The Future of Winter Lamb Finishing

There is a lot of variation in fine wool genetics. Possibly more than any other breed. I find it does really help to understand the fine wool spectrum of genetic nuances. With cross-bred sheep there is chat that we haven’t got many stories of genetic selection for health traits making a big difference. I think this is not the case for merinos. There are significant gains being seen with genetics for lower FEC and dag for example. We still have some way to go as there are a lot of merino ewes that consistently have high parasite burdens and egg counts – but that can change. I recently came back from the Bendigo sheep show and saw this vast array of merino genetics. There are studs that have launched into the space of chasing health traits and are now vastly different for the big heavy cutters that live in show sheds all their lives. It just takes time for commercial lights to go on in this space and for farmers to start buying enough rams with FEC and dag measurements in the right direction.

The reality is a lot of the fine wool farms are actually lamb finishing units – or essentially “slow lamb” fattening with the wool paying for the wintering. The trend is to mix this up with more terminal “fast lamb” and cattle finishing, or just sell store. There are more growthy fine wool types that can shear and kill lambs before winter, I think this has a lot of scope to move.

Selling store lambs is a simple solution for reducing reliance on drench for breeding units, but the finishing blocks they go into need a plan too. Most trading/finishing units want to avoid complexity of having adult sheep in the system. Longer grazing rotations with lambs and then cattle certainly help, but if there is no refugia from undrenched ewes/wethers these systems can tip up novel drenches pretty rapidly too.

The variation between intensive pivot systems, forage crops, extensive native block wintering or “ they just run around the paddocks for the winter” means the parasite control solutions for wintering hoggets cannot be generalised too much into “you do this for fine wool hoggets”. Getting them past prime weight makes a big difference to their ability to handle parasite challenges.

The most learnings I have had recently are from farms with opti-weigh set ups for the hoggets and linking this in with pre and post drench FECs. It is quite remarkable the response to drenching and alarming to see them slowly going backwards at -10 to -50g/day if you don’t keep the drench up to them over the winter.

I think I said years ago – with regards to drench resistance - that I was wondering if we were just re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic or whether we actually were making a positive sustainable difference… its probably both. International shipping standards and technology has come a long way since April 15, 1912, and that was just one failed ship, many others carried on without movies being made about them.