Technology is providing opportunities to improve farming systems and gather vast amounts of data. How to gather, what to gather and, more importantly, how to use the data was at the forefront of an EID (electronic identification) presentation to sheep producers at a Cobramunga property on Wednesday, April 27.
The day was hosted by Western Murray Land Improvement Group with funding from BestWool/BestLamb and the Wakool Agri Innovation Program (Murray-Darling Basin Authority).
Nathan Scott from Achieve Ag Solutions gave attendees an entertaining, engaging and knowledge filled day. Nathan is the leading Australian provider of advice in the practical use of electronic identification within stud and commercial sheep and cattle enterprises. Nathan also has a background in prime lamb production, and a passion for improving the productivity and profitability of livestock enterprises.
EID tags can play an important role, not only in on-farm management systems, but also in bio security for the nation’s flock. While Victoria requires the use of EID tags in sheep, the other states and territories still rely on paper records.
The risk to Australia’s sheep industry from diseases, such as foot and mouth, would have devastating impacts to producers, the animals and the industry. Nathan gave an example of the 2001 United Kingdom outbreak of foot and mouth. The outbreak was started through a farmer feeding infected meat to pigs. The pigs then produce a plume of the highly contagious viral disease which travels to nearby stock. In the UK case, 16 nearby sheep were then infected and despite appearing sick, were traded on through the saleyards. The resulting outbreak caused a national stoppage of all stock movement, the loss of 4.2 million sheep slaughtered through control measures and an additional 2.3 million sheep slaughtered due to welfare reasons. In total 10,000 vets, soldiers and ground staff were involved in the program. If Australia had an outbreak, would paper records be a fast enough identification tool?
The second benefit to EID is the on-farm ability to capture data to streamline your management and meet your breeding objectives. Nathan said it is vital that first, you know what you are trying to achieve. Is it wool cut, a certain wool micron, breeding percentages or weight gain, or a combination of all of them? Through the collection of data, producers can move past averages, which often give us a false reading of what really is going on and don’t provide enough information for selection pressure to improve from your current position. As the saying goes, if we used averages on humans, we’d all have one breast! The same goes for your sheep flock, if you are cutting an average of 5kg of fleece, some will be cutting heavier and others lighter.
When the time comes that you need to sell surplus to requirements ewes, how do you know which ewes were the 3kg fleece producer or the 7kg producer? Or which has a history of single lambs and which has twins? Through your data! If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
Nathan provided some real-world examples through flocks he has worked with. One example was the rate of weight gain. With an industry target of 300g per day, real-world flocks have seen a growth rate spread of 150-580g per day. Which would you want to retain in your breeders?
For merino, there are some key data that Nathan suggested may be beneficial to producers. Birth status-male or female, fleece weight and micron at 18 months shearing (before first lambing), 18 months weight, pregnancy status-dry-singles-twins-triplets.
When collecting data, it is critical that you are comparing apples with apples. It is no use to compare a mob that has been scratching around in the lignum to those you have been running on your irrigated clover. Even year-to-year comparison is not advisable. It is a tool to compare an animal to its peers at a point in time under the same management and conditions.
To enable all this data collection, Nathan walked attendees through the range of tags, readers and tools available. It is fundamental to know what you are trying to achieve before buying the technology. There is a huge range of options that can gladly depart you from your cash, but does it solve your problem?
A big thanks to the Western Murray Land Improvement team for another beneficial day, and to Simon Ettershank for the use of his stock and equipment.