Keeyuga Pastoral Company has been sourcing Merino rams from a north-east Victorian stud for some 20 years.
Manager Hugh Thomson said they ran more than 7000 Merino breeding ewes and 850 first-cross ewes and a small number of cattle on more than 3238 hecatres of owned and share-farmed land at Glenaroua and Ruffy.
He said for their self-replacing Merino flock, they have used Wirrate bloodlines for decades because they balanced fleece quality and weight with meat yield, as well as good fertility and do-ability. The genetics have proven to work well in the environments of both Glenaroua and Ruffy.
Mr Thomson said these were all important attributes that affected productivity and, importantly, profitability. For example, the team pregnancy scanned one mob of Merino ewes at Ruffy this year at 168 per cent, and they cut 5.5 kilograms of wool per head.
Mr Thomson said fleece of 10-12pc of body weight allowed for a well balanced sheep in their system.
The importance of investing in genetics has been reinforced through the company’s involvement in the Livestock Farm Monitor Project, in which Agriculture Victoria and Rural Finance analyse the financial performance of participating livestock farms.
“We’ve been doing the project for some 10 years and through the industry bench-marking and for our own operation, the importance of growing as much grass and getting the best utilisation is one of the key learnings for our business,” he said. As such, the operation has concentrated on improving pastures and continuing to invest in genetics.
To clean up their pastures, the team, which includes four full-time members, has been doing more cropping to clean up native pastures and get them back to Phalaris.
Mr Thomson said last year, growing canola at their Ruffy farm worked very well and enabled them to buy in 850 first-cross ewe lambs and join them on the canola, that had good lamb scanning rates of 83% foestues.
In the Merino flocks, rams are generally put out at a rate of 1.5 per cent for four weeks from February 1 at Glenaroua and in the second week of February at Ruffy.
Mr Thomson said because of the drought conditions last year, the team decided to put the best rams out at a lower rate (0.75pc) for the first cycle, to give best chance of getting the maximum number of lambs by the top rams; after that the other rams were introduced to bring it back to its normal rate.
Seasonal conditions also affect when young store are sold off, mostly through Bendigo store sales. Mr Thomson said they would like to finish off more stock, but they had to balance it with feed production and grain prices.
For the past few years, Keeyuga Pastoral has received a premium for some fleece marketed through Australian Wool Network’s (AWN) DNA wool supply program. Through this program, AWN can describe the origin of wool in different products. According to AWN, this “bale to retail” program gives them control of some costs and enables them to potentially offer a better price for specific wool types.
“We’re getting a premium for the certain clips that match the specifications. Decisions are made that are best for the stock and the farm, and then (it’s a bonus) if wool can qualify for that program,” he said.