No grain feeding
There is no doubt that ‘Lifetime Ewe Management’ has had a great impact on sheep management practices since the mid 2000’s. By measuring condition score’s, sorting sheep off data, measuring pastures and allocating feed accordingly, it has bought ME requirements and availability into the common language for sheep farmers. This is great, and pregnancy scanning adoption has lifted and so has scanning percentages. Or have they? Or is it just that scanning percentage is a prime lamb farmers way of getting bragging rights over their neighbour?
The other thing that has lifted is feeding grain to sheep! When you sit down and do the calculations and find there is not enough ME in the pasture for the ewes around joining out comes the feed cart! Then you identify that the skinny mob needs to lift half a condition score because all skinny ewes are our best producing ewes, so you start feeding. In Australia, we now annually feed more grain in a normal year than we did in the 2006 drought! And we are getting away with it, not because we are producing more from our sheep but because the price we have been getting for lamb has been rising.
It has been concerning me for a while that each year we are putting a higher and higher reliance on grain feeding to get sheep to perform. The easiest way to farm livestock is to have an animal that is adapted to the environment it is to be run in. But the more I look around I see we are changing the environment for our flock and keeping sheep that now need grain to stay in our systems.
In 2016 we decided to stop feeding grain to our stud ewes over 12 months of age and run them all together as one mob. No preferential treatment was given to the skinny ewes. It didn’t take us long to sort them out. In the first couple of years we were getting 15 to 20% of the ewes not conceiving and it was a bit of a hit. However, it made the ewes that were conceiving very valuable and now eight years on, the ewes we have today are completely different to the when we started. They are more compact, easy doing and recover quickly after lambing. Conception rates have lifted to consistent above 96% over the last three years.
This year due to a longer dry autumn and start of winter we had to put them into a containment paddock to preserve some pasture. This was an interesting exercise. We feed them 10% less than our commercial sheep to still keep testing pressure on them. For the numbers people they got 7.4 MJ ME per week compared to the commercials that received 8.1 MJ ME per week and they put on weight with 190% on board!
Now I am a realistic person and I know that our stud flock size compared to our commercial flock is considerably different but I am a strong believer that you have to start somewhere and it doesn’t make commercial financial sense to have 20% dry’s in your commercial ewes. Over time the genetics from the stud filter down into the commercials and reduce the need for the feed cart and this has me excited!
Lachie