Change of mindset for sheep production ahead

Mobs of sheep can vary in size, genetics and performance, so well-known Vic-based consultant Nathan Scott recently asked producers at Kapunda to look ahead and aim to incorporate electronic identification.

"The role of eID in livestock is varied - technology just for technology's sake helps no one, but if it works, the savings can be massive," he said.

Mr Scott said technology had mostly been a challenge for the sector, with slower progression and uptake cited as major barriers.

"It is a problem that the sector is perceived that way, but it does not need to be," he said.

Working hard and pretty hectic hours has long been synonymous with livestock farming, but Mr Scott wanted producers to resist wearing it as a badge of honour and instead consider taking on agtech.

"It is a barrier to get young people into the sector if that is how we present ourselves," he said.

"The challenge is progress is more about people than it will ever be about technology.

"The recipe for sheep and cattle agtech adoption is reasonably straight forward - it is the people that are more challenging."

This means agtech changes are needed and according to Mr Scott, it was important for producers to determine a clear objective for its implementation.

Mr Scott said using eID for marking and identifying lamb losses was already a task that could be undertaken easily without agtech.

"We do not want to complicate a system by using tech for simple things, but instead use it for complicated or time consuming jobs on-farm," he said.

Understanding the performance of individuals through data collection removes poor performers earlier in the system.

"Sometimes older sheep are the best genetic performers in the flock, but they are removed from the system because they had a birthday," Mr Scott said.

A mob mindset means producers are looking at marking percentages as a whole, even though it is clear many ewes within a mob are not performing, he said.

In a Sheep CRC fertility study, Mr Scott said the top 25 per cent of ewes had 143pc lambing percentages, but the average was just 86pc.

"That's a lot of ewes not doing a lot," he said.

"Through eID, you can find those ewes based on performance and not age."

A RECENT study has found that the gap between the top and bottom performers in a ewe flock can be pretty big, so finding tools to help navigate through that predicament is crucial.

Achieve Agriculture Solutions' Nathan Scott said massive variations within flocks were not uncommon, but that does not mean producers should ignore it.

An easy example of producers getting a bit fooled by looks rather than using data collection to gather insight from a flock, is assuming a nice, fat lamb in a paddock is a single.

In a trial conducted by Sheep CRC, the three top lambs with the highest growth rates were in fact twins and not singles, so Mr Scott believed if that did not stop producers in their tracks of ignoring the benefits of individual ewe data, nothing would.

"This was tracked through electronic identification tags - it really highlights that we do not know what is happening inside a flock," he said.

"We can match that information back to the ewe. This means the livestock sector is getting somewhere and this is exciting."

Using Pedigree Matchmaker, a panel reader on single file entrance, it reads the tag of the ewe and lambs.

This is put into software and estimates the association between ewes and lambs.

"Lambs followed ewes a certain amount of time, so we can predict that it belonged to that particular ewe," Mr Scott said.