WATER and associated irrigation is the new gold in Australia, turning marginal land and farms into lucrative agribusinesses.
This is true for the McNaughton family, who added irrigated land at Stratford to their seven-generation wool growing enterprise, which has been based for the last three generations at Seaspray, in Gippsland.
Water has seen the business develop multiple income streams in fine and cross-bred wool, trade lambs and selling excess stock.
But the focus of the agribusiness is still on wool.
"Wool is more than 50 per cent of our income," said Andrew McNaughton.
"But we'd be broke if we relied on wool.
"Unfortunately there's no distinction at the moment between fine and cross-bred wool. But it will come back."
In 1996, father and son, Gregor and Andrew McNaughton, won Victorian Flock of the Year and have been awarded Gippsland Flock of the Year three times.
The fine-wool-growing passion is built on a closed Merino flock using Woodpark genetics from the Huggins family – and success seemed assured into the future.
But challenges of long-term drought and Ovine Johnes disease caused them to rethink their business.
Four years ago, Andrew and Andrea bought a 162 hectare dairy farm at Stratford and, with secured water, they now grow all the feed required for both properties and utilise the irrigated country to grow out crossbred lambs and trade sheep.
"I think water's going to be the future. To try and stay viable, our thought was to secure water," Andrew said.
"We purchased the Stratford property to diversify and try and save the viability of the farm; and keep a cash flow happening."
Innovation is not new to the McNaughton men.
Participation in the Flock of the Year contest resulted in considerable benefits to their farm business.
"We implemented a number of changes because of what we saw on other farms and from participating and benchmarking our farm against others," Andrew said.
"We changed to polled sheep, moved to earlier shearing and turned stock over faster – for instance, we began turning wethers off as weaners.
"All along we focussed on strategies to keep our wool cut up.
"Back then the sheep industry was a bit different. Changes we've made since then include focussing on more meat sheep and use of terminal sires, like many wool producers," he added.
The McNaughton Pastoral Company, based on the 1619ha Seaspray farm, runs 7500 Merino ewes: 3200 are joined to Merino rams, 2300 to terminal sires and about 2000 first-cross lambs are joined to terminal sires.
Fertility is high – 95-105pc out of the Merinos, 150pc from the first-cross ewes.
They shear 18-20,000 sheep each year – the ewe and hogget portion of the flock is shorn at full wool, wethers three times in 18 months before they are sold and cross-bred lambs are shorn at 12-16 weeks before they are traded.
"The Merino ewe drives our whole setup and is the spine of our operation," Mr McNaughton said.
"Because there's currently a premium paid for short wool, 55-60 millimetres, we shear the wethers and lambs to take advantage of that – cutting 4.5 kilogram fleeces off the wethers, 1.5-2kg off the lambs and the ewes cut 7kg fleeces.
"We're trying to get the maximum fleece off a ewe, which is why we keep their condition score up year-round, lamb them down in April-May and they're weaned by 11 weeks-old."
A fully-classed flock, the lambs that are meant for sale are moved to Stratford, where they can grow out to trade weights.
"We wean early to spare the Seaspray country, maintain the ewe's condition and so she can produce wool through spring and summer – we're trying to get the maximum fleece off a ewe by February when we shear them," Mr McNaughton said.
They grow cereal crops and lucerne for fodder and cut 1200 rolls of silage and hay.
He credits the Huggins family for their vision and commitment to producing the type of sheep they need, including diversifying into poll Merinos at a time when McNaughton Pastoral was also looking to change.
"One of the things we're very lucky is, they've very fertile genetics behind them, so we can have light sheep and maintain fertility and lamb down easy," Mr McNaughton said.
Having said that, ewe condition score is maintained at 3.5-4 all year round, both through having sufficient supplementary feed grown on property and by weaning the lambs early.
Rams, at a rate of 1:70, have up to seven weeks to do their job and there are two lamb-downs per year – one for the Merino ewes and twice for the first-cross mothers.
Mr McNaughton believes there is potential, because of the irrigated country, to build the flock size across both properties to 25,000.
The McNaughton family featured in Stock & Land's special feature '10 of Our Best' in this week's paper.
