Welfare

Welfare is an essential part of our breeding objective. In addition to providing consumers with an ethically produced fiber, selecting for welfare traits increases farm profit through:

reduced labour
reduced chemical useage
less mortality
higher production (due to sheep that can walk freely to graze and are not restricted with sore feet, worms or flies)
access to more markets attracting premiums

Worms:

We have been selecting for worm resistance for about 20 years. We farm in a 500mm rainfall environment where most people would drench 4 times a year. One of these would often be a long acting. The level of resistance in our sheep is such that they average one drench per year (we monitor throughout the year to know when this is). Our limited drenching in recent years means that the worms on our farm are now susceptible to all drenches on our last drench resistance test, allowing us to use cheaper drenches with confidence. Worms cause sheep to lose condition, and regaining this condition is an inefficient use of feed, as people who have down LifeTime Ewe Management will know.

Worms also reduce lactation in pregnant ewes and reduce the growth rates in young sheep, so we are less exposed to these production losses.

Wrinkle and dag:

We ceased mulesing in our stud 6 years ago, and our commercial merinos 5 years ago. Before we ceased mulesing we actively selected for low wrinkle and dag to ensure that they could be easily crutched and that flies wouldn't be an issue.

Footrot and Flystrike Resistance

These are two issues that cause massive loss of production. For the last 5 years we have sent our culls rams to a host farm to be infected for footrot. This data has been sent to sheep genetics which will allow us to have high accuracies when the breeding value becomes available in Australia.

In the meantime we have been using the raw data to make selection decisions, reusing sires that have performed well, and their sons. Sires that have performed poorly are not reused and their sons are classed more harshly.

To speed things up we have used semen from Roseville Park 180043. He has been the best ram for footrot resistance that Australians have had access to. He currently has over 200 progeny measured for footrot, across 4 age groups, with a breeding value that's 99% accurate.

We are also part of the reference population for flystrike resistance. The last two years we have applied no chemical protection at all to our stud sheep. This has allowed us to record which sheep are susceptible to fly strike, and we currently have research breeding values for flock, allowing us to make informed selection.

Fat:

We also select very heavily for fat. Fat allows sheep to be more resilient in challenging seasons, allowing them to bounce back faster when feed is available. We live in an environment where we typically only have a feed surplus in the paddock for 7-8 months of the year. Fat allows us to put extra condition on the sheep when that surplus is growing in the paddock and it can be converted back to ME during the dry times.

Fat also aides in lamb survival.