THE Merrett family, Apsley, Vic, has three key elements to their successful prime lamb production - genetics, pastures and fertilisers.
The family comprises Kevin and his wife Mary-Louise, their son Damian, his wife Rebecca and their daughters, Madeleine, 2, and Eliza, 7 months.
They live on and run the 1480-hectare Glen Donald property 5 kilometres north-east of Apsley, with six blocks in close proximity, including 517ha of lease country.
With a soil pH of 5.2 to 6 and a long history of good fertiliser applications, mainly single super and some liming, Glen Donald is reliable clover country.
It has a winter-dominant 575 millimetres rainfall and in good years, pastures contain up to 70 per cent of subterranean and white clover in a mix that includes annual ryegrass and phalaris.
The property's single enterprise is prime lamb production, using Poll Dorset rams over composite ewes. It runs 6100 breeding ewes with 1900 of them - 30pc - going into a self-replacement ewe breeding program, while 15pc are ewe lambs.
Results clearly demonstrate the Merretts are very successful prime lamb producers and innovators.
"Because we breed our own replacement ewes, we can afford to spend more on the best quality rams we can find," Damian said.
For greater efficiencies, the Merretts have changed from Border Leicester-Merino, bought-in ewes to East Friesian-Texel-White Suffolk composites that they breed themselves. Rams for this have come from Mertex and more recently, Primeline.
"We only buy in ewes when we need to top-up numbers, and that was the case last year when we purchased another block of land," Mr Merrett said.
"Those ewes were Primeline composite ewes and we like how they performed.
"Certainly we feel the terminal sire infusion into the composites has moderated the frame of the ewes and improved the carcase attributes, including conformation and yield in their progeny."
Mr Merrett spent a year working in New Zealand learning about their intensive lamb production systems, and said the secret to success was to take the ideas that were transferable and leave the rest.
The Merretts have adapted the country's nutritional production to match genetic and reproductive capacity, and rejected early weaning as a management option.
"We sell all our lambs as suckers off their mothers," Mr Merrett said.
"With the growth and performance of lambs, we are able to sell them early enough to still give the ewes enough recovery time. We can always flush ewes with grain if needed, but we can't consistently or economically make up lost lamb growth and yield from early weaning."
The normal management cycle is to put rams in with the ewes before Christmas for a June lambing.
Ewe lambs are mated on agisted bean stubbles near Kaniva, Vic, but this summer that will not be possible as the landholder needs them to maintain his own sheep.
A 200mm drop in rainfall on the average has been a big challenge for most producers in the region, hence the Merretts are now buying in grain for the coming summer-autumn period.
* Full report in Stock Journal, December 4, 2014 issue.