Data driven livestock production for feed efficiency with Andrew Freshwater Clear Creek Pastoral Co.

Feed efficiency remains one of the biggest gray areas and least understood aspects of livestock production. Yet understanding how much grass a cow consumes to produce a calf or a ewe to produce a lamb is critical not only to farmer and ranch profitability, but also to the sustainability of the industry. At 19 cents per kilogram to grow dry matter, inefficiency compounds rapidly. The difference between efficient and inefficient animals can determine whether operations generate profit or struggle to cover overhead costs.

Today we are joined by Andrew Freshwater, who has spent over 30 years using data to drive efficient breeding decisions across his sheep and cattle production enterprises in northeastern Victoria. Freshwater's family brought Angus cattle and Romney sheep to Australia in 1849, establishing a multi-generational commitment to livestock genetics.

Recent heifer trials demonstrated dramatic efficiency differences between groups run as contemporary cohorts. Through Zoetis genomic testing, Freshwater documented that genetically inferior heifers showed poor feed conversion efficiency and marginal annual returns, while superior genetics in the same management system generated excellent profitability. The lesson is clear: breeding animals is neither pure art nor pure science, but rather a data-informed approach that acknowledges biological complexity while leveraging technology—from genomics to artificial intelligence—to optimize resource utilization across diverse farming systems.

Beginning performance recording in 1989 as a teenager, Freshwater has accumulated over 80,000 sheep records representing approximately 3.5 million data points through long-term progeny testing programs. Rather than relying on static estimated breeding values, he has developed proprietary software that runs Monte Carlo simulations incorporating local climate data, grass types, and historical weather patterns to identify the most profitable animals for specific environmental conditions and management systems.

Transcript

Speaker 1  0:00  
Ash. Welcome to the ash cloud. I'm Ash Sweeting today we're following on on the conversation around cow efficiency and how understanding how much grass a cow takes to produce a calf or a ewe to produce a lamb is critical not only to Farmer profitability and ranch profitability, but also the sustainability of the industry. It remains one of the biggest gray areas and least known areas of livestock production today, we're joined by Andrew freshwater, who has spent the last 30 odd years using data to drive efficient breeding decisions across his sheep and cattle production enterprises in south eastern Australia. Andrew, thank you

Unknown Speaker  0:47  
very much for joining me today. That's my pleasure.

Speaker 1  0:51  
So you run multiple properties, beef and sheep in southern or in eastern Australia. Can you please just start by telling us a bit about what you do, the properties you run, and how you got to be where you are at the moment,

Speaker 2  1:09  
bloody hard work, I guess, is the easy answer. I was actually just talking to a friend in Germany before, and I sort of joked that the harder you work, the luckier you get. And that was told to me by an old Italian family. My father used to buy bulls off back in the 1980s I guess we, we really just look at what's what's the best way to turn grass into its highest value. Traditionally, that's been sheep farming with with cattle as a lower proportion, but that's starting to change for us now. It's becoming a lot easier to be able to trade cattle, and also become more involved in the in the genetic side of cattle, to basically value, add the grass going through them, and turn them into a higher, higher value. Like our like everywhere, our input costs are growing substantially year on year, so we just need to keep in front

Speaker 1  2:05  
of that, I guess, in terms of that value adding grass, what are the what are the priorities, in terms of what you need to get right to do that as best as you can, and What are the risks

Unknown Speaker  2:21  
and challenges you have to manage on the other side of that coin.

Speaker 2  2:25  
I guess the big thing is, if you, if you're trading a steer or a heifer, you need to be able to know that you've got four to five months of grass in front of you. So you don't want, sort of want to get part way through a cattle trade and suddenly have to start feeding grain or or inputs that you haven't counted on, because that can obviously ruin, ruin the profit of that trade and send you backwards, and it can become cumulative. So if you run out of grass, just that recovery takes a hell of a lot longer. The big thing that I can see moving forward. And I certainly noticed that last year, when we were we were pretty tight for grass is the feed conversion efficiency of animals. We run a composite shedding sheep that we've trademarked the name catalyst for, and I've worked pretty hard on the on the resilience of those sheep in dry times. Notice they got through with no problems whatsoever. Notice, on the cattle side that the animals that had a bit of a feed conversion also got through. And the slightly smaller animals, and I know there's a fair bit of talk that you need to be running smaller cows, what I found is, yes, broadly speaking, that's right, but there's always exceptions to the rule. So there's a there's a multiple amount of things that we need to consider, like anything in a biological system. It's not it's not a simple straight line, and you've got to keep monitoring every day and always assume that you're wrong, and the first tap on the shoulder that you are wrong, you need to be prepared to change your plan pretty quick and not have much emotion tied up in it.

Unknown Speaker  4:12  
So can we dig? Because

Speaker 1  4:14  
obviously your value adding grass the more of the final product you get for the input, which is the grass, that's the feed conversion, the feed efficiency. So it's something that is a growing conversation in the livestock industries. If you go and speak to any other industry, that transport industry, the airport, the airline industry, they've been talking about fuel efficiency and all that sort of stuff for decades. So what's the how do you go about improving the feed efficiency? What can you learn from other industries? And are there any any particular leaders or people you see in the livestock industry? Have been doing this for longer than you have that you you reach out to for advice and ideas and leadership.

Speaker 2  5:08  
I'd say in the beef industry, it's pretty hard to go past Lee Leachman in the US. I've known Lee for years, and we use it. We use stabilizer style animal but the work that those guys have done on on feed efficiency is obviously world leading. Yeah, I also look to the pig industries and the poultry industries. I know they have different now. They're not, they're not ruminants, but they tend to be a lot more focused on the on the efficiency of the feed that goes down those animals throats. I don't think we're as focused Well, we aren't as focused at the moment, in beef and sheep, I would like to think, though that that's starting to change fairly quickly. If you look at the genetics of sheep and cattle, you do we actually need more growth? Do we need more intramuscular fat? Do we need all those things? Probably not, but we really need to focus on health and welfare traits, and you wouldn't call them convenience traits, but the feed efficiency traits and better use of resources. So yeah, it costs us about 19 cents per kilo to grow a kilo of dry matter. And if you start adding that up, it can become quite a frightening figure.

Unknown Speaker  6:30  
So that's the cost to grow a kilo of dry matter, grass

Speaker 1  6:34  
or past, yeah. And then back to that overall feed efficiency side of things. I guess there's, there's 222, sides to that coin. One is how much an individual eats compared to how much they produce, and the other is the resilience side of things, the ones that don't actually ever get into the market for whatever reason, disease or they're infertile or whatever that happens to be that you're putting all that feed into, but don't actually get any product and have an overall, overall dilution across the across the herd or the flock? Yeah.

Speaker 2  7:06  
So we, we ran a group of heifers through last year, and knowing full well that they were not the style of heifers that we really wanted, but it was kind of like just a year long data collection, I guess, on grass, just to see the difference we we DNA tested all those heifers through Zoetis, the inherit select product. And it's really interesting to look at the results that their their efficiency is horrible. Their production throughout the year was horrible. And you start working out what they've made you for the year, and it's not that much. If you compare those to another group of heifers that were running the same contemporary group. We made excellent money on those, and you know, the ones that we were playing around with made the result pretty average. So it's, it's a huge it's a huge difference, and something that we're just not looking at. We I still hear people say, Well, don't worry about the grass. It doesn't really cost you anything to grow grass. Well, it does. Even the overheads of land to buy, to buy a hectare of land in this region of Northeast Victoria can be anywhere from 20 to $35,000 a hectare. We run about, I guess you'd say 12 to 16 DSE per hectare. So you add that up over a 30 year period, and the the average level of profit per DSE per year, and you've got to have all your wits about you to pay land off, and you certainly can't do that if you're running inefficient animals on that land.

Speaker 1  8:48  
So there's a few things that have come up in what you've said. One, one is data collection and data management and data analysis. It's having the numbers to actually make data driven decisions from and the second is, obviously, if you've got those two groups of heifers and you're running them on your property, then the management and the feed and all that sort of stuff is going to be pretty similar. So that kind of leads back to the genetics, which then opens up another huge door to more data and numbers and data collection. So is that? Is that one way of thinking about it?

Speaker 2  9:27  
Yeah, definitely. I've got a friend in New Zealand called Andy Ramsden, and he's a sheep breeding guru. I think he said to me about 30 years ago, breeding animals was Swiss, start where it starts. So you need to start with the genetics, I run a long term progeny testing program on our shedding sheep, and over the years, we've ended up with a bit over 80,000 sheep run through that system, and there's about three and a half million data points. So I've, over the last 12 months, taken all that and built my own computer. Program to actually crunch all those numbers like if you look at static estimated breeding values, an animal that might work perfectly where you are might be a complete disaster for for where I am. So what I've done, instead of looking at those static numbers, is it has gone through the all the breeding values and all the raw data and phenotypic data that I can find, run it through a Monte Carlo simulation, and it will come up with the most profitable animal for my area, for what I'm trying to achieve. And if I, if I'm saying to someone, you know, they might be a double and they say, We want to buy a group of ewes off you which one should we buy? We can then actively go through those animals with all their production records and recommend the best use to buy so they can get a decent experience and not end up with a bunch of animals that they say, Well, hang on, these ones don't work here on breeding values. They might be the best animals there, but they might just not suit that situation. So I think where we need to get to in agriculture is to move away from the static indexes. They've been fantastic up until a point, but we need to be really thinking a lot harder how we index animals and making them live utilizing live data, probably moving more into using AI. And I know AI can spit out bad results, but it can also spit out good results. And you know, there's a lot of upside to come from working out how to use it to your benefit, especially in a farming system.

Speaker 1  11:41  
So just to provide a bit of context, where you are to Dubbo, you're in northern Victoria. Dubbo is, what, five, 600 kilometers

Unknown Speaker  11:50  
further north,

Speaker 1  11:53  
a little more subtropical, different types of grasses, dry of different seasons, that kind of stuff. And that's enough of a difference that certain, certain sheep or cattle will will do better in one location than another, and they need to be locally adapted.

Speaker 2  12:07  
Yeah, yeah. So what I've done is actually built the system so it looks at the long term weather. So it takes in all the weather details for as long as there are records, looks at all the climatic information that you can you can put in your grass types or what you plan to feed these animals, and it'll come up with some recommendations. I've found it really helpful, sort of stress tested it here and found that it actually works, which I'm quite happy about. But it means that we can become more targeted. I think everyone's gone out and bought a group of animals that they think will be the best thing since sliced cheese, and got them home and being disappointed where the long term results haven't been quite as quite as I expected. So I've just tried to put something together that that makes it easier, particularly for my business, to to get more information. I guess I'm a bit of, a bit of a genetics and data tragic over the years. I tend to, I tend to not have other hobbies besides sit down and crunch numbers and and look through what ifs and look through ways that we can breed better animals.

Unknown Speaker  13:16  
So firstly, what's

Speaker 1  13:19  
the how much, how much crossover is there between what you're doing with sheep and what you're doing with the cattle? Is it? Is it basically starting from scratch each time, or is there a lot of stuff that you can, you can leverage across?

Unknown Speaker  13:30  
Now I found this, there's quite a lot of crossover, a

Speaker 2  13:33  
hell of a lot of crossover, actually. I guess it helps that you're dealing with ruminants, so that's a good start. But I found there's quite a lot of crossover everything sort of points to, you know, if you think back to the 1980s that style of Angus cow that we had back in the 1980s which is quite a large animal and probably ended up looking a little bit more like a Friesian cow at times throughout the year, they're definitely the animals That don't make us any money and cost us money and send us backwards. And so we need to have a more, a smaller animal. I don't subscribe to the animals that are frame school three. Frame school four. I think they're too small. But there's a happy medium on the sheep side. We've we use a an accelerated lambing system, the Cornell star system, that came out of the US. So they're learning about every you get some that lamb every six months, but they average about every 7.2 months. That, to me, has worked really well, but you've got to have the right kind of sheep that can handle that. You know, particularly if you've got an animal that's slamming in the middle of January in Australia in the kind of heat we're getting at the moment, they need to be of a particular sort. So I don't think there's any recipe like there's no blanket recipe. You've just really got to think about where your own farm is, what you what the capabilities to that farm. Are, what the capabilities of the management team are, and then building the system around that, otherwise you can end up with a massive failure if you try and run before you walk properly,

Speaker 1  15:11  
and just to, just to take a step back, this is, you know, from what you said, there's, there's a lot of data being collected. There's a lot of now analytics built on this. So is what, where did you where'd you start with this, and how long have you been building it? And just talk us through that. You know, if you didn't jump here in one step, it's there's there's, as you said, that's that, um, the harder you work, the luckier you get. And you must be pretty lucky with all the work that you've put into this.

Speaker 2  15:40  
I when I was a kid, back in the early 1980s we were crossing Angus with Hereford. I didn't know why, but I knew that we're getting good results. And we were always mum and dad. Were always aiming for those animals. My family bought Angus cattle to Australia in 1849 and they bought Romney sheep over here at the same time. So we've kind of been hanging around sheep and cattle for a long time. I was fortunate enough to start my own Romney sheep stud when I was 12 years old, back in the 80s, and in things about 1989 I was probably one of the very early adapters, adopters. I put sheep on land plan, put Romney sheep on land plan, and had no idea what why we were doing it, but I just thought in my head, it makes sense to to be able to record those animals and see how they look against other people. It was quite funny, because we're we used to show sheep at the Melbourne show, and I remember going to a Romney meeting, and the older fellas saying to me, I was just, just a young teenager at the time. Whatever happened to all the good sheep breeders if we need numbers now to breed sheep, and that breeding sheep was an art, not a science. And I've actually got written up on the whiteboard in my office is breed is breeding animals and art or a science? I think it's a happy medium between the two, but the science part definitely helps. So we started performance recording a long time ago, and I've always collected information. And just as I guess, as you get older and you start working out, what's the cost of running a farm like I've started farming in my own right when I was 23 so that was a pretty, pretty early start. And when the when the money's coming out of your bank account and going into your bank account, you soon work out that it's better off to have more of it coming in than going out. And that revolves around having animals that perform under under the conditions that you're trying to farm under, and that can only happen by selecting better animals. Back in the 90s, that was bloody hard work because there wasn't a lot of information around. And we're fortunate now that as time goes by, we've got huge amounts of information to us. Now I remember taking DNA tests for sheep back in about 2009 and sending them off to Brisbane. And the guys there saying to me, you know, you won't get any information out of this at the moment that's usable, but in time you will, who would have thought a few short years later, the information that we can get out of genomics and DNA tests, and I think we've only just touched the sides of where that's going to go. So really it's, it's been, I guess, a long, a long career up until this point, of just collecting the information, being reasonably frustrated by the fact that it's not fully usable just yet, but hoping that the information will be fully usable as time goes by. It's worked pretty well so far, and hopefully it continues to work.

Speaker 1  18:43  
So on that note of where it could go, what's your? I'm not going to hold you to any predictions, obviously, but what's your, I guess, what excites you and what concerns you about that? And yeah, what's your thoughts on that?

Speaker 2  19:01  
Genetics is like driving a really fast car. You can put your foot flat to the floor and have a crash pretty easy. But if you drive that car properly, you can get great performance out of it. I think moving forward, like I just I look at our cow herd here. And I think this year, we'll probably take our top, top 10% we'll probably start doing more IVF, and we'll start implanting those embryos into our bottom cows. There's just no point running those bottom cows. So looking forward commercially when we're looking to buy a group of replacement heifers or something, perhaps we go to those people go to a provider and say, Can you provide animals to these breeding values or these specifications? And that's done via large scale IVF. So. I think that's probably where we're going to end up. We'll see a huge amount of AI with breeding decisions. I'm not totally sold on AI yet, but I think it'll get there. There's a lot of things that AI can't work out with livestock breeding.

Speaker 1  20:15  
You're talking about intelligence, not artificial insemination,

Speaker 2  20:19  
yeah, artificial intelligence, I think it'll get there over time. And it's probably one of those things, the more information that we can put in there, the more we can use at the moment, you put information in, and it can be a little bit questionable at the best of times, I think we'll continue to see a decline in terms of trade, like that's happened for the last 1000s of years in farming, it's not going to get any better, so we just need to be a lot more focused on on how we spend our money in sheep and cattle farming, and that might look in the future entirely different to what it's looked like for the past couple of 100 years in farming, particularly in Australia. I don't know if intensifying our farming with breeding animals is the way to go in this part of the world. I know I spent a bit of time in the in the sheep industry in Scandinavia, and everything's obviously in shed because it's so cold and the snow, that's really interesting. But you start thinking about the efficiency of those animals in that situation, and once again, there's good animals and there's bad animals, but that's a pretty high overhead situation. I don't think that's one that we can we can work with in Australia. So I think the future, I know that's a long way around, but the future is really it's what we make it and I think there's no set pattern of where things are going to go. I think there's going to be a huge amount of technology and science. Obviously. I think the next generation coming through are going to want to be continually excited. I'm 52 now. I'm sort of the wrong side of 50, and you look at 30 year olds coming through, and they understand computers and what technology can do, and they're kind of that, I guess you call them the Facebook generation. We'll see a lot more of that. I'm probably the last generation that the kind of bridge, that partial computer, partial old style of doing things, but things will change pretty quickly. We've got to get a lot of excitement in farming. I think we're going, particularly in the sheep industry. At the moment, we're going through a bit of a bit of a lull in excitement, which concerns me greatly. There's a lot of sheep leaving the industry. Some people say that's good for the industry. Some people say that's bad for the industry. I'm not so sure either are right at the moment. You know, we're getting great prices, but we need some drastic changes in the sheep industry as well. I think the beef industry looks fantastic in Australia. We're obviously world leaders in beef. We've got great markets. So we just need to keep doing what we're doing and seeing where we end up. But I think it's all positive.

Unknown Speaker  23:09  
What do you think

Speaker 1  23:12  
is needed to get that excitement, to get the younger people? This is an old idea. This is not a new question or a new problem or something that's limited to Australia or the United States or Europe or anywhere in particular. But you know, what are your thoughts on, on that incentivization side of things?

Speaker 2  23:30  
Yeah, that's that's a really difficult one. I speak, I speak with mates of mine who, they're starting to talk about succession and their son's coming through, the first thing they want to do is get rid of the sheep. And you speak to the sons and say, Well, you know, why don't you want to farm sheep? And say, well, in the middle of summer, why do we want to stand in a hot shearing shed with flies and maggots and that sort of thing. That's understandable. The General workload around sheep, I think, for the return isn't very attractive to a lot of newcomers coming in, so that's a real concern. I think a lot of people, younger generation, don't see a bright future in sheep. They see a lot of hard work in front of them. They see a lot of menial jobs, and they see a basic amount of income coming out of them. And I know Australia, we've tried to, we've tried to spin that in all manner of directions over the years and and put fairy floss around it and all sorts of things. But I think the hard reality is, you know, there's a lot of people in their 30s would rather sit on a tractor and put a crop in and take that risk, or run a mob of cattle than what they would chase a mob of sheep around? I don't know the answer. I wish I did. It's a tough one. It's something I think about quite a lot.

Speaker 1  24:55  
Is it? Is there? Is there educational components? Is there engagement between city Q? And the rural areas that sort of, is that part of the challenge, or is it? Is it more on the the economics and the workload is what you've alluded to?

Speaker 2  25:10  
Yeah, we keep hearing about this city country divide, but the younger people that I hear really speaking about out of the country, people, every person in a major city that I know loves farmers. We have family from Melbourne come out and they talk for the next 12 months and show photos and continue to talk about the great time they've had. They're not concerned about the country, city divide. It's just us. I think we need to rethink the way that we interact with people in capital cities. Yeah. So if you look at it on a DSC return, you can make as much out of running a cow as what you can a sheep. If you if you're wanting to improve the grazing and everything, you can run a cow behind a single wire. Running a sheep behind a single wire is a fair bit harder. So there's that extra labor component, drenching. I was saying to a mate the other day. If you want to get 1000 sheep in and weigh them and drench them, takes a bit of work. Even with auto drafters, if you want to get 1000 steers in and weigh them and drench them, you can back line them and run them through. And it's not as difficult. It's probably going to take you give or take the same time give or take a few hours to

Speaker 1  26:25  
kilos of produce in 1000 Yeah, steers, than 1000 sheep.

Speaker 2  26:30  
Yeah, yeah. So that's so that's a change to we probably need to be able to market what we're doing in lamb a bit better, particularly the lamb production world. I know wools tried to market itself forever, but it seems to be trying to reinvent itself every couple of years. And I don't see that at marketing actually going anywhere. There's a few standouts that I see around the world. You know as the in New Zealand, there's a there's a the astino, which is a composite Merino style animal that's being used in air filtration. That's really exciting stuff. But the notion that produce a lot of wool and people will wear wool, I don't see that many people wearing wool as an everyday item. Where I travel around the world, they all want to eat protein, so

Unknown Speaker  27:19  
concentrating on that meat market probably holds

Speaker 2  27:23  
more more future. I think I might have a totally skewed view as well. We we haven't shown a sheep in 16 years. We're all shedding sheep so. But I kind of looked at that, that wool market, years ago, and I thought it's not something that I can see a bright future in. So I'm probably looking at it through rose colored glasses to an extent,

Speaker 1  27:44  
and you you have been fortunate enough to have traveled quite a bit around the world. So how do you see the you know, what we've been discussing from an Australian perspective, as you know, being relevant or different in the different parts of the world you've been traveling to the issues and the challenges.

Speaker 2  28:06  
Yeah, animal welfare is becoming big. When I was in in Sweden last year, I had a couple of people tell me that Australian cattle feed lots weren't very good because they had poor animal welfare. And I sort of had to show them some photos and show them the welfare that we did do, which is much better than what I saw over there. And they're actually quite shocked. So the welfare is becoming quite big everywhere. I think that's a really good thing. I think our animal welfare is probably something we need to keep working on around the world. We're almost moving to a two step market that I can see there's there's a really high end product that people are looking for, and they're more than happy to pay for it. And then there's a base product where people just need a supply of protein. So that two step market, I think, is becoming larger and larger providence. Provenance, I think, will become larger when food safety concerns around the world become a big thing. So, you know, the interesting thing that I found traveling around the world is we're actually not very different. Everyone's pretty much the same. There's obviously different languages and different accents. Everyone basically thinks the same.

Speaker 1  29:27  
Your you mentioned, your families have been on the land in Australia, raising livestock since some for well over a century. So I'm from that. I'm probably fair to assume that the whole sustainability of everything is a is a priority for for you and your family. Well, how do you see that from your perspective?

Speaker 2  29:50  
I was fortunate enough in the 1990s to

Unknown Speaker  29:56  
to meet Alan savory

Unknown Speaker  29:59  
and have and. A fellow called Bruce ward in Australia.