Dunluce prime lamb producer Alan Weir has been experimenting with the right mix of cross breeds for the past five years.
Initially a wool grower, breeding his own Merinos, he switched to meat sheep, eventually producing the farms own brand of Dunluce Lamb.
“I am experimenting, I have gone everywhere and thrown a lot of things in,” Mr Weir said. “It’s quite an assortment because I don’t believe there is a superior lamb.”
He started out with composites from Cashmore Park and Oaklea, before adding maternal ewes, from a mix of Dorset, Coopworth, East Friesian and Merino bloodlines. “The White Suffolk is getting too big now, so I am using the Dorper-Dorset cross terminal rams – I quite like that mix and hybrid vigour is something for nothing,” Mr Weir said. Maternal ewes were selected on the basis of fertility and milking ability. To add to the mix, he said he was also using Hayelle stud, Serviceton, White Dorper and White Suffolk terminal sires.
The farm was set up for two lambing drops, in mid-March and the remainder in June-July, to ensure a year round supply. The butcher took lambs at 20-22kg, the Dunluce product went out at 22-26kg and animals for the farmers markets were slaughtered around 25-26kg.
Mr Weir said he made the switch from wool to prime lamb, after being burned on a contract when the market was “very good. I contracted some lambs then the market collapsed and the abattoir came around and said me lambs weren’t good enough,” Mr Weir said. “That made me really wild, so I thought, if they are going to treat me like that, they can get stuffed, to be quite honest.”
“I sensed the world wants to know where their food is coming form, and I am trying to show people how good lamb can be.”
He said while he couldn’t compete with the supermarkets, when they offered specials, it still offered a worthwhile return, while offering customers a good product.
While Mr Weir said his two sons, Ben and Evan, were keen to push the 1620 hectare farm into more cropping, he would continue to produce Duncluce Lamb.
He said he would have to regenerate much of the pasture, lost during the recent drought. “I spent a fortune, sowing them all down, but it’s just been too dry.
“This is as good as it gets, it’s perfect – we have been bruised, the last few years, and we hope its just going to keep raining.
The granite country was sown to cocksfoot, clover and fescue, with cropping of oats, barley and wheat, with lupins as sheep feed. “The boys are going to keep cropping, but the granite hills and that are my sheep country, they can’t plough that in,” he said.
