Investigating Flock Rebuild Strategies - Final Report

Summary

This project has focused on providing sheep producers with the confidence and material on optimal pathway(s) to flock rebuilding. In particular, a range of differing strategies available (or potentially available) to sheep producers for rebuilding flock numbers are compared in terms of their projected flock growth capacity and financial impacts on the business over a period of 5 years. The effect of differing production zones, enterprise types and flock age profiles are also investigated, along with intangible barriers to flocks rebuilding.

Objectives

Develop flock rebuild scenarios that track inventory, cashflow, profit and loss and the overall balance sheet over a multi-year projection.

Model the impact on strategies on exposure to variation in supplementary feed costs, purchase of stock and price received for sale animals and flock structure

Model variation in benefit and costs for a range of production zones (pastoral, mixed farming, high rainfall), enterprise types and flock age profiles, real and simulated case studies

Identify and report intangible barriers to flock rebuilding including.

Key findings

Flock rebuilding strategies assessed as highly profitable and can also help rebuild numbers quickly mainly involve utilising more home-bred ewes or purchasing more ewes. Strategies on improving fertility and lamb survival, although profitable, do not have the same immediate flock rebuilding capacity. Purchasing young ewes in particular is a profitable strategy to rapidly rebuild stock numbers.

Some flock building strategies that increase reproductive potential (boosting ovulation rate and litter size), can be profitable. However, before these strategies are considered, recommendations on ewe condition score at joining, nutrition during joining and late pregnancy, ewe condition score pre- lambing, and lamb survival need to be met first.

Benefits to industry

Recommendations as a result of the findings of this project are as follows:

a. Flock rebuilding strategies involved retention of older ewes and purchasing in additional ewes are, in general, more profitable and allow more rapid rebuilding than any other methods investigated. These are the primary methods of flock rebuilding to promote to the red meat industry.

b. Joining of ewe lambs, although requiring more managerial input, monitoring and skill level to implement than retaining older ewes and purchasing additional ewes, has the capacity to have good profitability and also rapidly rebuild flock numbers.

c. The re-joining of once dry ewes within the same breeding season (assessed as dry at pregnancy scanning), is a profitable flocking rebuilding method across all flock types assessed and should be more actively promoted to industry. However, its impact on rebuilding flock numbers is modest relative to retaining older ewes, purchasing more ewes or joining ewe lambs.

Future research

Up-to-date benchmarks of reproductive performance across the key sheep regions, for the key breed/genotypes. This includes fertility, fecundity, and lamb survival rates by litter size

Reproductive performance data from experimental flocks where once-dry ewes (assessed at scanning) are re-joined with the same breeding season and compared with the performance of ewes that were pregnant at first scan

Detailed guidelines on optimal nutrition for non-Merino and Merino cross enterprises need to be made available. This is vital for sheep producers contemplating the use of strategies that increase little size.