Fertility and fecundity in the Australian sheep flock between 2006 and 2019.

Welcome to Episode 20 of the MLA Productivity and Profitability media series! In this episode, we're joined by Dr Gordon Refshaugee to explore fertility and fecundity in Australian sheep flocks over the past decade. 

Your host, Ellie Hays, and Gordon discuss the average pregnancy rate in Australian sheep flocks and share practical tips to improve fertility and manage the resulting obligations.

To watch our webinar with Gordon head to: Productivity & Profitability series | Meat & Livestock Australia (mla.com.au)

To access Gordon's research paper head to: An analysis of fertility and fecundity in the Australian sheep flock between 2006 and 2019 | Scientific Reports

More information on pregnancy scanning, check out the AWI-MLA report links:

AWI-MLA The Value of pregnancy scanning

awimla_value-of-pregnancy-scanning_report.pdf

This episode is proudly brought to you by Agrista, in partnership with Meat and Livestock Australia.

We’d greatly appreciate it if you could take a moment to complete a short survey about the series. By participating, you’ll enter the draw to WIN one of @agrista.au 3 tools: the Farm Expansion Calculator, the Exclusion Fencing Calculator, or the Containment Lot Calculator the choice is yours!

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/7PS8HBM

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Did you know that Dr. Gordon Refjogi's recent analysis of over 7 million Australian youths from 2006 to 2019 revealed an average pregnancy rate of just 76%? This finding highlights significant opportunities to enhance reproductive efficiency in the Australian sheep flocks. Hello and welcome to the Productivity and Profitability Podcast Series brought to you by Meat and Livestock Australia and Agrista. I'm Ellie Hayes, a consultant with Agrista based in southern New South Wales, and I'll be your host of the podcast series. In this series, we bring you practical and topical information to help boost the success of your business. We're here from a diverse range of industry experts who share their insights to assist with your on-farm decision making. Today I am thrilled to be speaking with Dr. Gordon Refshorgi. Gordon and I will dive into all things fertility and fecundity in Australian sheep flocks and explore the actionable steps to improve reproductive efficiency. Let's get started. Hi Gordon, thank you very much for joining me today. I'm looking forward to talking about the fertility and fecundity in Australian sheep flock between 2006 and 2019. How are things in your part of the world today?

SPEAKER_01 1:42

It's a lovely, sunny, cloudless sky. It's nice and warm and things are going on fine at the moment, I think.

SPEAKER_00 1:50

Before we jump into today's topic, tell us about your story and how did you get to where you are today?

SPEAKER_01 1:57

So I'm a I describe myself as a small ruminant researcher. That means I work with sheep and goats. I've been involved in sheep research for decades, really. And in the last uh six or so years I've been working with goats. My interests are around reproduction, but that means I also get involved in studies of nutrition, genetics, meat science, disease investigation, technology development or validation, you know, management. And so it's reproduction at the core for sheep and goats and the factors that float around and that it influencing reproduction is my research field. I have a background where I uh grew up on farms. So I've been around rural New South Wales all of my life, and I've got uh an ag degree out of Chancellor University and a PhD out of UNE.

SPEAKER_00 2:53

Good, and you have gathered some incredible insights from your research paper on fertility and fecundity in the Australian sheep flocks. Can you walk us through the research you conducted and the methods you use to study fertility and fecundity?

SPEAKER_01 3:08

Yeah, so the the background to the paper that we had published in 2024 is reaches right back into the sheep's owse days, where there were a number of national sheep pregnancy scanner conferences held as a part of the managing scan use program. And the pro the focus of that program was to improve the adoption of pregnancy scanning, and therefore, as an outcome of that, to lift reproduction rates in the national sheep flock. The pregnancy scanners at the conference were saying, you know what, we're collecting a lot of data, and it's a it's an information point exchange between the client and the and the service provider, the contractor, pregnancy scanner, and that's as far as that information goes. And they say that we've got a huge amount of data that's been collected over time. Would that be interesting for anyone to have a look at? So that's back in 2009. Those ideas are ceded, and we roll forward through to 2020 when I uh found some time to speak with a local pregnancy scanning business, and I said, How about you give me your records and we'll go through and start analysing the information? Which we did. That result was a really surprising pregnancy rate for Central West New South Wales based scanner. So I spoke with my colleagues at the Sydney University at uh the University of Sydney, that's Simon deGraff, Jess Ricard, and we looked at those results and said maybe we could get another pregnancy scanner and expand the data set for the same time frame, which is what we did. We got an honor student who's Madison College, she's now doing her PhD in artificial intelligence of pregnancy scanning recordings, videos, trying to predict predict the outcomes from using AI. So we put together, this team put together a data set that lasts from 2016 to 2019. So the two data sets overlap from the two pregnancy scanning businesses. There's sheep mobs representing every state and territory in Australia. There's 14 years in the data. There were over 15,000 mobs of use scanned and nearly 7.5 million use in the data set. We collected those records from the scanners as either Excel files or as record sheets or as invoices. So that means the invoices had to be transcribed and so did the record sheets into an Excel file where there was an identity for client that was de-identified. So that someone's name was then converted into a hexadecimal code, and that meant there's no way we can track who the client is. And when there's over 3,000 clients, it's actually not very important information in any case, but it's de-identified. All of those records uh will have had a date of scanning. From the date of scanning, we subtracted 86 days, which is about when RAMs have been introduced to the to the mating groups, and 86 days later is about when scanning's occurring on average. So we made the assumption that there were two cycle matings, and 86 days previous to the data scanning was about when joining commenced, and so we get a sense for when the season of mating was being undertaken for that mating. From those records, we can also get perhaps a postcode which gives us a region in Australia. We might have labels for the mobs that could indicate that the ewes were maidens or lambs or adults, it might indicate breed, and so, and then of course we had the outcome for the pregnancy scan itself. That was scanned in lamb, or thus scan for mold. So we have pregnant, not pregnant, or we have not pregnant, one or two, or sometimes three fetuses. We compiled all of this information together, uh, cleaned up the data set to make sure that there were the records made sense, the totals were correct, and then presented it for analysis. Uh it's an enormous data set, it's four and a half times bigger than the next largest data set. And the the key findings, the key three findings, that when you average pregnancy rate for the whole data set, the average pregnancy rate's 76%. When we separate out those mobs that were scanned in LAM only without any litter size information, the average pregnancy rate is 72. And for mobs scanned for multiples, the average pregnancy rate's 84. Those numbers deviate enormously from where we thought we'd expect the average pregnancy rates where previously we thought they would have been closer than 90%.

SPEAKER_00 7:42

Are there noticeable variations in pregnancy rates across different age groups?

SPEAKER_01 7:49

Yes, there are. So where the records had labels that indicated age of animals, and they might have been notes like lambs or LMBS, or they might have said maiden or hoggot, or they might have said adult or mature used or mat used. We we inferred from there, and even ear tags for the year of scanning can all imply age of the groups of animals, and they line up statistically as we would expect them to do. So U lambs have a lower pregnancy rate, which is as we understand, it's their first time exposed. There's a lot of factors affecting the success of pregnancy in U lambs, and so overall the average pregnancy rate was 51%. There was quite a range, and they were scanning, the reproduction rate was about 81% in lambs. Hoggets had a low pregnancy rate at 78, and their scanning rate or the reproduction rate was 115, which isn't far away as a scanning rate from where we might expect hoggets to sit. And adult use is the biggest disappointment, and they average 79% as an average pregnancy rate, with a scanning rate of 126. Now, they line up as we understand them, where there are improvements as the animals get older. The scanning rates are actually not terribly dissimilar from what we would have expected anyway. In particular, the scanning rates for the whole data set was 121. And here, when we have adults identified at 126, if you were to ask consultants or to look at other larger data sets, those numbers for the scanning rates are actually pretty close to what we would expect in literature and in our sense of the world, but the pregnancy rates are way off, and that's that's a big issue. So the cause adults will make up usually 60 to 70 or 80 percent, perhaps, of all of the ewes that are mated, certainly 60 to 70 percent, when they are conceiving at around 79% that's the key limitation to pregnancy success. Uh, ew lambs, there's not a lot of mating of ew lambs across the industry, particularly in merinos, which is still the dominant breed. So their impact at 51% isn't holding back the whole data set that we have. But it is clear that there's uh lower pregnancy rates in those U lambs, which is what we're going to expect. It's an obligate outcome of joining an animal for the first time, particularly when it's very young. So no great surprises there. It's the adult use, pregnancy rate and adult use that's the biggest uh handbreak in this data set.

SPEAKER_00 10:23

How much do pregnancy rates vary between different regions and what are the biggest environmental factors influencing fertility?

SPEAKER_01 10:31

Yeah, okay, so uh again, as when we had postcodes for any of those records, we could place those farms into regions which were pastoral zone, high rainfall zone, or the wheat sheep zone. And the results line up more or less as we would expect, where the pastoral zone had a lower pregnancy rate and lower scanning rate. And a high rainfall and wheat sheep zone weren't terribly dissimilar from each other. And that makes sense because the pastoral region uh is extensive, it's hugely variable even within local areas. The feed base can be challenging, the rainfall can be non-seasonal, so those sorts of factors that contribute to unreliable energy and protein status for the diet are going to impact on mating success. But also, we have a lot of predators in the pastoral zones, and so they'll be putting pressure on animals and their reproduction rates as well. We compare that to high rainfall zone and wheat sheep zone, where you have higher rainfall, which means there's more pasture throughout the seasons, potentially more reliable rainfall, and in the wheat sheep zone, you're growing alternate feedstuffs, and there's loosens available, there's wheats and other grains available. So the ability to provide energy and protein for these animals in the wheat sheep zone is higher, and as a result, we see slightly higher pregnancy rates and higher scanning rates in that zone compared to the high rainfall. But at the end of the day, this is reproductions influenced by a range of factors such as nutrition principally. There's a small genetic component, which is about maybe 10%, 11% of the variation we see in terms of its heritability. So, therefore, it's environment, which takes up the other 80 or 89% or so of the variation. And environment will include not just climate, so heat stress can have an impact at times, but it needs to be pretty hot and fairly consistent, and heat will be generally confounded with lower feed quality. So feed quality and nutrition is a key driver of sexual behaviour, of uh ovulation rates, uh, quality of the ovar, quality of the sperm. So nutrition is absolutely essential. That's energy and protein ultimately. But then we can also have some diseases, there might be some predation. So there's a number of factors that are going to contribute by and large to the pregnancy outcomes. So that's why producers are reminded all the time to do the five Ts checks of their rams before they're mated. So you should be definitely putting your hands on the testes of the rams to ensure that they are large and firm but not hard and not soft and not misshapen and don't have any lumps in the round the through that the scrotum. That's important. Rams need to be able to walk and they need to be in good body condition. If we think about live weight of the ewes, then you lambs will be the higher pregnancy rate if they are heavier. They'll also have a higher pregnancy rate if they're older. Pregnancy rates will improve between six and seven months, seven and eight, eight and nine months of age. As animals get heavier, you get higher pregnancy rates, and that's because they've got more bone, more muscle in their bodies, which have relationships with reproduction. But it also suggests that they've been on a high plane of nutrition, which means their follicles will be better nourished and the ovar will be better quality or the sperm will be better quality. So increasing live weight during joining, increasing higher live weights before joining commences, or and in adult animals in a higher body condition state will all lead to higher reproduction outcomes. So nutrition's the key, really, to all of this. But if producers are having problems with their pregnancy rates and they're concerned and see them declining, then they definitely should be getting vets in to do inspections on the rams and contact consultants to see where the key limitations are going to be. But at the end of the day, it's almost certainly going to be nutrition driving most of the lower reproduction outcomes.

SPEAKER_00 14:39

With nutrition, do you have any specific recommendations for producers?

SPEAKER_01 14:45

Uh yeah, it's interesting. So horses for courses, you need to understand where you are in the world, what's your feed base, when are you joining? Most people you would think, and the advice coming out of New South Wales DPI, uh, which is now DPI RD, when it was New South Wars Agriculture, you know, when I was growing up as a young man, it was mate your animals in autumn in most parts of New South Wales because uh the lamb on green feed when the feed base is the highest, so you can manage your stocking rate according to that. But it's not really a lot of producers that actually do that. You look at the number of animals that are scanned in our data set, most of them are mated in spring and summer. Now you can be mating in the end of summer. People like to chuck the rams in on Valentine's Day, which is romantic, uh, but really actually timed better with the feed base typically. So you've got these sorts of decisions you can make about your circumstances really need to be made with you. And so any advice I can give to producers now in a podcast will be generic. But if you're making when seasonal conditions are dry seasonally, then you should be supplementing your animals. If the animals are in reasonable condition or even a little lean, and the feed base is sufficient to maintain them in that condition, then a small amount of pulse grain, particularly lupins, at around a rate of 250 or 400 grams per head per day, fed to those animals two weeks before mating and one week into mating, will bring about an energy and protein flush and result in more pregnancies and more twins. So you could lift your scanning rates with a short-term supplementary flush. But that's really about recognizing the conditions that are able to maintain the animals, the feed base, and then providing a supplement on top of that. If the feed base is inadequate, then the animals need to be fed another grain, like a cereal grain, to maintain them. And so, same thing. I just keep them on the grain until two weeks before joining and spike them up. Animals that will respond to a flush are more likely to be leaner than animals that are fatter. So if you have those animals segmented at any time, then that will enable you to make an easier decision. If you were to segment your animals prior to mating, then I would be looking at drafting the ewes at weaning into fat and lean groups. The ewes that are lean at weaning have done the best job for you, unless there's something holding them back, like lameness or a disease or broken mouth. So you've still got to class up the ewes so they're fit for joining. But by and large, the lean ewes are the ones that have done the best job. They've given everything they could to the weaning weights that probably more likely wean more than one lamb. So they are the contributors to the profitability of the enterprise, and you need to reward those animals by drafting them off and feeding them something better, offer them a better pasture allocation or feedbase allocation to get them back up in a condition. And you need as much time up your sleeve to do that, then hold back these fat use. So you can just create two mobs and manage them together in a way in your grazing rotation, in a way that the fats don't get the quality, the leans get the quality. About a month before joining, double check that you've done the right job if you need to make any sort of change in the short term, like a flush or a spiked feeding with a high protein feed base, you can make that decision and plan for it a month out. Don't get to the time of joining and for the first time look at the RAMs and the first time look at the ewes and go, oh well, you know, here we go again. It's gonna be what it's gonna be. You want to take control of the outcomes by working a little harder a little earlier. And I think that's very sensible advice and will apply broadly, particularly the separation of fat and lean animals. That the rewards will be there by lifting the condition of a lean animal before mating.

SPEAKER_00 18:41

With certain pastures potentially causing photoestrogens, what can we do to manage that that risk?

SPEAKER_01 18:49

Yes, the phytoestrogens, there's a family of phytoestrogens, and they are associated with infertility. The most commonly recognized of those is clover infertility, which is really a problem of a big problem decades ago when a handful of varieties were developed for their ability actually to persist through water logging and through drought conditions, right? What a perfect clover. That's a dreadfully disappointing outcome. And those clovers were spread widely, and because they persist through drought and through water logging, they're pretty robust plants. Unfortunately, when they increase in proportion in the diet, they these phytoestrogens complicate the dietary uh intake and lead to infertility ultimately. You can have even sort of sexual development characteristics in weathers when there's too many phytoestrogens in the feedbase and you have problems with fertility in the ewes, which can last permanently for those animals, can be short term and long term. There's been a lot of work done in the last couple of years through UWA. Kevin Foster's led the program there, recognizing that clover infertility is potentially on the rise because those clovers are still around. So they've rehashed a lot of that information, which is excellent. But you can also get phytoestrogens from wilted leucin. That group of chemicals is called chemestin. It has a short-term impact on infertility, it's not a long-term issue. So while the lucin is wilting or it's under stress from aphids in particular, it will increase its concentration of chemestin, and that can cause a temporary infertility. So if we were mating on lucin, then I'd be mindful that it was good quality, actively growing, not wilting and not under major aphid pressure. Now there can be some other issues that go around. High quality Lucin can get bloated, you can get spread gut, you might get pulpy kidney if your vaccines aren't up to date. And there's some discussions, and I think it's not the literature's not really very clear on this, but there is evidence where high feed intake can lower progesterone concentration, and maybe even high ammonia concentrations can interfere with embryo survival. So the the way to use lucin is while it's actively active green and growing, you would flush the ewes on it and keep them on the lucin for about 10 days into mating and then take them off, which just helps to spike the nutritional uh base, increase protein and energy, and then minimize the risks by taking them off. You can also get phytoestrogens in senestec medics as well. So they're around and about in the environment. By and large, nothing's caused a major problem for sheep, like the clover infertility problem, which is which is can be in hand and can be managed.

SPEAKER_00 21:39

Beyond nutrition, are there other interventions such as hormone treatments that you'd recommend?

SPEAKER_01 21:46

Yeah, again, uh it depends on your business objective and the season of mating that you're engaging in. So the the two primary and most common uh hormones or vac or hormone associated products that are available. Regulin, which is a melatonin implant, tricks the body of the animal into thinking that the day length is shortening as if it was an autumn mating. So you would use regulin to help improve your fertility rates and your scanning rates when you're joining in spring and perhaps early summer. The effects of melatonin will wane once you're into the new year and mating closer to autumn. Another hormone-associated product you can get is called overstim. Used to be called fecundine. It is a vaccine. It's a vaccine against a hormone that's called androstenodione, and that hormone is produced by the primary follicle in the ovaries. The primary follicle secretes andostenodione as a feedback signal to depress follicle stimulating hormone, which really what it's saying is I've got the pregnancy, I can do this on my own, I don't need any help. And so if we block that vaccine, uh if we block that hormone signal, the feedback signal, then follicle stimulating hormone will increase and you get another ovulation. So you increase ovulation rate by using overstim. Curiously, there's an elevated non-pregnant U rate. You get more empty U's when you use overstim. So it's not necessarily a solution to lower fertility, but you'll still get more ovulation, so you get more twins. Because it's a vaccine, you need two doses in the first year, and then you need a booster dose every year after that. So you're kind of obligated to the program. You can't really dip in and out of it. Whereas with Regulin, some years you might want to join a little earlier and you can use Regulin to stimulate the program. And other years you say, Oh, well, maybe we'll join a bit later and I don't need to use the Regulin. So they're the two common hormones or hormone-associated treatments that you can apply to animals to get another spike, which can be economic, uh, particularly the overstem is quite cheap. It's a relatively cheap vaccine, and regulin sits at around seven dollars, uh, and people I think are balking at that price point, unless lamb's really very valuable. But if you're joining in early spring and you don't get very high pregnancy rates, then what's your objective?

SPEAKER_00 24:09

Do you recommend pregnancy scanning? And what is the best time to get the best accurate results?

SPEAKER_01 24:16

Yeah, absolutely. Wholehearted. I've been 100% committed to pregnancy scanning. In 1997, my father and I were feeding oats out to our ewes, and we started using the bin feeders, and one of the rams typical died of grain poisoning. Yeah, okay, good, good. I said, okay, Dad, we've had a major issue leading to the death of an animal, a ram. So not only is our ram percentage down for a period of time, but also what else has happened to the use of how about we pregnancy scan? Yeah, I can't spend more money, I can't do that. And it was really revealing because we had quite a high non-pregnant U rate. So we were able to react to that because we joined early enough, we could then put the Rams back in and we could recover our flock number and maintain flock structure over time because we responded to this one-off. So I had a sense that there was going to be a problem. But from that moment onwards, I was sold. Here's the value of pregnancy scanning. And even in those early days, when I really was quite naive, I was noticing things like the really fat animals that had the highest fleece weights weren't getting pregnant, right? And it's they had the highest fleece weights because they weren't getting pregnant. So I went, okay, this is an interaction in the business operation of the performance of animals, but also in our farm business. And of course, then since having done completed my degree and done my PhD and been involved in reproduction research, it's really clear how valuable pregnancy scanning is to a business. Now, I've got a friend and he used pregnancy scanning in a thousand crossbred ewes once in his life. He scanned a thousand ewes and he said there were four ewes not pregnant. And he goes, It was a colossal waste of money and time. And I went sure was because you didn't scan for twins. Right? So pregnancy scanning doesn't help you if all of your animals are pregnant and you're not scanning for multiples. That is an absolute waste of money and time, no question. After about a hundred sheep scanned, you'll know where the proportions are if you're scanning straight away from twins, empty singles twins. And if you've got no twins after a hundred years, you could probably just scan for empty and dry and re-evaluate your program while you don't have a lot of twins. If you don't want a lot of twins, tech, no worries. Because the twin bearing ew needs so much more feed in late pregnancy, the mortality rate or twin bearing ewes is so much more elevated, the mortality of lambs, particularly unsupplemented lean twin bearing ewes, is so high, then there's a whole bunch of welfare as well as farm production factors affected in the outcomes by not managing twin-bearing ewes. Our data from this massive data set suggests that for every pregnant animal there's about 1.45 fetuses. That's the linear regression that we've got across the whole range. There's some error around that, right? It's higher and lower numbers, but the line of best fit is 1.45 fetuses. So that suggests that there's still quite a lot of twins in all of the animals when you're just scanning in lamb. So there should be value for you if you've got at least 15% of your used twinning. Uh, there'll be value for you in segmenting and managing those animals better. I often hear that there aren't enough paddocks for managing these animals in different groups, and I think that's baloney. If you only have one paddock for your sheep, then that's true. And how you're doing the operation anyway, if you've only got one paddock, right? You can't manage worms. Build another fence, put an electric fence in, do something, create segmentation, find, grow feed without the animals being on the feed base. There's ways around this. You can separate your twins at scanning and put them in a rotation ahead of the singles so the twins can eat the quality and the singles can go and tidy up the paddock behind them. No worries. That will always work. You don't have to lamb your singles and your twins separate, but if you manage them up to the time of lambing so that they reach better nutritional conditions, the lambs will be heavier, the used will be in bedded body condition, there'll be lower mortalities in those twins. If you've managed them from scanning through to pre-laming better, then that's an outcome. So if you can't lamb them in all these different paddocks, then there's a way forward. If you were to add fetal aging into your scan, you can create segmented groups of like types: early twins, early singles, late twins, late singles. You can manage your lamb marking groups a little better, but lambs are more even in their age at that time. You won't have lambs being born in the yards when in when you're marking the lambs. These are all outcomes that improve the welfare and the performance of the business. So fertile age will help you create better mobs, particularly if you're focusing on reducing mob size for twins. So scanning is a one-off event, it's a single point in time, it doesn't tell you precisely what you could have had or what you will get at the time of lambing. Uh, there are a number of factors that affect the quality of the scan. So you need to be scanning those used ideally between 80 and 90 days from RAM introduction. You have a window outside of that of about another 10 days. So 70 to 100 days is the window. As the fetus develops, there's more bone being developed in the fetus and the electric because ultrasound relies on sound, the sound waves. If you have bone, the sound will hit the bone and no sound will get past the bone, and that creates a shadow. And so if there's any fetuses behind the shadow, then the scanner can't see it. So scanning accuracy declines because of bone in pregnancies that are greater than 100 days. So that's your maximum. And the earliest about you can detect a pregnancy with a really good scan is about 35 days. So you've got that little window, which is ultimately 70 to 100 days after the rams are introduced, and the sweet spots 80 to 90. Definitely get in and do that. The earlier you do it, the more time you have to manage these animals to lamb in better, better condition by providing an improved allocation of feed base for those twins in particular and getting the singles right. Your twins want to be lambing in around about three score, maybe a little higher, three and a quarter towards forward condition, and your singles will do pretty well at two and a half to two and three quarters, but you wouldn't want to push them down to twos. You can push them too hard. Your singles should be marking you 95%. And if you're in the 80s, you need to wonder why. And your twins, it's difficult, but you you really want 80 to 90 percent of your twins as well. That's everything's got to go right, and you don't want your twins in the 50s or the 60s, they've got to be 70s plus. So there's some metrics that people can think about if they've got those numbers.

SPEAKER_00 30:55

In terms of reproductive efficiency, is there a baseline unit we should be measuring?

SPEAKER_01 31:02

Yeah, okay, so reproductions, fertility, litter size, lamb survival, and even weaner survival. The common language is number of lambs weaned per U joined. That's that's the metric we should be using in our language. It's the number of outcomes for the number of animals that we're exposed to, entire rams. That's where we start. There's a lot of smoke and mirrors in pubs and at the show ground at the footy grounds, about how many lambs were marked as an indicator for the success of the breeding operation. But the true metric is per you joined, which is hard if you're starting your marking. Oh, yeah, I've got 180% of my twins, you know, 95% of my singles doing really well. What does that really mean if you had 30% empty? So it's per you joined is the metric. The national marking rates represented as per you joined, and they're around about 90 to 100% across the nation, and they vary a little bit according to the season that the surveys are undertaken, uh, which is a reasonable benchmark, but I don't know why in the wheat sheep belt in the high rainfall zone, we're not weaning 130 as an average. I think that's really achievable. Certainly 120s plus, and when meat is at least 50% of the value of the gross margin in the merino operations, at least there are some exceptions, but very few exceptions to that rule. Meat for 20 plus years is a massive contributor to the income in the sheep enterprise, and therefore reproduction is a driver of that outcome. We should be really focusing on lifting fertility rates to lift our weaning rates, and I think we're missing a lot of opportunity still.

SPEAKER_00 32:44

Post-weaning management plays a part in improving production. What's your best advice of ways to manage ewes in this period after weaning?

SPEAKER_01 32:55

So we've I've had a couple of flocks now where we've been able to, in longitudinal studies where we've watched the performance of animals over time and we've seen lean ewes that were twin-bearing at the beginning of the study, remain lean at the subsequent mating and have substantially lower fertility rates. They fall over. In other flocks where the lean ewes at the first scanning, which are twins, come in at weaning and are managed better and lifted in their condition, even if the condition lifts only a little bit compared to non-managed animals, their fertility returns and they continue to sounce it forward. And the lesson there for us is managing those lean ewes at weaning to ensure uh that they recover their condition because they're the ones that have done a lot of the heavy lifting for the operation. You'll see that I did a great demonstration in Central Queensland last year with some wonderful producers from the Long Reach Barcaldine region where we had ewes at they were early marking, not quite at marking, and there were fat ewes, which had lost their fetuses or lost their lambs, and then there were really lean ewes, which are the ones that were rearing. And so we put our hands on the others, it was really clear that the very lean ewes were wet and the fatter ewes were lean. So there's relationships between the contribution of the ew to the business and how much it takes out of her body. And so those animals that are really doing the heavy lifting need to be rewarded. And the best way to do that is to draft them off at weaning and manage them better. And if the ewes are too poor, wean them earlier. They'll just be competing with the lamb in any case. So there's a few things that you can do, a few levers you can pull, uh earlier weaning and draft off those lean use so they recover and can go again successfully.

SPEAKER_00 34:50

Do you think there is a fertility issue in the Australian sheep flocks?

SPEAKER_01 34:54

That's a great question. So in the literature, when we look through reports of large-scale studies, right? So I could go and find a paper that talks about fertility in 50 sheep. That's not going to reflect what's happening in the real world. So I want to see a paper that's talking about tens of thousands of animals or hundreds of thousands of animals, and there's not many of them in us for Australia. Uh, there are the three biggest of them, more or less, and naturally mated operations. Some of the larger other studies can be genetics studies where there's single-signed mating and there's AI. So the pregnancy rates are probably going to be more variable and lower, and not a true reflection, so except to remove the genetics-based studies and look at naturally mated studies. And there's three big ones. Uh, Doug Fowler published a report in 2007. It had nearly 100,000 animals in it and had an average pregnancy rate of 86%. Amy Bates, in her PhD, published some work where I was involved in the project, helped to collect the data, and had about just under 30,000 ewes and had a 90% pregnancy rate. And then Bob Kilgow had nearly 35,000 ewes with a 94 to 95% pregnancy rate. They are pretty much the three biggest studies for natural-romated operations. And the average of those is about 90%. When we look at MLA and AWI's strategic plans for how they want to make investments with RD levy money, they need to ensure that there's a return on investment for the dollars that they direct into RD. And the way to do that is to see what's the state of play? Where's is the situation for an issue like fertility? And where could it get to if we made improvements? And what's the return on that investment? And the numbers they drew on by looking at the literature and also by talking to consultants was their view was the average was 90% pred rate. So Solomon and I, and Jess and Madison, do this study, and we come and say, well, actually, we say it's 76%. Because we've got the biggest data set. It's hard to ignore. It's every state and territory. It's really hard to ignore. Is it real? Well, our scanning rates are very close to the numbers that everybody else is prepared to accept. The relationships within this data set uh make sense. Production zones differences make sense, age differences make sense, seasonal differences make sense, everything makes sense about it except the pregnancy rate. I think it's too big to ignore. It's closer to real-world data. My sense is that if a consultant gets close to producers, then they're probably going to be looking to drive improvements in seeking the one percenters. They're not the people that are not paying attention to the management of animals per se. That's not exclusive. But if they're close to researchers that are prepared to come on the farm, say, oh, we're looking to do a study on XYZ, yeah, come on to the farm, no worries. I'm confident in my breeding management and my animal management for researchers, industry experts to come in and have a bit of a look at my operation. So I think we're biased a little bit as consultants as researchers for the information that we've been fed through the literature and through our exposure to industry. The pregnancy scanning information is probably much closer to the real world, may not be biased by who we are. And so it suggests that there's an average pregnancy rate of 72%, and that's a problem. Yes. So the major are a lot of flocks. I should say the median results for the whole data sets closer to about 89%. So there's still a lot of good performing flocks, but there's probably about 40% of flocks or mobs that are scanned where we're way off the mark, way, way off the mark. And so it suggests nationally that there is a problem on average. And 76% is probably 14% below the mark. And that means we're weaning at least maybe 10 to 15% fewer lambs.

SPEAKER_00 38:42

Are there steps we should take or producers should take to address this?

SPEAKER_01 38:47

Well, wouldn't it be really nice if we had a national pregnancy scanning data set where technology was available for scanners? Once they've done the job, they can press a button, it goes automatically into a database. That technology exists. It's the will, but the value proposition's also problematic. It's probably not in the scanner's interest. I mean, Sapien tried to set up a database and it didn't really get up and run very strongly. And that's because the value proposition is not there. Why is it in a farmer's interest to share their data? Why is it in a scanner's interest to share data? It's a national interest, so it's an industry-level interest and government level interest. If, say, think of a map of Australia and the scanning data starts to come in and there's a red area in somewhere in Australia where a lot of flocks are being scanned with low pregnancy rates, you could direct RD and extension and adoption or disease investigation into those regions. You could go and say, we know there is a problem here, it's different from normal. Let's understand this. That might then allow everybody to uh have a better control over the outcomes of their breeding according to a range of other circumstances which haven't been placed together in the context of everybody else. So that'd be nice. What should everybody else do? Well, I mean, I I think I I think, and I talk a little bit about confirmational bias. So if my merino flock or my sheep flock uh isn't performing very well, it's not contributing greatly to business productivity. But I want to keep the sheep because I like the wool, or uh, someone in my family likes the sheep, or I use them to eat weeds in my operation to build integrated pest management, or it's just diverse income, it's a little bit of cash flow, whatever it is, right? But it doesn't perform very well, so I'm not going to invest any time or any money into these animals because they don't return. And so that self-fulfills your prophecy because they won't perform when you don't manage them as well as they could be managed, or feed them as well as they could be fed. And so the cycle continues. Break away from that and start lifting the performance of your animals, they'll reward you. Modern merinos, modern sheep are outstanding animals, they're really productive. So there's ways forward in better management of animals. And I'd start with assessing body condition and live weight pre-mating and putting in an intervention within a couple of weeks at least of pre-mating. But I'd also start with keep an eye on your rams.

SPEAKER_00 41:07

Where can producers find your research paper? And can they use that to rebuild and sustain a strong productive breeding you?

SPEAKER_01 41:18

Two questions inside of there. The paper's easy to find. Well, if you know how to spell refsogi, R-E-F S H A-U-G-E, Danish, uh refshorgi, and it's in scientific reports. And you just put that into Google and the paper will come up. It's an open access, it's free to download, it's there to read. If you're keen at looking at typos, you will find three in the paper. It's two superfluous commas and one typo in one of the graphs, which is to my great chagrin. It's a wonderful paper, and there it is eternally with those errors. But uh it's easy to find Google, Refshorgi, and Scientific Reports, and the paper will come up. Will that paper help change your world? No, it might make you think a little bit more about where you sit in relation to everybody else, and there might be some comfort in that for you. But uh if you want to stay making really, really serious changes to the productivity and performance of your flocks, then there are programs you can join as best. There's um Redwell, Fed Well, there's Lifetime View Management Packages. The lifetime view management packages are outstanding, really good, and they've been modified slightly to suit maternal breeds, also. So there's great information available on how to put your sheep package together. And if you were to really start thinking about it, I would write down on a piece of paper what your breeding objective is. What's the type of sheep that you're trying to breed for your location? Are you classing your animals according to that breeding objective? Are you buying rams according to that breeding objective? If you're buying rams, do they have breeding values? If they do have breeding values and you've kept a record of all the rams that you've bought over time, uh then you can put that information into a package called RAM Select, which gives you a sense for where your genetics is going to sit nationally and show you where your genetic trends are. And that's such revealing information. But it means record keeping, it means taking the time to put these packages together and working on the animals. But if you've got to know your breeding objective, start there. Where are the key weaknesses in the operation from scanning? So scan your animals, see how many are pregnant. I would definitely be wetting and drying the ewes at marking. Definitely, absolutely do that. That is really gold. That is gold information. Structural problems, utter structural problems, use it, get pregnant, fail to rear, real handbrakes on your reproduction rates. They lead to welfare problems with higher land mortality. Get rid of those animals. EIDs are becoming mandatory, so you can use the EID to help make those sorts of decisions by just keeping track of those performance outcomes. Classing out the ewes that fail either once or twice. If your reproduction rates are really low, then you need to take more time. To clean up your flock. So you need to give an animal another chance to prove itself as being unfit for reproduction unless they have mastitis or bottle teats or shorn teats that have been clipped off. If your reproduction rates are really high and you're weaning, say 120 plus, then anything that fails the first time you can get rid of because they're not a big number of animals. Looking at historical data sets out of the DPI, New South Wales AG, showed that if you were to cull your hockets for the first time fail, you might cull 25% of them. Not pregnant, pregnant failed to rear. If you wait another year, give all those animals another chance, there might only be 6% of those animals or 12% of those animals that fail to rear a second time, which means you can get rid of them. That increases the accurate selection, which increases your radiogenetic gain for improving reproduction outcomes. But it also means instead of getting rid of 25, you're getting rid of 12. So there's another 13 animals, so you can get rid of for other traits that line up your breeding objective. So the whole farm moves together on all the traits that are important to your business. They the first things to start thinking about.

SPEAKER_00 45:08

Before we do wrap up, Gordon, is there any key takeaways you'd like producers to remember about improving flock fertility? That we haven't touched base. Yeah, put the RAMs in.

SPEAKER_01 45:18

Don't forget to put the Rams in. But if but if you're putting the Rams in, they've got to be fur time. So they've got to be three to three and a half score. And their testes have to be large and firm and not misshapen. When I was at uni, Michael Friend said it should be like a beer can that hasn't been opened. Right? So it's a fleeting moment in time. I've got a beer can that hasn't been opened, it feels firm. Push against it, pushes back. Firm's about that sort of standard size. That's what our testes want to be like. It doesn't want to feel like a can of beer that's been drunk softer. Push into it. Doesn't want to be like a beer bottle, just hard. Put your hands on the testis. Make sure the rams are ready to roll. Do that two months before joining. And put your hands on the ewes about at least a month before joining so you get a sense for whether they're lean. If you can feel on the condition score side, if you can feel bones really easily, you're way off the mark. Way off the mark. And don't overnourish the animals. If they get too fat, pre-production rates come down. So there's a little guide there. But nutrition's the key. And the best indicator for the nutritional state of an animal is body condition score in adults and live weight in younger animals. Use those metrics and set your targets and have a crack.

SPEAKER_00 46:27

Lastly, one question we do ask all guests on the podcast is what lesson do you wish you didn't learn the hard way?

SPEAKER_01 46:34

Oh dear. That's not fair because you only l really learn through experience. The deepest learning is through your experience. If you're not making mistakes, you're probably not really learning, right? So you can you think you know it, but do you really know it? So what did I learn the hard way? I'll jump out of this species and into another species and I'll reflect on my my farm at home. Uh my wife and I run a beef herd that's not terribly large. I run beef because we don't have the time to run sheep. Ultimately, it's no shearing sheed, no sheep yards. So we run cows. I've been running cows since the mid-90s, and uh performance record my animals because I like data and I make selection gains, and you know, I see that the growth rate per age unit of the calves uh has is improving all the time every year, so they're becoming faster in their growth rates to weaning relative to their age, adjusted for sex and age of the cow. But none of our neighbours had cattle, so I was not vaccinating for pesky virus, and I didn't have pesky virus in my herd. But then one year we had a bit of feed, and I mistakenly traded in some heifers from elsewhere and introduced pesky virus to my herd, where we had pregnancy rates of 90-95% for nearly 20 years, and they fell in an absolute heap, absolute heap. So I slipped on my biosecurity. So there's there's my lesson. Keep your fences, boundary fences tight. Don't stop thinking about biosecurity.

SPEAKER_00 48:04

Oh, great. Thank you for your time today, Gordon. I've really enjoyed our conversation. It's great insights into your research paper.

SPEAKER_01 48:11

Thanks very much, Ellie, and thanks to Agrita and MLA for the opportunity to share my wares and my thoughts.

SPEAKER_00 48:19

Wow, what a great way to wrap up the series with such valuable insights on fertility and fecundity in the Australian sheep flock. A huge thank you to Gordon for sharing his knowledge today. For more information, head to our show notes where you'll find a link to the webinar we record it as well as some resources mentioned in this episode. If you have enjoyed this series, please share it with a neighbour or a friend. We'd love to hear your feedback, and there will be a link to a short survey in the show notes. We would appreciate if you could fill that out. All participants will go into the drawer to win one of our online tools of your choice developed by Agrista.