BRUAN Poll Dorsets stud principal David Gordon said using ASBVs, coupled with new industry technologies to help decipher these figures, are of top priority to further develop the Condah stud.
Mr Gordon, who runs the 850-hectare property with wife Colleen, said LambPlan has been of great benefit to the operation. “LambPlan is important because it gives you a benchmark, you know what you’re working with, and to me it’s proven itself,” Mr Gordon said.
He said it’s helped improve post-weaning weights, which is their “biggest profit driver”.
“Our philosophy is growth and muscle, you need to make sure you put muscle and fat into the animal so you have shape, and lean meat yield,” he said.
“We’re doing a lot of DNA testing, looking at meat eating qualities, so going forward we can keep the product as good as we can without making wrong decisions that could affect the eating quality of the lamb.”
Despite breeding high performance rams for over three decades, he said breeding stud and flock rams wasn’t something he’d originally planned on doing.
“I think originally, the reason behind starting the stud was to breed rams for my father’s prime lamb enterprise that he was running with his brother,” he said.
“By doing that, we thought we weren’t doing it justice, so we thought we’d either do it properly, or not at all, so we decided to do it properly.”
The Gordons also run about 5000 first-cross ewes, which they join to their own Poll Dorset rams, for the prime lamb market.
Mr Gordon said using their own rams over the commercial flock means they get to see the progeny of their rams first-hand. “I sell quite a lot over the hooks, because I like to know what the progeny of my young rams are performing, and if they’re improving,” he said. “If our breeding values say that they’re improving, we’d like to benchmark and confirm that they are.”
He said last year’s on-property ram sale was their most successful to date.
“I think part of the reason it was so successful was because lamb producers are looking at our ASBVs, with good accuracies and matching phenotype, and are seeing good results,” he said.
“We have a number of valued return clients who’ve been purchasing rams from us for many years, which puts a good base in the sale for us.” He said clients come from within a one hour radius of their property.
“We are very commercially driven, and we’re aiming to produce the best possible genetic values for our ram clients, suitable to their operations in south-west Victoria, which is where the majority of our clients are from,” he said. “Their gains are our gains, so we want to make sure we’re continuing to grow and improve.”
He said despite this success, he’s often struggled to promote the stud. “I find it really difficult to actually sell myself, that’s the hardest part,” he said. “That’s why Sheep Week is good, prime lamb producers can come and view what we have to offer first hand, and discuss breeding programs without any pressure.”