Tackling Ewe Wastage with Anne Ridler

Replacement rates in your sheep flock are determined by your ewe losses and your culling decisions. For every ewe lamb you choose to keep, that’s one less to sell. 

In this week's podcast, our guest, Associate Professor Anne Ridler, discusses the findings from her recent study on ewe wastage in New Zealand sheep farming. Anne’s research found that, on average, 28 to 30 per cent of ewes leave the flock annually in New Zealand. The study aimed to understand when and why ewes exit the flock and how to reduce that wastage. 

Let's break those numbers down … say you have 1,000 ewes at mating time:

• At scanning time, of those 1,000, 33 will leave the flock because they’re dry. 
• Before set stocking, another 18 ewes will go due to non-reproductive reasons such as low BCS and 17 will die in this time. So, of your original 1,000, you have 932 left by the start of lambing. 
• Lambing is the highest risk period, with two-thirds of your losses occurring during this period. The average is 3.7 per cent. So, that’s another 37 ewes leaving the flock up until mid-lactation/docking, leaving you with 895 ewes.
• If you decide to cull wet-dries at weaning, the average is 3.8 per cent, meaning another 38 ewes leave the flock, reducing your number to 858. In addition, another 33 ewes exit the flock between docking/tailing and breeding in year two, some of which will be wet-dries (on average, across all the farms), some will be culled for other reasons and some will die. This takes the flock down to 825. 
• Then, post-weaning, based on udder issues, age, teeth or other decisions, farmers choose to cull, on average, 15.4%. That leaves you with 708 ewes. So, 292 replacements need to enter the flock to get back to 1,000 ewes for breeding.

Whilst these numbers might seem a bit confronting, they give a great insight into how you can reduce the number of replacements you require.

With most losses occurring during lambing, Anne suggests this could be an area to focus on. Feeding ewes well during pregnancy (to avoid metabolic issues) is a big part of keeping your ewes alive. But there are other things you can do, such as paddock audits and cast beats. 

Mark and Anne also discuss other options such as keeping wet-dries and putting them to a terminal ram.

We would be interested to hear what you base your culling decisions on. Is it age? Do you give your wet-dries a second chance? Let us know.

The study from which this information was derived was funded by the Massey-Lincoln and Agricultural Trust and done in collaboration with Lincoln University.

Head Shepherd is brought to you by neXtgen Agri International Limited. 

We help livestock farmers get the most out of the genetics they farm with. Get in touch with us if you would like to hear more about how we can help you do what you do best: info@nextgenagri.com.

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Transcript

Speaker 1 0:05

Welcome to the Head Shepherd Podcast. I'm your host, mark Ferguson, ceo at NextGen Agri International, where we help livestock managers to get the best out of their stock. I want to take this opportunity to thank our friends at MSD Animal Health and Allflex for sponsoring Head Shepherd again this season, and I'm also excited to introduce our mates at Heinegger as brand new sponsors of the show. Msd Norflex, or perhaps better known as Cooper's Animal Health in Australia, offer one of New Zealand and Australia's largest livestock product portfolios, with a comprehensive suite of animal health and management products connected through identification, traceability and monitoring solutions. Like us, they see how the wealth and breadth of information borne out of this podcast can help them and their farming clients achieve their mission of the science of healthier animals.

Speaker 1 0:47

Heineken will need a little introduction to our audience. A market leader and one-stop shop for wool harvesting and animal fibre removal, together with an expanding range of agricultural products and inputs, the Heineken name is synonymous with quality, reliability and precision. The Heineken team have a deep understanding of livestock agriculture, backed by Swiss engineering and a family business dedicated to manufacturing the best. It's fantastic to have both of these sponsors supporting us and bringing Head Shepherd to you each week, and now it's time to get on with this week's episode. Welcome back to Head Shepherd. This week we've got Associate Professor Anne Riddler back on the show. But before we get into that, sophie, what's happening out in the world?

Speaker 2 1:28

Not much, I think pretty much most people in New Zealand are putting their rams out within the next few weeks, and in Australia they're already starting to lamb. So I thought I'd just do a quick discussion about a paddock audit for lambing time. Obviously, we're, I know, three months roughly away, but it's not exactly grass growing season, and so to really bank that feed up for lambing time, you kind of have to think about it now, and so we do have an article on the hub about this, but I thought I'd run through it. Just basically saying have a look at your previous year's data to see any trends in survival rates or paddocks. You might have some that do better, some that do worse. You could have some with great shelter, but maybe last year the dry matter and the feed wasn't there, so it didn't work out quite well.

Speaker 2 2:09

Um, and also, maybe have a think about your mob sizes and whether between now and then you might be able to temporarily divide a paddock, um, with some electric fencing. But yeah, just have a big grand view. Look at your farm, look at all the paddocks you have available to you and see if you can sort of prepare them and get them set up for your lambing time for success. Yeah, there's an article on the Hub for this which we'll share so you can go have a more in-depth read.

Speaker 1 2:34

Excellent, and there'll be people down in the South Island who are looking at the window at the moment, going there's no food anywhere. So 1,200 kilos of anything would be amazing, but yeah, I guess, sitting around waiting uh well, I've got time waiting for it to rain, uh and and flat out feeding stuff, but yeah, it is still doesn't change the fact that we, most people, will have used lambing and uh, we and we can still go back through those diaries and see which paddocks have actually, uh, have done well over over the time. One thing I'd probably just just reiterate there is that a lot of people will box up mobs on their way down to the tailing yards and so not actually get a measure of survival in those different blocks. I think that's fine, but it'd be great to count those lambs coming out of each block so that you actually start building a bit of a knowledge about where your twins have gone well and where singles have gone.

Speaker 1 3:23

Singles go well most places, but where your twins have gone well and where singles have gone, singles go well most places, but yeah, where your twins and triplets might have performed better than other places, because sometimes it's not as obvious as what you think, it's not the. There are obviously cold places to lamb on farms, but other places that might just get a bit more disturbance than average will also knock around your survival. So, yeah, I'd encourage people to, as you say, sort of start thinking now about what that lambing layout might look like, rather than getting right to the death knock and then thinking about it.

Speaker 2 3:47

And I know we've probably a bit of a broken record about this, but you can probably fire off the quick numbers about dividing a paddock.

Speaker 1 3:54

So 2% extra survival in twins from every 100 ewes you take out of the paddock. I think that's right. Anyway, essentially, the smaller the better, as Amy Lockwood's PhD showed. Basically, the less twin-bearing ewes you've got in a block, the more lambs will survive. This is not proven, but anecdotally, in tougher lambing conditions which we might be in this year, where you've got lighter ewes and less feed, that's going to be even more important. So, when the maternal behaviour and bond isn't as strong because of sort of nutritional restriction, it'll be even more important this year to and that can be just a two-wire, uh yeah a break fence, that's that blocks the breaks of paddock up. So you um, it can be quite stuff that kiwis are really good at doing which is breaking fences, uh, breaking paddocks into bits, um yeah. So the same number of sheep in a block, but if you split it in half you get an improvement in lamb survival by just buying less interference of each animal, basically trying to cut down the number of fresh lambs in any group of sheep on any given day, because that's where the confusion happens, particularly in twins and triplets obviously, and that confusion brings mismothering and that mismothering brings lamb mortality. So, yeah, all things to consider there and, yeah, a lot of these things are again important this year, a lot of these little tiny one percenters when it's dry, when things are tight. I've just written an article for countrywide about sort of watching your energy, watching your condition scores. I know we've been banging on that for 20, 30, 40, 50 years, before I was even born, was even born. We're probably talking about it. But, yeah, this year it's going to be the year to really do what you can with managing the little differences in condition score and feeding the scarce resources to the right sheep. It's going to be a really, really important year for that. I guess.

Speaker 1 5:39

Related to that, we've got Anne Rindler back on the show this week week uh and associate professor there at murdoch university in sheep and beef cattle health and production. Uh, done a lot of interesting work. We've talked to her previously on head shepherd, about, uh, udder health and assessing udders, which was which was, a really good podcast. Be well worth going back and listening to that. Uh, probably a bit late now the user as or either in the ramp in with the ram or or very soon will be, but certainly before you're checking those others after weaning. Well worth listening to that.

Speaker 1 6:09

But on this podcast we're talking to Anne about the work she's been doing around ewe wastage and the number of sheep that sort of disappear each year for a variety of reasons, and so they've done a range of surveys and studies looking into that, and it's an interesting chat about where those sheep are disappearing to, and some of the numbers can be pretty scary. So we need, as an industry, to really get a handle on what is going on, and again, that's why we do talk about things like condition scoring and managing those ewes well, because often it's that period over lambing where we lose quite a few, and some of that is avoidable, some of it's just nature taking its course. But in terms of economics and welfare, there's some big losses out there and we need to be aware of them and need to work on ways to improve them. So I'm sure you're going to enjoy this chat with Anne Riddler. Welcome, anne Riddler, back to Hedgeheaven.

Speaker 3 6:59

Thanks, mark, nice to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Speaker 1 7:02

Excellent. So last time we spoke we were discussing some new wastage work. You were working on, you and the team and obviously time's gone by and you've no doubt got some results that we can talk about today.

Speaker 3 7:14

Yeah, that's correct, yep.

Speaker 1 7:16

So yeah, I guess. Well, let's start there. What are we finding? Why are ewes disappearing out of New Zealand? Sheep flocks.

Speaker 3 7:23

Yeah, good question.

Ewe Culling and Replacement Rates

Speaker 3 7:25

Ewes getting why ewes disappearing out of new zealand sheep flocks? Yeah, good question. Um, so I guess we, when we started this work so this was a study we did in 2021 um, and we kind of knew well, based on the stuff we'd been doing, that that review replacement rates were around the 28 to 30 percent, which means that 28 to 30 percent of ewes exit the flock each year and that's either due to being culled or dying, and so what we really wanted to do was describe when and why they're exiting the flocks, because if we've got a good handle on that, then we can look at. You know where can we reduce that and where is it just, you know it is what it is because we know that high replacement rates, the cost of that will vary depending on a lot of different factors, but you know, if you're having to keep a lot of hogarts or buy in a lot of replacements, that's relatively costly compared with those ewes lasting in the flock for a bit longer.

Speaker 3 8:07

Yeah, so we had 38 farms involved in the study. They were located right throughout New Zealand and so we started with a ewe culling interview. So we went to the farm, sat down and sort of had an open-ended interview with the farmers about what they were culling, why they were culling and when it was happening, just to, I guess, most farmers. Well, from talking to farmers, it seems like they tend to assume that everyone does pretty much the same as they do in terms of culling. We wanted to, I guess, work out whether that was actually the case. Yeah, so that was the start of it.

Speaker 1 8:37

Yeah, righto. So what did they tell us?

Speaker 3 8:40

Well, I guess some things were pretty much as expected. So every farmer pretty much culled their not pregnant, mixed-aged and two-tooth ewes. Culling of non-pregnant hoggets was quite variable, as you'd expect, but yeah, everyone was culling their dry-drys and everyone was culling except for one farmer actually culling bearings or vaginal prolapses, but from there it got quite a lot more variable actually. So probably the most variable was, uh, wet dry use, so use that got pregnant but didn't end up rearing a lamb. Yeah, we had about 60 percent of farmers would always kill mixed stage use that were wet dry, whereas about a quarter of them would never kill, and there was quite a lot of. We sort of chatted to the farmers about why they were doing these things and there was some quite diverse opinions on on wet dry use in ewes in particular.

Speaker 1 9:23

Were some of that because they had trouble identifying them. It's a busy time either. Or both lamb docking, marking, tailing whichever one you want to call it and weaning are busy times on the farm. Is that part of the reason that they weren't culling wet-dry ewes?

Speaker 3 9:37

No, so everyone was checking for wet-drys but some were very much you. You know she lambed in exactly the same circumstances as all the other ewes. So if she didn't rear a lamb I don't want her, whereas others were very much. I don't think it's the ewes fault, I'm going to give her another chance. So the farmers that didn't kill their wet dries usually would put a either a tag and or put them into a bee mob and sort of if they were wet dry again they'd kill them. So they sort of give them a two strikes and you're out rule rather than automatically cull. So with two-tooths it was only about 30% of farmers would always cull wet dry two-tooths. So farmers were more sympathetic towards wet dry two-tooths.

Speaker 1 10:14

And do they vary with year, like I know? Some years, you know, you've had three or four days of weather that's wiped out heap of lambs.

Speaker 3 10:25

Do they sort of go a bit easier on those years, or yeah. So we had a chunk of farmers that were kind of a sometimes cull and that would depend on the weather for those years. Yeah. So if they'd had a really bad spring they might be more sympathetic. If they'd had a good spring they'd be much harsher or, and it would also depend a little bit on how many ewes they had to cull, so how much scope they had for culling. If they, if they, had a lot of culls for other reasons, they might keep wet-dryers, whereas other years they might not.

Speaker 1 10:44

Have we got a? Did we get a recommendation out of that as in what they should do, or that's not your charter?

Speaker 3 10:53

Well, I guess from a certainly for young ewes, if you're culling a wet-dry two-tooth, you've basically had her for two years and you've got absolutely nothing out of her except a lot of hassle.

Speaker 1 11:05

Devalued years and you've got absolutely nothing out of her except a lot of hassle, um devalued her from a lamb to mutton in this video.

Speaker 3 11:08

Yeah, yeah, that's right. So I guess everyone's got a different view and certainly the farmers that kept what wet dry ewes believed that they were no more likely to be wet dry in future. Whether that's true or not, they weren't keeping close records on that. I would certainly say, if you are keeping wet dry ewes, check, check their udders really, really carefully, because we know, as we've talked about before, udder defects are a big cause of wet dries. But I certainly well, personally I'm not a farmer, so I'll put myself out there and say, certainly, with two tooths, maybe four tooths and maybe even good six tooths, I'd be tempted to give them another chance, but I would be putting the tag in their ear or putting them in the B-mob and doing the two strikes and checking the udders really carefully.

Speaker 1 11:46

Yeah, because I think there was that study, or it was a Kiwi study, where there was a really high repeatability of wet dries, but I think that was probably mainly udder defects.

Speaker 3 11:56

Yeah, there's not a lot of research on it. So there was one published a few years ago where there was a high repeatability of it but it wasn't clear whether they checked others or what they'd done with it. Where we've followed wet-dry two-tooths, they were no more likely. So this is only on one farm, one cohort. But they were not more likely to be wet-dry the following year. So that was with careful other checks. So, yeah, it's possibly they're slightly more likely, but if it's 5% instead of 3%, is that a big enough increase to justify culling all of them?

Speaker 1 12:29

Yeah, and I guess if we get which I always swing to genetics but if you're making that culling decision but you're not doing anything on looking at the lamb survival, breeding values and maternal breeding values on the rams, you're not really going to have any impact on the flock, you're just going to water it down with. I mean, people kind of think they're selecting for better reproduction by carrying that out, but if you, if your ram selection policy is not backing that up, then you'll be going nowhere anyway. Um, so it's pretty, pretty important that, yeah, if you're going to do that, then you do both those aspects you're selected for the rams that are more that way inclined, as well as put selection pressure on the ewes, I suppose.

Speaker 3 13:02

Yeah, true, yeah, I do think a lot of wet-dry ewes are probably just unlucky, to be honest. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 13:10

Yeah, well, when you see family lines in our game, you'll see ewes that are rare, twins or triplets every year, year in, year out, regardless of the and. So there's and we know there's a genetic component. It's very lowly heritable, but lots of variations. So, yeah, but as you say, like it's, you've expended a lot of money to get them to a, to a dry two-tooth or to a wet dry two-tooth. That's your sort of all of the, all of the expenses you've just depreciated that you down. So if there's a chance you'll have another lamb. It's worth worth assisting. Yeah, I guess. What else with a farm and that survey? And then, beyond that, what have, yeah, what have we learned about you?

Speaker 3 13:41

wastage yep, cool. So I guess just following, just finishing off on the culling thing. So most of the farmers were culling if they had other defects, which is good, but surprisingly some went.

Speaker 1 13:51

Uh, and they were flipping them on a conveyor, or what were they? What was their checking?

Speaker 3 13:55

mechanism. Um, it was quite variable still actually. So a lot were just palpating through the right through a race, yeah, um, but some were just still doing the old squint at them as they run up the race and only pick them out if they've got really baggy, saggy udders or get the shearers to do it.

Speaker 1 14:10

That would be a recommended messy practice, wouldn't?

Speaker 3 14:12

it? Yeah, totally. It's part of the shearer's job to check he's had as well, because he's shearing and fade as well, hopefully. That's right. So yeah, definitely recommend palpating the udders, ideally twice, actually at weaning and then sort of four to six weeks later. But yeah, yep. And then there was a bit of variation on whether farmers checked teeth or not, and that depended on whether their flock had teeth problems or not and what age. They culled, routinely culled their ewes at.

Speaker 1 14:40

So they were just checking incisors or they were checking molars.

Speaker 3 14:43

Just checking incisors? Yeah, use it. So they were just checking in sizes or they're checking molars. They're checking in sizes, yeah, yeah, yes, it's pretty much impossible to check sheep's molars, unfortunately, which is a shame, because often the really skinny ones we find their molars are completely, um yeah, wrecked.

Speaker 1 14:54

So yeah yeah, it's a pretty dangerous game putting your fingers anywhere near back there.

Speaker 3 14:57

So yeah, I wouldn't recommend it. I've played that game and it didn't end well.

Speaker 1 15:02

Geez, they're sharp, aren't they? They're nuts, they really are.

Speaker 3 15:07

So from there we then collected information from those farms. So we got 34 farms, gave us really good information, basically getting yew numbers at different times of the year, so key times of the year, telling times and reasons, deaths Some farmers recorded deaths, some farmers didn't, so we just had to base it on missing, missing use from tallies for some of them. And then we also visited most of those farms at the main cull just after weaning and recorded how many years were, how many years were there, how many years were culled and why they were culled. So basically for a production year can say on average exactly where all the use go. Basically basically yeah, righto, yeah. And then we also got some farm demographic type information, so big picture flock size type thing and the associations with ewe losses with those sorts of big picture farm demographics.

Speaker 1 15:55

Yeah, righto. So I feel like we need a drum roll to tell us where they went.

Speaker 3 15:59

I don't know. I can certainly talk about it from a thorough production. Yes, so if we assume so, obviously farmers go and do their main culture just after weaning, and so at that point they're essentially picking which ewes are going to be winners, aren't they? They're saying these are the ewes I believe I want to breed, these are going to be my ewes, that are going to be my breeding flock. So if we have a hypothetical flock of 1,000 ewes, then from just before breeding through to pregnancy diagnosis, so whatever, that is March to sort of June-ish, depending on where you're located. So a thousand ewes, 33 will disappear because they're not pregnant. So they'll be dry dries. 3.3% on average would dry dry, with quite a lot of variation. And then, once we get through to pre-lamming or set stocking, between breeding and pre-lamming, 17 ewes were culled for non-reproductive reasons, so 1.7%, and most of those were for poor body condition, yeah, and 1.8% died. So 18 out of out of the 1000. So that's pre-set stocking.

Speaker 1 17:01

Is it the 18 are gone?

Speaker 3 17:02

Yeah that's right. So we started with 1,000 ewes at breeding. At set stocking we've now got 932 ewes left.

Speaker 1 17:10

So for the non-Kiwi set stockings within a couple of weeks of lambing, that's right yeah. So that's when they go out onto their lambing paddocks.

Speaker 3 17:24

Yeah, so that's sort of from between March and yeah, we'll say, mid-August for a typical sort of North Island type farm, and then between sets, docking and mid-lactation. So docking or tailing, when lambs are what sort of three to eight weeks old, 3.7% of the ewes died. So we lost 37 ewes right through there, which means we're now down to 895 ewes out of our 1,000 that are still there at docking or tailing. And then another 3.8% were wet, dry, so they were still alive, but they hadn't reared a lamb and they may or may not be culled depending on the farm. Yeah right, Yep.

Speaker 1 17:57

We're rattling through the numbers pretty well.

Speaker 3 18:00

Yeah, we are yeah. And then we get down to weaning time and 154 ewes so 15.4% on average were culled after weaning.

Speaker 1 18:11

Oh yeah. That was predominantly condition score or.

Speaker 3 18:15

Sorry, that doesn't include wet-dry. That was predominantly.

Speaker 1 18:18

I can tell you this age was the most common reason for culling, after weaning, and then teeth and then utter defects and then a small number for condition score, feet and other bits and bobs so considering this should be, if we work on 28, 30 percent replacement, right, this should be, I suppose should be 25 percent of the co-old in one age group and I guess they've whittled down so it should be down to, so you're not culling all of the old ones.

Speaker 3 18:44

Well, yeah, culling for age policy varied quite a lot between our farms, so I'll just find the numbers. But yeah, we had a bunch that didn't cull for age at all, yeah, um, and then we had those that culled at less than six, six or greater than six. So the most common was culling at six. So nearly half our farmers cull for age at six, but honestly, not that many ewes make it to six because they've been whittled down throughout the years, over the four and a half years that they've been producing. Essentially, interestingly, culling for age policy, there was no association between that and replacement rate. So farmers that weren't culling for age, their replacement rate was no different from farmers that did cull for age.

Speaker 3 19:27

So if they're not culling for age. They're essentially culling the same number of ewes, but for different reasons. They fail at different times.

Ewe Mortality Rates and Risk Factors

Speaker 1 19:32

Yeah, yeah, that's right, yep yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 19:37

So we also lost 33 ewes, or 3.3%, between docking and breeding the following year.

Speaker 3 19:45

Is that in addition to year 37 that died between yeah, so that's post-docking and some of those were killed, some of them were dead, missing, and this is average, so some of them would have been wet dries on average. So, yeah, if we started with 1,000 ewes at pre-breeding the first year by pre-breeding the following year, we had 700 mate ewes left. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, if we started with 1,000 ewes at pre-breeding the first year by pre-breeding the following year we had 700 mate ewes left.

Speaker 1 20:07

Yeah right, and that looks like a mortality rate of 8% or 9%.

Speaker 3 20:12

Yeah, it was a bit. Yeah, well, a bit less than that.

Speaker 1 20:17

But yeah, Depending on where.

Speaker 3 20:18

Sort of 7.

Speaker 1 20:19

Depending on how. 7. Yeah, which is. I think. If you ask most farmers, they'd tell you an answer like three or four or something.

Speaker 3 20:25

Yeah, and I think three or four is kind of the ideal and there's definitely farmers that have their mortality rates down around the three or four. But all the work we've done, it's seven to eight percent is probably more realistic. Yeah yeah.

Speaker 3 20:38

And most of those. So in our study and in other studies, about two-thirds of those actually happen over the lambing period. Yeah, so you've got this really sort of a six to eight-week period where two-thirds of your deaths are effectively happening. So definitely, if you want to try and reduce your death rates, then really targeting that lambing period is the time to do it. It's quite a dangerous time for it to be a year, obviously.

Speaker 1 21:04

And I mean the causes are obvious but we might as well go through them. So how much of that was bearings versus dystochia, versus just use the metabolic whatever fall over? Don't get up.

Speaker 3 21:13

Yeah, good question. No criticism of our farmers at all, because they're awesome, but we actually only had four that actually recorded the causes of deaths.

Speaker 1 21:21

Yeah right, Most people went on skiing holiday or something and let them do it.

Speaker 3 21:27

Yeah, I don't know. I think doing a cast beat pre-lamming is pretty standard and we definitely recommend that because cast is just so common and such a stupid way for a sheep to die.

Speaker 1 21:37

Yeah, it is a dumb way to die.

Speaker 3 21:38

It's so, so preventable. So we'd definitely be recommending a cast beat pre-lamming and in a study we did a few years ago, you know the number of ewes that you could save through a cast beet was astonishing really, but yeah, so over-lamming itself. We only had four farmers that recorded. The most common was dystocia, or lambing trouble, yeah. And then there was unknown, so possibly metabolic-type disorders, yeah, so pretty much what you'd expect.

Speaker 1 22:04

Bearings it was like there seems to be some people have. Well, it's almost like abortion storm in terms of some years you've got massive problems and other years it disappears completely. Did you find that across the study? So?

Speaker 3 22:17

bearings of vaginal prolapse is for a few reasons. We could spend days talking about bearings. Yeah, I mean, I think it's. You know, some years are bad and some years aren't bad and there's variation between farms and between years and, honestly, in terms of the proven risk factors, everyone's got a theory but the proven risk factors are fairly limited, really.

Speaker 1 22:39

But what did you see in terms of numbers? What was the average percentage? Or you didn't get that.

Speaker 3 22:44

We didn't get that. Yeah, from a study done in the early 2000s I think 1% was average overall, with a range from about 0.0 something to about I can't remember maybe up to about 6%. It can get quite high. I mean, it's obviously quite devastating for farmers, but yeah, frustrating.

Speaker 1 23:01

Yeah, yeah, indeed. Yeah, I remember a study that pete ennis did a while back that, yeah, molars were a major well I was looking at it was a urinary study really, but half the sheep that I don't know about half might have been more than half half the sheep sort of got identified as being urinators are actually just molars that weren't functional as you didn't do any autopsies as part of this. This is all pharma, or sorry.

Speaker 3 23:21

Yeah, yeah, so we've definitely done um autopsy studies in the past with with skinny ewes. Um, and, yeah, often we certainly condition score two type ewes. We often don't find anything wrong with them and that probably just ewes that just aren't coping with being in a big mole and, you know, separated out and fed better they'll probably improve quite well. But molar teeth are definitely something that we find commonly as an issue in those really skinny ewes. Yeah, recognising that those skinny ewes are a very small proportion of the overall flock, so you know how many sheep in the flock have actually got bad molars? Probably not that many, but it can certainly have a big impact on them.

Speaker 1 23:59

Yeah, so I guess it's one thing knowing the where they go, the other thing is working out what you do about it. So one thing you've said is do a cast beat for particularly in the right condition, to the right shape, where you know you're going to get them sitting in the middle of the back, which, as you say, is the dumbest way to die. Um it really is yeah what?

Speaker 3 24:17

because they're used to carrying twins or triplets and you put all that into them and then yeah, yeah, um, so what are the other?

Speaker 1 24:23

I mean risk factors that can be controlled or, yeah, things that we need to be doing? I guess, and maybe part of that question is, was things like stocking rate, uh, class of countries, any of that sort of come out significant as being a risk?

Speaker 3 24:38

yeah, good question and basically no. So we only looked at big picture farm demographics. So that was location in terms of region, the farm size, so effective hectares, the ewe flock size. We looked at the number of ewes per labour unit. So you know, are farms that have relatively low labour unit numbers more problematic. We also looked at whether or not the farm policy was to mate some or all of the ewe hoggets. So if you're mating hoggets, is there more of a problem with dropout and replacement rate and there was no associations between that and anything.

Speaker 1 25:11

Yeah right.

Speaker 3 25:12

There was a slight impact of hill, so hilly farms had higher levels of ewe culling between breeding and docking. Yeah right, and slightly more wet-dry ewes as well, which you'd kind of expect. You know there's a lot of good research on ewes lambing on steep hill country and lambs disappearing off downhills and things like that. Clocks that routinely culled at greater than six years of age had higher losses, yeah. So yes, there's not a lot of good data on old ewes and death rates and things, but you know the general perception is the older ewes are more likely to die, which makes sense.

Speaker 1 25:51

Yeah, I've been in that rodeo before and it's not a lot of fun. The 7-year-old like a mob of 7-year-old ewes yeah, it's not fun.

Speaker 3 26:01

Yeah, I mean some, some farmers do it and probably do it. Okay, I think if you're going to do it, you need to accept that you're going to have slightly higher f rates and probably treat them like two-tooths, yeah, or put them in with the two-tooths and just feed them a bit better. Basically, um, the main thing we found was that the higher the? U scanning percentage, the lower the? U wastage rates, lower the losses so we're not.

Speaker 1 26:22

We're not burning them out, so it's more so. That's a, that'd be a. Well, we can make some assumptions, but I guess that's better managers, get better scanning, get better, get better survival. Is that a unfair assumption?

Speaker 3 26:33

yeah, I mean we didn't look at specific farm management factors, so we weren't condition scoring use or assessing pasture covers or anything like that. So it's highly speculative as to why that would be, Certainly higher scanning percentage.

Speaker 3 26:47

Flocks had less non-pregnant ewes, so they obviously culled less dry dries and they also tended. It wasn't statistically significant so I shouldn't say this, but they actually tended to have lower ewe death rates, which was surprising because we know that twin and triple-bearing ewes have a higher death rate over lambinging and certainly the relative number of ewes that died over lambing for those high scanning percent flocks was greater, but their overall death rates were actually relatively low yeah, so yeah, if we want to be highly speculative, it would probably.

Speaker 3 27:15

We know that scanning rate. Obviously genetics has a big impact but body condition score is at mating is massive. So I wanted to speculate. I'd say probably. Yeah, feeding use really well equals higher scanning percents, but also less. Less use disappearing out of the system because I reckon that'll get through this peer review panel. Yeah yeah, as I say, we didn't do a csu condition scores, we didn't measure pasture covers, you know, every week the entire stuff or it is, yeah, so we know generally how that rolls and it's still.

Speaker 1 27:52

I wrote an article about it recently. Really, it amazes me how few people condition score still, considering how powerful or how much we know that will control a lot of these factors or impact a lot of these factors.

Speaker 3 28:01

Yeah, it really really is, and there's been so much sort of publicity around it and training programs and everything else, and it's not that difficult, eh yeah.

Speaker 3 28:09

yeah, I know it's not that difficult I know it's another job, but the benefits relative to the time you put into it a mess, yeah, yeah, yeah so anyway, yeah, I'm just just by the by doing a wee study at the moment looking at because I know a lot of farmers condition score as they run down the drafting race. So we're just doing a wee study with eight farmers of different, with different levels of experience and their ability to identify thin. So use a condition score two and a half or less by feeling them or by running them down the drafting race at different ball lengths.

Speaker 1 28:37

So that'll be quite interesting how good will condition scoring be. There could be some egos being dented in that study.

Speaker 3 28:44

Yeah, there could be.

Speaker 1 28:47

I've done that once and it certainly resulted in a dented ego Not mine. I know I'm not good enough to do that. I know that I have to use my hands, but yeah, definitely particularly, and you do it with different wall lengths or you just whatever.

Speaker 3 28:59

Yeah, so we're doing a side-off shear, three-months wall and six-months wall.

Speaker 1 29:02

Yeah, perfect, that'll be great. I look forward to seeing that result.

Speaker 3 29:13

Yeah, yeah, we study, but it's quite interesting. Yeah, yeah, and we're also timing how long it takes with each um, each method at each wall.

Speaker 1 29:16

Yeah right, yeah, okay, yeah, cool, that will be good. Yeah, because I think well, everyone in the offshoes, I suppose, is I'll normally give people a pass, but other than that, I reckon you're guessing and so it'll be interesting. If people are particularly different frame scores and stuff, it is pretty, pretty hard with three or four underwires going flat out.

Speaker 3 29:33

Yeah, it's a ripping through. Yeah, definitely, and it sort of probably also depends a bit on gut fill and whether they're pregnant or not, and whether it's a bit damp and the wool falls off the spine a bit better and things like that.

Speaker 1 29:45

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm always eternally amazed when you put your hand on an animal. You get a different answer than what you thought you might. Yeah, yeah, eternally amazed when you put your hand on an animal, you get a different answer than what you thought you might. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sometimes it's best just to not look at it.

Sheep Farming Reproduction Strategies

Speaker 3 30:03

Yeah, yeah, anything else that you've gleaned since we discussed last um, yep, so what else was it? Yeah, I mean, I guess, in terms of reducing those losses, anything to reduce you deaths is going to have a big impact, particularly because dead ewes don't earn you any money. Um, so yeah, as I've said, the cast beat super important, but I don't know. I think our lambing management system's different. There's obviously quite a lot of variation between what farmers do around the country, um, and some farmers have astonishingly low death rates over lambing and others have really quite high, and I think I don't have an answer to that. But it would be good to do some research on our, on our lambing management systems, because our flocks have, you know, sheep have changed massively in the last 20 or 30 years, and are our lambing management systems still fit for purpose with the type of sheep that we have now? Um, recognizing that farmers are constrained by economics and labor units and things like that as well, of course, yeah, I guess there's well there.

Speaker 1 30:53

Yeah, I guess there's always a bit of conjecture about whether you do more damage than good when you enter the lambing paddock and I think, yeah, with some of the sheep we've got out there who do stick to the lambs pretty well, I think you can do a lot of good, and other sheep that are a little bit less keen to hang around their lambs, you can do a lot of damage by being in that lambing paddock. Yeah, that's right, it's certainly not an easy one-antifit-all sort of thing.

Speaker 3 31:18

Yeah, agreed, although I guess with those ewes that don't cope well with people being around, is that something that can be trained quite quickly. For those ewes, if you're doing castbeats and they're actually pretty used to you will they actually deal with that quite well? There's probably going to be a lot of variation, but yeah.

Speaker 1 31:37

I guess the reality is that dairy farmers get milk in the vat every day, but for us it's this little more. For sheep and beef farmers or sheep farmers, it's this little 28-day period or whatever. It is 35-day period where that's the time when all the milk turns up. That's your only yield on that sheep system. So you need to. Whatever you can do to reduce losses is going to have a positive influence, obviously, on the bank balance. Well, assuming it costs you less to do it, but yeah.

Speaker 3 32:02

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, hopefully it does have a positive impact anyway. Yeah, and I guess other things you know, obviously, culling policy, so, certainly, like non-pregnant ewes, our non-pregnant rates varied massively, you know, from about less than 1% right up to sort of 12% to 14%. Yeah right, and I get, I mean that's going to be impacted by the length of the mating period and I get that some farmers want to only mate for a short period, so they've got a really tight lambing. But, you know, trying to do everything you can to make sure that ewes get pregnant, you basically pick these girls as being winners. So, um, you know making sure. I know some farmers push out the boat a little bit with their ram to you ratios. Yeah, is that worth it if it means you end up with a few more dry ewes? Um, and just yeah, thinking about the length of the mating period and whether you're prepared to accept more dries or not, given that you're going to be hanging on to those ewes for six months before you find out that they're not pregnant.

Speaker 1 32:57

Yeah, and across our cohort which is yeah, I mean we've got some pretty, some people that like to push that boat pretty hard in terms of joining length, but I normally get away with it in a like in a Kiwi system where it's april may, joining short day length, everything's, everything's with them. It's probably more well, in my experience at least, to be more ram to you. Ratios or condition score of the use themselves or things like that, which people probably have make more error on than it seems like a lot of hitting that. That first cycle you're getting up like mid 80s, conceived in that first first 17 days and then, yeah, I, if you're, it doesn't take many more days to get them into the mid to high 90s. But yeah, I think, yeah, you're right, some people like to test how wide you can spread a ram, which is no good for some of our clients who breed rams.

Speaker 3 33:47

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, our sheep are really fertile, aren't they? They, you know, if you give them a chance they'll get pregnant, basically. But yeah, and as you say, you know, a lot of farms are getting 85%, 90% in the first cycle, without too many corns, yeah, and in that case two cycles is probably more than adequate. But yeah, when you're getting sort of 10%, 12% dries, that's quite a big loss. I suppose it means the rest of your use get quite well fed for the rest of winter though, because you've culled 10 percent, so maybe it works out well at the other end.

Speaker 1 34:19

I don't know um what's your dry rate if you've got bruce, seller over that's higher than 10 like you get if you got bruce can be.

Speaker 3 34:26

It's really variable. So the impact of bruce seller will depend on how many rams are infected and what your ram to you ratio is and the length of your molting period. So yeah, we've certainly seen farms where you know the scanning percent's been pretty woeful with Brucella ovis. But if you've only got a small number of affected rams it'll have less impact. So yeah, it's hard to put a number on that it's amazing.

Speaker 1 34:46

it's still out there and running, happily, isn't it?

Speaker 3 34:58

Well, happily, isn't it? Well, it seems amazing. Yeah, I mean, it's such a relatively straightforward disease to eradicate, but it does. It does seem unfortunate that it's still still out there. Yep um, and pockets, yeah, yep um, and you're just generally culling decisions, I guess. Um, you know, we talked about wet dry c-tooths.

Speaker 1 35:16

Yeah, righto.

Speaker 3 35:17

If you choose to cull all of those, then you've just lost 10 to 15% of your two-tooths. Plus, you know, you include dry two-tooths out. Then 20% of your two-tooths are gone without producing anything. So, yeah, I guess, yeah, focusing on two-tooth in terms of lemmings, but also thinking hard about culling decisions around some of those least obvious options. So wet drop culling on things like I don't like the look of her because she's ugly. You know the ones that aren't directly. Well, yeah, there's a few that aren't directly looked at yeah.

Speaker 3 35:53

Type of looks and things like that.

Speaker 1 35:54

Yeah, there's a few. Yeah, off top whatever, and commercially, if she's going to produce some lambs, then yeah, it doesn't matter too much.

Speaker 3 36:01

Yeah, and there's quite a lot, I mean for farms that are big enough to warrant an extra mob. The B mob or the terminal mob option is a really good one, isn't? It means that you can throw all those ewes that you're not sure about or don't like the look of into there and, um, they can still produce you some decent lambs, hopefully, but you don't have to worry about their genetics staying in the flock.

Speaker 1 36:18

Yeah, I think that seems to be an underutilized well. Yeah, there's a plenty of opportunity to have that be mobile terminals going over them, for economics as well as the reasons you're talking about. Um, I think lots of people like to have the selection pressure or whatever on the maternal side. But for all sheep you're going to cut the progeny from anyway, then it doesn't really matter. Better off.

Speaker 3 36:36

But yeah, that's right, and I guess one of the comments from the farmers that did tend to keep wet dries was that they're in really good condition at weaning time. Um, and so you know they might. They might make that that, uh, be more where the wet dries end up, as well as other things. Um, a bit earlier. You, they'll take the game early because they're in really good nick and ready to roll basically, yeah, yeah, Excellent.

Speaker 1 36:55

Is there any work that you know going on where I guess more detailed following of those wet drives? So we had to put some stats around how many of them, what's the repeatability of where you are checking out is and what the repeatability of that is going to be?

Speaker 3 37:11

No, there's no work on going on that that I know of. We're not doing any currently. Just in terms of numbers, you kind of need to start with a really big cohort to have enough used and follow through as well.

Speaker 1 37:21

Yeah, yeah, that's probably all things reproduction. You need such big numbers to get anything statistical. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 37:28

Yeah, yeah, that's right, yeah, yeah, excellent.

Speaker 1 37:30

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, excellent, Well, good, anything else from no.

Speaker 3 37:34

I think that's probably the main things we found Cool. Just hang on, I'll just do a quick squizzy of.

Speaker 1 37:43

For those people who haven't already, they should go back and listen to Anne's first podcast. I can't tell you when it was, but if you Google Anne Riddler and Head Shepherd, you'll find it. But uh, that was. We, yeah, discussed a lot around other defects and how to how to check for what, what's good, what's bad and what you should be looking for and when. Uh, yeah, we try and I need to go back and listen to it again to make sure we're doing the right thing. But, um, yeah, really handy tips in that one, so definitely recommend people getting back and having listened to that yeah, so just to sum up.

Speaker 3 38:09

So what we found was that for ewes at breeding, 14% of them didn't rear any live lambs. So for every 1,000 ewes that get put to the ram, 140 of them won't rear any live lambs, which is yeah a few more than one might expect perhaps.

Speaker 1 38:25

Yeah, and those numbers are yeah, so 86%, whatever, yeah, 14% are effectively weathers.

Speaker 3 38:32

Essentially yeah, but unfortunately not merino weathers. No, no, no.

Speaker 1 38:37

Yielding three bucks worth of wool. Yeah, and that's a big number, I think, when you multiply them out. I don't know what your average flock in your study was, but yeah, it's not hard for that to be a truckload of a unit load of ewes that are sort of doing nothing for the year. So when you put them in a yard or put them on a truck you can kind of get. It's a bit scary, the numbers we're talking.

Speaker 3 38:59

Yeah, that's right, and I guess back in the day when wool was worth quite a lot of money, they kind of justified their existence. But now all they're doing is eating feed, creating a hassle and generating some methane.

Speaker 1 39:08

Essentially, we've got all this way over there talking about the M word Sorry, excellent. Yeah, no, there's yeah anyway, but I think, as we know, there's a massive upside in the sheep industry and that's why we love working in it to try and help people get closer to reducing all these wastages and improving the productivity profitability.

Speaker 3 39:33

Yeah, and I think I mean obviously New Zealand farmers have done an amazing job at getting to where we've got to now. Compared with 30 years ago, it's a completely different national flock essentially. So now it's sort of tinkering with trying to reduce, I guess, e-wastage, I mean lamb wastage. We haven't gone there and we obviously it's not part of the study, but there and we obviously it's not part of the study but, you know, land wastages is kind of the area where we can really, yeah, try and try and make some more improvements.

Livestock Production Opportunities and Challenges

Speaker 1 40:02

Yeah for sure, obviously not an easy solution. We would have sorted that by now. Yeah, yeah, excellent, I'll let you get back to looking at some more data or something, but, um, yeah, I really appreciate your time. Thanks for coming back on and, uh, thanks for following up that original discussion and it's yeah great to get all those stats some pretty sobering stats, um, if yeah, on on some of our production systems and, um, it highlights all the opportunities we've got ahead of us yeah, and I mean, some of those colors and things are what they are, but there's definitely scope for I think.

Speaker 3 40:28

if farmers have a pretty good idea of where things are disappearing and why, then they can start to think about how they might interventions they might be able to put in place to try and reduce some of them, whereas if you just kind of have no idea then there's nowhere to start, essentially.

Speaker 1 40:42

Yeah, yeah, and particularly if, well, we don't want the prices to stay where they are. But when mutton was worth a bit of money, it was probably less critical than it is now, when mutton's worth very little, and so the depreciation from once they cut teeth is massive. So we need to, yeah, minimise anything where, if they are getting depreciated into adults, they should be hanging around for as long as we can hold them there.

Speaker 3 41:04

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, and we also know on most farms turd-eared ewes have lower production than mixed use. So obviously the higher the replacement rate, the higher the proportion of young sheep and therefore the lower the overall production as well. Yeah.

Speaker 1 41:16

Excellent, thanks, anne.

Speaker 3 41:18

Well, thanks, mark, nice to talk to you, thank you.

Speaker 1 41:22

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