Precision Lambing

Paradoo Precision Lambing consistently proving its success as the lamb survival system of the future. How does your Lamb survival results stack up? An early break and a mild winter in most of southern Australia has seen some very good lambing percentages. So are these percentages from good management or just good luck. Interesting to compare last year' results where we had a late break and reasonably wet winter.

Precision lambing refers to the joining of ewes for short intervals to form discrete groups that are within a similar physiological state in the reproductive cycle. Historically, management regimes have allowed ram exposure to occur for at least 30 days and more commonly between 42 to 70 days, even though most of the flock has most likely conceived within 30 days or less. In the precision lambing system, ewes are exposed to rams for short intervals, generally between 12-17 days to allow only a portion of the flock to conceive at a time. Rams are removed and then reintroduced after a short period of between 20-25 days for another joining period of between 12-17 days to form the second group.

Approximately 60-80% of ewes within a flock can conceive within the first 17-day oestrus cycle. A contributor to the high conception rate in the first cycle is the addition of teasing prior to ram introduction. It has been shown that teasing increases the conception rate and improves the synchronisation of the oestrous cycle within a flock, leading to a higher frequency of ewes conceiving in the early stage of the joining period.

Shortening the joining length less than a cycle length is also a means to lower the proportion of ewes conceiving for the first lambing to enable a more even spread of demand between the first and subsequent lambings.

A major motivation in implementing the precision lambing is to enable targeted husbandry and management to maximise ewe and lamb survival.

The precision lambing system enables greater precision and compliance with key critical control points, including:

Meeting best practice condition score targets during pregnancy
Achieving recommended feed on offer targets for lambing and maintaining these over the lambing period.
Achieving small mob sizes for lambing of twin-bearing ewes at scale
Optimisation of lamb marking and weaning, and post weaning management of ewes and lambs

Ewe and lamb survival are optimised by applying timely pre-lambing treatments, meeting the require lambing feed on offer targets and prescribing the best lambing paddocks and smallest lambing densities to the twin-bearing ewes. For example, pre-lambing treatments are applied to groups of ewes that are similar physiological stage, thereby reducing the incidence of triggering events such as pregnancy toxaemia that can occur in conventionally joined flocks where there is a large spread in the stage of pregnancy at the point of of the pre-lambing treatment.

Meeting the required lambing feed on offer target for twin-bearing ewes is one of the hardest critical control points to achieve in a conventional lambing system. Essentially, the whole farm needs to reach a high level of feed on offer when pasture growth is low to moderate, and the animal demand is peaking at its highest.

Furthermore, if these targets are achieved in conventional lambing, the FOO only lasts for a short period as lambed ewes reach maximum intake and ewes that have not lambed are consuming critical feed. Consequently, only the early lambing portion of the flock received the benefit of the FOO target and as FOO diminishes while waiting for the last ewes to lamb all ewes and lamb are compromised during the early lactation and lamb growth phase.

The shorter lambing in the precision lambing system also allows the ewe and lambs to be moved sooner from the lambing paddock onto Precision lambing allowing all lambing ewes to benefit from the FOO target as only ewes due to lamb within a short period (less than 17 days) are placed into the lambing paddock. Furthermore, when lambing ceases, these ewes are moved sooner from the lambing paddock allowing them to:

BENEFITS

Shorter and compact management periods (Joining, scanning, lambing, marking, weaning)
Greater precision in nutrition and animal health.
Ability to make earlier interventions for worm burden or extra feeding.
Improved labour efficiency and management. Compacted peaks in demand allow casual labour/extra labour to be used more efficiently.
Improved welfare outcomes
Ability to move ewes and lambs from birth site sooner, to allow interventions sooner eg. Move onto better feed, maintain lambing paddock FOO
Ability to use best lambing paddocks (shelter, aspect) repeatedly
Lambs are all similar age/size at marking allowing flexibility to schedule/intervene
Post-weaning lambs are similar in age/size, reduction in the tail, and easier adaptation to supplementary feeding.
Complementary with stock containment areas and post-marking management of ewes and lambs into large mobs for increased efficiency of grazing management and pasture utilisation
Prioritisation of ewes for recovery post-marking/post-weaning to ensure priority of nutrition (twin-bearing ewes that are early and late lambing)

COSTS

Higher labour input at joining
Higher total number of ewes scanned (some ewes scanned twice) and multiple scanning’s

Heavier ewes, wet paddocks saw a lot more cases of foot abscess in 2017 and these also reacted negatively to conception rates over the summer also. Early abortion seems to be well up across industry and has reared its ugly head a lot in the past few wetter years. Campylobacter and Listeria have hit our commercial flock in the past 2 years. The 2017 was as close to a perfect 10 as far as seasons went then 2018 is not far behind. Pasture cages, cuts etc... have us by mid-August growing between 4 to 5 tonnes of dry matter. Our bucket is overfull and with an average finish means we will expect to exceed 11 tonnes of dry matter per hectare for the year if the spring moisture keeps ticking over. Grow it, Eat it and Keep it.

Remember the cheapest feed is always what you grow in the paddock. Lamb Survival is a multi-faceted and complex issue that involves many decisions to make the best chance of success. The challenge is big and most rewarding when you can pull it off. Consistency is important with anything and we need to aim at improving our business over time. Do we have a responsibility to improve lamb and ewe survival in our sheep businesses? Absolutely we do and it will pay us handsomely to do so. Transparency and socially acceptable practices are more and more important.

Reducing mortality in livestock and addressing issues such as mulesing and pain in our livestock is a responsibility we must tackle head-on.

Why do we run our sale rams and stud ewes hard and at high stocking rates?

1. We have a responsibility to make sure our genetics can perform under pressure. It’s a lot easier for us to cull out poor performers if they cannot handle it. Generally our best figured rams look the best every year.

2. Feeding up rams will hide these poor performers

3. Stocking rates of our sale rams have been based at 23 to 25DSE/Ha from the break until sale time. This we have done for over 10 years. Sometimes we may have over done it as I know many of you know?

4. Rams must undergo conditions and pressures that ultimately the ewes that they will breed, must endure during the winter.

Exciting new development. The Paradoo Prime Quarter Backs.

So we are pretty happy with what has eventuated from our Quarter Backs as they have grown really well and the wool micron, color and quality is above our expectations. We have used some high fat, musle, NLW and growth rams from Moojepin and TriggerVale studs who are both leaders in the modern merino in Australia. We have just recently completed all wool measurements, face, body, feet and breech scores that will incorporate all fat, muscle, fertility and growth measurements. These rams will have an average of 23 to 24 micron.

All rams have been run under the same conditions/ management groups as our composite rams. There are no favors have been given to these sheep. We will be ruthless on foot structure and as with our composite sheep – No foot pairing. We have used another round of Triggervale rams in our breeding program this year. A select number of these rams will be available from the 1st of November 2018. Watching over the past 5 to 10 years we have seen some significant changes to the traditional Merino sheep. Studs and breeders that have embraced performance recording have focused some balance back into the over-wooled breeding. Fat and muscle have been infused to make the Merino ewe a more robust and reproductive animal of the future. Breech wrinkle has been removed and a free-growing fleece with a longer staple length to enable earlier shearing has been added.

Worm tolerances, numbers of lambs weaned, and full parentage have given confidence to the breeder to select sheep with more accuracy from the merino breed type... The debate lies on improving wool value and those composite maternal breeders who have paid little attention to Greasy fleece weight have certainly got their critics. Shearing costs, skin values, microns, harvesting efficiencies and the overall cost of production need to be considered in all this.

Animal Welfare

What does Animal Welfare mean for our business at Paradoo Prime and for us on a personal level as farmers? Any business needs to be able to measure performance. These measurements can be compared to previous years and then compared to other like businesses through benchmarking.

Steps are then taken to ensure your business progresses in performance. This could be in production outputs, efficiencies in labor, reducing costs and so the list goes on. We are an industry-benchmarked business and have been for the majority of seasons since 1997. Key themes from industry benchmarking will tell you that stocking rate is a major profit driver of most medium to high-rainfall grazing businesses. ( KG/HA) In a prime lamb business like ours, other major influences are the price received for your lambs and the weaning percentage. Variable costs such as supplementary feed, labor and fertilizer, and pasture costs can also be large influencers.

So where do we benchmark and measure animal welfare in all this?

“Animal welfare for us is the ultimate scorecard on which we are measured regardless of anything and everything else.”

We are livestock farmers that have a legal responsibility to care for our animals whilst they are under our management and ownership.

The keys to success in the livestock industry can be measured in a number of ways. Unfortunately, some of the profitability indicators and messaging around some key targets can contradict and challenge what broader society would think are acceptable animal welfare outcomes. We know that we are achieving both highly profitable benchmarks but at the same time, we are able to guide the livestock industry in achieving better animal welfare outcomes. We like to think it’s winning from all angles.

So what is the scorecard? Who has one and what do we measure?

Unfortunately, the scorecards across the industry are few and far between. The upside tends to be measured and touted but not the downside. E.g. marking rates rather than survival rates.

This is how we categorize our Precision lambing Score Card. Mortality records are first on the scorecard.

Ewe mortality, lamb mortality, and weaner mortality. In our business that weans in excess of 10 thousand lambs annually we are able to achieve over 90% lamb survival in mature grass-fed livestock.

Our annual Ewe mortality has been consistently under 2% and annual weaner mortality of less than 0.7%. We believe our scorecard would rival nearly any commercial grass-fed sheep grazing business in Australia and New Zealand.

What do we do for pain relief in our livestock?

We have been a non-mulesing flock since 1995.

We do not use cold or hot knives for tail docking for our lamb marking operations. In the last 15 years, we have had no open wounds or blood exposed during these procedures.

Elastrator rings have been used on tails and testicles and in 2018 we were 1 of 3 flocks in Australia that trialed a pain relief system called Num Nuts to assist in reducing acute pain in lambs at the time of marking. An effective pain relief product will be used as mandatory during the lamb marking process from here on. Again we see this as a proactive step at Paradoo Prime as we focus on the best animal welfare outcomes which in turn also assist us in developing effective production outcomes for our business.

PRECISION LAMBING

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BENEFITS

COSTS