide if you want to eat how much pasture utilisation. That's us this year, 45% to what numbers, sometimes I read 45 in the paper this week. We're this much. But by having fast-growing sheep we can lamb them here, we can have higher reproduction rates because it suits the system. We also know in mid-pregnancy they're only at 1.3 DSE, then 1.4, and then when they lamb they go to here. So if we lamb over here, we can't get many sheep in the spring time. So the more we go over there, the more we eat, so we're just more efficient. Up to 70% when you've got pasture degradation. And that's about what happens with that reproduction thing. Ewes are doing 100 in November, ovulation rate. They doing them May, which is right at their peak of ovulation at 200, to about 17% ovulations a month, it's about 4.2 a week, at 75% embryo survival it's 3% lambs a week. But if you change it on your farm just a week, you won't know, because you've got the year-on-year effects. But that's really what you're doing. So fastest sheep, growth sheep, will allow you to change the efficiency of your utilisation system. And really what's happened is that, in the last 15 years, we had 18 kilo carcasses, and now we've gone to 22 kilo carcasses nationally. We've got 4 kilos carcass weights, about 8 kilos live weight. And all the increased genetics we've had for increased growth has allowed us to change the product. But what's happened is the abattoirs have changed their specs from 18 to 22. If they hadn't have changed their specs, the genetics we have now would've allowed us to actually lamb a month later and still have the same carcass weight lambs come out. The abattoirshave used all the genetic space we had to be more efficient at pulling weight per hectare out. Genetics are just like a peg in the ground. I just think of genetics as a peg in the ground, they are where they are. You then decide where you wanna move away from that peg. So, define your directions. For me, it's growth, number of lambs and parasite resistance. So I need to know they're there, I wanna go there. I do some feedback off my lambs, I wanna move there, I go and see what my reproduction rate, I wanna go there, if I need something on internal parasites for me, I go there, there, there. So I keep moving away from this fixed position. Rams provide the new DNA and they're 80% of the change. In maternal rams, if they mate 60 ewes a year for three years, 200 roughly, they've got five lots of daughters that are there for five years. Their daughters are there for five years, and the great granddaughters are there for five years. So maternal rams have 600 expressions of their own DNA. Terminal lambs have 200, Merinos have less. So when you understand that, maternal rams have far-reaching long-term consequences, because they have so much of it carried on, intergenerationally carried on. So culling of ewes, you're gonna go spend a lot of time mucking around culling a few ewes, or you gonna go and put some rams in the front, let the whole thing flow on for the next 15 years? Which one's the most important thing? So culling of ewes is just really fine-tuning down at the end, taking a little bit of dead wood out. This is just maternal indexes. This is the old maternal index, in two here with some new maternal indexes. This one here had, this one here's the one that's giving us a lot of growth here at post-weaning weight. You'll notice here that if we start to actually reduce adult weight, here, we've got minus on adult weight, we've got some changes in reproduction rate, six back to two. Right, we've got some changes in post eye muscle depth from four up to seven. So we've got a range of indexes we can use, the question is, which one do we use and why? So if you add some slow-growing sheep, and you really needed to get them to market in a fixed time, you'd probably put some more growth into them. There's other people out there at the moment who've got some large sheep, who are saying we don't want our sheep to be any bigger, so we're going to actually cap out our weight. So there's a whole range of tools out there for you to use, systems to use, you just have to decide, that's where the DNA is, I know where I am, I need to make a change. So use LambPlan figures to to that, and then use the RamSelect app, you can go and sit in and type up all the parameters you want, and search and suck out the animals you want out of the national amount of rams that are available. Just on differential management. This is March to February across the year for us. This is how we organise our ewes. Condition scored here in March at joining, we'll preg scan them here in June the other day. And our singles, twins and triplets will then go at different stocking rates from the day of preg scanning, we'll do another condition score at weaning time, and then in January when we shear them we'll do them off the board, just on eye. So we've got four or five times of the year where we've got differential management of the ewes to try and give them all the best opportunity we can. This time it's set stocking, we'll have paddock size and shelter and pasture quality involved, so that we put all the animals in the right place at the right time, on different pasture levels. And hopefully get a five kilo birth and a 250 grams per day and a 45 kilo lamb at the end. If you go on to survival, we'll just do a bit on survival. Knowing that this is little lambs and their survival, are we putting enough time and efforts into areas that will give us the best bang for our buck? So here we've got starvation and mismothering. I think we'd have to get up in the morning and say that could be the priority. After that, dystocia, big singles. What's gonna happen this year? You know, that's why we preg scan to reduce that. Every time a lamb dies, one lamb dies per 100 ewes, at $100 lamb it's a dollar, dollar per ewe, click clickclick, click clickclick. It's the cash register. So we need to look at those and make sure we're targeting what we need to get the best. Just for us, for cold weather, potential heat loss here. There's a combination of velocity, temperature and rainfall, that's how you measure it. And this is the difference in mortality when you get to that combination of those three factors of 1,00 wind chill. So if you've got Merino twins, go and put them somewhere where you can keep the little fellows alive. If you've got cross-bred singles, they're pretty tolerant aren't they? But these little fellows here, there's plenty of them out there, this year, a lot of Merino ewes preg scanning 150%, that means half the ewes, half the ewes of this zone, they need to be looked after really really carefully. So we're quite mindful of that, so we get them in the right place. And if you do a good job with either trees, or some of shelters, tall wheatgrass shelters, that's what you can get. Preg scanning, just home numbers. 38,000 ewes in the last few years. These are 90% maternal composite ewes, 1 1/2 to seven years of age, approximately. 3% empties, 30 singles, 60 twins, seven triplets. That's the breakdown you get. So that's year after year stuff, that's what my farm does. So when you see that, you go well okay, I know I'm gonna put them somewhere. I know that I've got three lambs every, there's three lambs inside every one of those. Which equates to not many of that, so they become very important. As soon as you give that triplet number goes up, you start doing things. To get little lambs alive, birth weight. You know, those numbers I showed, those numbers before I had triplets here at three five, there, not good enough. Four five, those are the fellows, that year where they are too heavy they were up here. The graph's starting to dip over. So we need to be mindful of that. The condition score of the ewe. The condition score of singles, optimum, 90% survival, 2.9. Anyone got fat singles this year, you're gonna peel about 8% survival off. That's eight bucks a ewe. You go to twins. Here, it's the other way. They're different sheep. She's got that requirement, she's got this requirement here. So we need to then not just leave them here, we need to put some twins there and put some singles there and get a better result across the two. And that's what happens when you get it right. A set of triplet studs last year, 164 of them, 234 lambed, 234% at marking time. Six paddocks of five hectares with trees all around. So if you do it right, and that's in a year that's had like, mind you about 45 inches. So little blighters do live if you give 'em a bit of a chance. Ewe lambs. It's 406 ewe lambs here. These are their fathers, their nine fathers, this many in each group. At eight months of age, 242 days, they're all out of adult ewes. The preg scan of them, this happens year after year on the farm, 155%. The average in the middle. This ram here, his daughters did 127. This ram's daughters, 182. You got the wrong father, you won't have lambs. That's the message, it comes out time and time and time again. You got the wrong father, you won't have lambs. We had quite a lot, had 8,000 ewe lamb records analysed. If you're born a single, that's your reproduction rate, as your live weight changes. If you're born a twin, that's your reproduction rate. If you're born a triplet, that's your reproduction rate. So which one are you gonna keep for replacement ewes this time? This is when they have lambs. Live weight against their weaning weight of their own lambs. So where are you gonna keep the replacement ewes from? Better keep the multiples, I reckon. This one here, 19, 20 months of age, one and a half year olds. Those ewes for next time round, black. If she didn't scan a lamb as a lamb. Where is she? Not a very profitable beast. There're all these graphs are straight and they're linear, so yeah, where are you gonna keep them from? Which ones? Just got enough time to throw that one in. Condition score ranges. You don't realise they're as large as they are. Three score ewes here. Three score ewes here at 50 kilos and 80 kilos. 30 kilos on the same frame, on the same ewe. That's the different weight against the condition scores. You don't know they're like that in your mob. That's straight out of some of my stud data, I did that graph the other day and was surprised. So by joining ewe lambs we do get a chance to actually keep some of these weights down, and probably be a little bit more efficient. Just, Darren Gordon's involved with effects of mob size and stocking rate on lamb survival. We'll be involved with that this year, this is a bit of stuff. Pregnancy scanning multiples, putting singles and twins in separate paddocks of sizes, trying to optimise the right size for survival. And keeping those records, so that's a bit of new research. We've been involved in genomics. So maternal sheep have got very good eating quality, however there's a range. We're testing our sires, and if we have sires that have got, when we get a choice, we will tend, or we won't use rams that have got a lower eating quality, and we're looking forward to some indexes coming into maternal sheep in the future. Mark Ingliss talked about here the feedback loop, which I'm looking forward to having animals come back into the database, so that we can make maternal sheep better. We'll continue to keep working on ewe-lamb mating potential. Because they're at eight months of age, they're reaching puberty now. And the New Zealand data shows that we should be able to get that back to 7 1/2 and keep dropping it lower and lower. So we're working on that. Number of lambs weaned from LambPlan is now the ability to split number of lambs born, weaned and survival into three component traits, which will increase that area. We'll continue to do some work on adult weight and condition score with efficiency, and all our sheep will stay run under the paddock conditions like they need to. So after 30 years later, from my trip to the UK, I don't think it's much different, those things are still there and these animals are delivering into these areas that we need on our farm. And making us a good sound dollar. So that gives us a little bit of time for questions.