PERFORMANCE data is helping producers in the sheep industry make valuable management decisions and boost profits by up to 60 per cent.
The large-scale Peter Westblade Memorial Merino Challenge has collected data from Australian genetics since 2004.
“We can show that the net profit differences – between the top performing flocks and the bottom ones – is in the order of 60 per cent … that is just massive,” said trial organiser Craig Wilson of Wagga.
“This can equate to $150/ha in net profit due to the influence of genetics,” he said. “It is powerful data when you consider we can directly compare more than 300 business,” he said.
Mr Wilson said the top Merino enterprises returned profits which would be on parity with many other top agricultural enterprises, whether it be cropping or cattle.
The next intake of wethers starts in April this year and the teams of 30 – drawn from as far away as Tasmania and Western Australia – will be run on a Wagga property. “We are looking for some new entrants and some more diversity in genetics this year,” Mr Wilson said. It is estimated that some 60 teams of 30 wethers will be included in the upcoming trial.
Mr Wilson said each team of 30 wethers would be split into two groups of 15.
One group will be scrutinised for meat value and the other for wool returns. He said the previous challenge had shown the range in net profit from feeding Merino lambs for meat and or to grow wool could be doubled by using top genetics.
“The challenge has proven beyond doubt what a Merino sheep can achieve, combining excellent growth and carcase traits with high wool cuts which have low fibre diametre,” he said.
“Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the performance of genetics is a vital tool to gauge profitability.” In the past 12 years – through benchmarking – the challenge has run and evaluated more than 4500 wethers. The teams were run on Riverina and southern NSW properties.
Mr Wilson said the bank of data will allow new entrants in the trial to benchmark flocks against up to 300 teams which participated in previous trials.
He also confirmed that some of the flocks had participated in the initial trials and used information to “draw a line in the sand” and see where they were at.
Mr Wilson said there had been a chance to make some genetic improvements and enter the trial again to evaluate the overall outcome in terms of profits.
“It is almost impossible to accurately know this genetic capacity without the (large scale) benchmarking,” Mr Wilson said.
