Focus on strategy – not on price

Instead, producers should focus on the profit drivers they can control - feeding for production, improving pasture utilisation, higher lamb growth rates, and culling non-performers.

As keynote speaker at the Mackillop Farm Management Group Trial Results at Naracoorte on Wednesday last week, Dr Farquharson challenged producers to do more with their lambs from birth to market by setting targets and measuring the fertility of their ewes and growth rates of lambs.

He also stressed the importance of running ewes at efficient body weights with "fat, heavy" ewes unproductive and metabolically fragile.

Pregnancy scanning was a valuable tool for the sheep industry and should be undertaken about 75 days from the start of mating.

In addition to scanning for singles, twins and multiples, he encouraged producers to identify their early and late lambers with the early lambs able to be marked two to three weeks earlier and weaned earlier if necessary.

Lambing paddocks should be chosen carefully at scanning to give 60-70 days growth on them. Ewes should be put into them at about 10 days before onset of lambing, with ewes carrying twins requiring pasture cover of 2000 kilograms of dry matter a hectare and singles at about 1600kg DM/ha.

He was reluctant to have more than 400 lambs in a paddock.

He encouraged "surveillance" during lambing but minimal disturbance in the paddock.

"The best thing you can do is let them get on and do it themselves - in most cases if you save one you might lose three," he said.

Lambs should be marked at 14 to 28 days of age with portable yards a good idea to mark lambs in the paddock. Some of his larger producers were manufacturing marking trailers.

He encouraged producers to weigh their lambs at weaning and draft them into 5-kilogram increments. They should seriously consider getting rid of lambs under 25kg liveweight that would otherwise take a long time to reach marketable weights.

Producers should not be afraid to wean earlier in years when feed was in short supply and recognise that lambs needed a month of quality pasture after weaning.

"It is no good delaying weaning lambs and then pasture quality deteriorating and weaning onto poor feed," he said. "That is when they go backwards running up and down the feed all day - and miss mum - but if you turn them out with steak and eggs they put their mouths down and forget about mum."

Milk production ceased at about 10 weeks of age after which time ewes competed with lambs for feed.

Ensuring good, steady growth rates post-weaning was also important, especially for those ewe lambs to be retained as future breeders.

The target was at least 120 grams/day every day to ensure they reached 40kg at seven months.

"If they have a check, what I'm finding is people try and catch up but that puts them into a growth phase so what happens is they neglect the ovary and don't ovulate," he said.

He said producers should be careful not to compromise their ewes close to mating looking for

A good principle was to have all lambs - from the previous drop - off to market 200 days from the start of lambing.

"In a lot of places people have lambs close to market so give them their best feed they have got, but it is around mating time and it would be better to give it to the ewes to flush pre-mating," he said. "Every kilogram a ewe loses costs about 5pc of lambs so we don't want to get going backwards at mating."

* Full report in Stock Journal, April 10, 2014 issue.