Brothers Tim and John Buxton, Maristow, Stratford, had been recording fleece data of their self-replacing Merino flock for years, doing it all manually.
But it 2012, they bit the bullet and invested in electronic tags and equipment to work with them (a stick reader, a barcode printer and scanner and a computer).
The electronic system has saved them a lot of time and frustration, and given them more accurate data from which they can make decisions including which ewes to keep to sell off.
Tim said the manual system was “fairly time consuming” and at times, it was tricky to read a sheep’s ear tag number to couple that with the data they wanted.
The used to have to write down the ear tag numbers three times – first to go with the fleece sample, second with the fleece weight, and third with the body weight. They then spent days entering that data into the computer.
“Today, the stick reader goes beep and there they go,” John said.
In their set up, the wand is connected to a barcode printer and then that barcode is scanned and data recorded against it.
The brothers use a program that ranks the sheep, in terms of production, in firsts, seconds, thirds and culls, and Tim said they could set how many sheep they wanted in each group.
“It finds the sheep at top end and those at the bottom end that you can’t pick by eye that you want to get rid off,” Tim said.
The eIDs also help them select the small number of ewes from which we breed rams for our own use.
Being early adopters also allowed the Buxton’s to take part in a Department of Primary Industries (now Agriculture Victoria) project that saw them supply a lot of tags, and the brothers wanted to introduce the tags on their own terms, and not have to re-tag a large number of their 4000-head flock if the government mandated it.
They’ve also found the electronic system useful at pregnancy scanning to record whether the ewes are dry are carrying singles or twins; and at lamb marking time, whether the ewes had reared a lamb is recorded.
“At joining time we ran sheep around, and because all of their information is on the computer when it came up ‘failed to rear’ twice, what happened to her? She’s on the truck.”
“Hopefully in time, it will drive our lambing percentage.”
They have a sheep handler that makes drafting the sheep much easier too.
“On this farm, we have precision ag in the tractors and it saves time and chemicals and makes a lot easier, why shouldn’t we have that in sheep because they’re the ones that earn the money?” Tim said.