Consultant Jason Trompf said he was hoping to use the upcoming Loddon Valley Stud Merino Field Days. Serpentine, to significantly lift the number of producers using written breeding objectives.
Mr Trompf, JT Agrisource, said he wanted to encourage farmers to look at both genetics and visual observations, in writing the objectives.
“At our Bred Well Fed Well workshops we find less than 20 per cent of commercial farmers have clear, written breeding objectives, which is something you need when you are trying to get the more complete animal,” Mr Trompf said.
“One of the things I will cover is some of the different aspects to need to look at, to inform that objective.”
He said producers could sometimes concentrate on the wrong thing. “Everything is more, all the time; they say ‘I want more wool, more growth’,” he said.
But he said producers should also look at a fitness audit of their flock, to see how their animals were functioning in the production environment.
“You can also use genetics to almost build an animal that is suitable for that production environment, you can use genetics to lower the cost of production, rather than having a focus on more, more more.
“We need to define what we are trying to achieve and use all those things to get there.” He said that included lamb, weaner and ewe survival, or mortality rates.
Dr Trompf said producers also needed to appraise income from wool, against what they were earning from meat. “Farmers say ‘I am wool producer, yet 50 per cent of my income comes from things, other than wool’.”
He said new tools were being developed all the time, including the recently introduced DNA Flock Profiler Test, currently being trialled by the Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) for Sheep.To validate the concept animals were DNA tested and the results aligned with production values, measured on the ground.
Flock profiling was a “more quantative way of getting a barometer of where you sit,” Mr Trompf said. The workshop will be on Friday, March 3.