Phasing out of mulesing: cost, benefits and opportunities

Summary

Mulesing is considered an effective procedure to reduce the risk of breech flystrike in Australian sheep. While mulesing is effective in this, it is a painful procedure that poses potential risk to the sheep industry’s social licence to operate and market access.

Objectives

This project had four main objectives:

• To produce a detailed report on the benefits and costs of ceasing mulesing on sheepmeat enterprises.
• To produce a detailed review on the New Zealand experience with the cessation of mulesing.
• To identify the key drivers of producer behaviour to continue mulesing and barriers for behavioural change to non-mulesed sheepmeat enterprises.
• To develop an extension strategy to address key drivers of producer behaviour to support producers with the transition to non-mulesed operations.

Key findings

The key outcomes of this project were the development of a cost: benefit analysis tool which allows producers to estimate their financial position following a phase out of mulesing over seven years. Scenarios assessed as examples found a positive cash flow for prime lamb operations transitioning to non-mulesing. The main cost of transitioning came from additional chemical controls required. Further financial benefits could be added if there was the potential for a price premium for non-mulesed wool. This project also found that producer attitudes towards mulesing are important drivers in the decision to run mulesed operations or not. Based off these findings an intervention/extension strategy was developed to increase knowledge of and trust in short and long-term strategies to control flystrike, by:

• discussing the cost and benefits associated to phase out mulesing
• trialing its on-farm practicality
• raising awareness of the risks to social license.

Benefits to industry

The continued practice of mulesing poses potential risk to the sheepmeat industry’s market access and consumer acceptance. This project provided two practical applications that will assist producers with the transition to non-mulesed operations; a tool to estimate the financial implications of phasing out mulesing, and an extension strategy that targets key producers’ attitudes and barriers to transition to non-mulesed operations.

MLA action

MLA continues to support producers in extension/adoption of non-mulesed operations, and is investing in research into alternative control strategies for flystrike and the market access implications of continued mulesing.

Future research

Areas suggested for further research include trialling the extension strategy developed in this project and measure it’s effectiveness. Future research may also examine the on-farm prevalence of breech flystrike in mulesed compared to non-mulesed sheep, and the market/consumer risks (both national and international) associated with mulesing for the lamb meat supply chain.