NSW sheep breeder Matthew Coddington says the Merino of the future needs to be a fertile, disease resilient, heavy fleece cutting animal with high early growth rates and carcase quality.
One of the keynote speakers at the World Merino Insight, held in Adelaide last week, Mr Coddington believes Merino breeders can have it all by taking a balanced scientific approach to breeding.
“When you are pushing fleece weight, body weight and reproduction, these traits are antagonistic with each other so it is hard to keep them all coming up slowly,” he said.
“Everyone in the future has the ability to breed sheep to keep maximum profit in their flock but the need to bring the traits up in a balanced way rather than with a single focus. That way they can get the most out of both the wool and meat markets.”
Mr Coddington says breeding healthier sheep is also an important part of his vision with more variable season on the way.
“With climate change we have gone from having major worm burdens in the environment that I farm in from November to April to September to June. Barber’s pole worm has gone from being an issue in our sort of country largely in the summer months to being a problem for nine months of the year,” he said.
“By identifying sheep with better worm resistance figures, we are reducing our costs of labour and reliance on chemicals, which will be even more important in the future.”
Mr Coddington – a fifth generation breeder – bought the Dubbo, NSW, based stud from his parents in 2005, with wife Cherie.
The couple and their five children have not looked back, embracing modern tools such as artificial breeding technologies, benchmarking their stock against other studs in sire validation programs and using Australian Sheep Breeding Values.
Roseville Park genetics are sold across Australia and have been used in New Zealand, Uruguay, Argentina, the Unites States, China, Russia, South Africa and the Falkland Islands.
They sell about 650 rams a year and 3000 doses of semen.
A large proportion of the rams sold are AI bred, with Roseville Park undertaking one of the largest annual laparoscopic AI stud programs in Australia annually since 1982.
In an intensive week, between 2500 and 3000 ewes are mated to ten of the stud’s highest performing rams identified through visual assessment and ASBVs.
This gives a narrow lambing window for accurate data collection in the lambs and rapidly increases genetic gain.
“The ewes are tagged into types for high fl eece weight or high growth rates before joining, and then it is about folding in the edges to get the right combination by mating the high fleece weight ewe with a high growth rate ram and vice versa,” he said.
Roseville Park has used its 15 highest performing ewes as donors in an ET program annually since 1989. This producers 100 to 150 lambs each year.
About 30, seven-month-old ET-bred ram lambs are used each year to back up the AI mobs.
The stud has been a member of Sheep Genetics since its inception in 1999 as part of the Merino Validation Project and records data on a wide range of traits from fleece weight and micron to staple strength, eye muscle and fat depth. Its stud ewes average 18 micron and 7.5 kilograms wool cut.
This year in an exceptional season, the ewes averaged 8.86kg when shorn in March.
He says genomics will offer another leap forward for identifying hard-to-measure traits such as eating quality traits and identifying sheep with the polled gene.
Roseville Park was one of the initial Merino studs which entered sires into the Sheep CRC’s Information Nucleus flock to identify gene markers for a wide range of traits.
Rams entered into Australian Merino Sire Evaluation Association projects also have genomic information collected.
For the past six years, all of the stud’s main sires have had a genomic test carried out before joining.
But he says these figures have not replaced the need for time in the sheep yards assessing structure and phenotype of each sheep in the flock.
“Just as my sheep have to be balanced for traits, my selection process is very balanced as well. Showing sheep is also a very important component of this.”
Self-replacing flock figures stack up
THE Merino stacks up financially ahead of other breeds with its dual wool and meat income, according to Roseville Park stud principal Matthew Coddington.
This year instead of mating 1000 of his older ewes to terminal sires, they will also become part of the self-replacing Merino flock.
Last year its Merino wether lambs netted $12.50 a head more than his crossbred lambs even though they were sold at lighter carcase weights, due to the higher fleece values.
“By mating these ewes to our high growth, high muscle Poll Merino rams, our economic benchmarked analysis on the farm puts the pure Merino enterprise in front,” he said.
“This is without factoring in that other enterprises are buying in replacement ewes and the higher DSE requirements because of the amount of feed that the other breeds eat as well. It also simplifies the job for an easy streamlined business, making running sheep easier than it used to.”
