Gippsland's lamb feedlot pioneer

You get the feeling that if you left John Bates on a desert island with a packet of seeds and came back 12 months later you would find a lush vegetable garden and a thriving bartering business between Mr Bates and the locals.As the man behind Gippsland’s first lamb feedlot, Mr Bates is not someone who is afraid to take a risk or push into new territory. He runs 870-hectare Wellington Hill at Stratford with his wife Helen and their children Ben and Michelle and their fiancés Jamie Dornings and Stacey Burton.In the past five years, the business has transformed from a self-replacing Merino flock and home to Hazeldean stud to prime lamb production.It now supports a 10,000 head a year lamb trading operation and feedlot that at full capacity has 4000 head of lambs going through it that dress out at 22 kilograms.Mr Bates currently joins a few thousand first-cross Border Leicester ewes and a couple of thousand Merino ewes to Poll Dorset and White Suffolk rams from Ian Kyle’s Ashly Park stud at Bairnsdale.He is also trialling 500 SAMM ewes from the Callum stud in WA as an alternative to a Merino self-replacing ewe flock.He is not into counting the heads on his sandy loam property, believing what you do with them is more important. He said Wellington Hill was currently operating at two-thirds production, with further improvement to pasture, genetics and his fattening and nutrition strategy necessary.The trading operationTo complement his breeding flock, Mr Bates drives countless kilometres to store sales from December to May, buying up to 10,000 sucker lambs per year that he feedlots for 40-50 days and sells over the hooks. And travel, is not just down the road – Western Australian stock agents are becoming very used to the quietly spoken Gippslander. During one trip to WA in 2003 the astute farmer took advantage, of what he said was simply “an affordable opportunity” and bought 3000 two-tooth Merino ewes from Wickepin, near Narrogin.The big framed 21 micron ewes adapted well to the mild Gippsland climate, and aside from cutting an average 6-7 kilograms of wool each year, have formed the foundation ewe flock for Mr Bates’s prime lamb operation.It is this sort of thinking that underlines Mr Bates’s operation and has won him a great deal of respect in the industry.“If we lived in an area where the markets were favorable for Merinos, such as the Riverina, then we would be running them, but we’re not so we look at what we do have and use that,” Mr Bates said.“For 22 years I shore sheep and Helen worked various off-farm jobs to keep things afloat on the property but we just burnt out and had to change,” he said.The feedlotMr Bates said their perseverance and willingness to learn had been key to the success of their Wellington Hill feedlot.While three years experience running a beef feedlot had given them a headstart, Mr Bates said he had had to learn a lot about nutrition and feed requirements to consistently finish lambs that dress out at 22kg.It has involved five years of finetuning their feed strategy and feedlot design, helped by advice from consultants and visits to feedlots in Canada. “Getting the feedlot ration right and knowing how to correctly finish the lambs has taken a lot of work,” Mr Bates said. “What we have now is pretty much where we want to be, but I know the more experience I get the better it will be. “The introduction of the lambs is the most difficult but we found having a feeder that you could open and close to modify the access to grain stopped lambs gorging themselves and encouraged them to eat more hay.” Today the feedlot is based around 10 pens, set up with two tonne feeders, with water reticulating from trough to trough and each lamb has about 40-50 square metres.With the first of his SAMM ewes ready to lamb, Mr Bates is hopeful that the meaty-framed ewe will eventually replace Merinos and form a self-replacing flock.“It has been a very reluctant change out of Merinos, but we are chasing the market and just want to be debt free in 10 years,” he said.Pushing to the market forefrontIN the past 10 years the numbers of prime lamb producers in Australia has increased by almost 4000 to 24,083. Across the country staunch Merino, crop and beef producers have jumped on the lamb bandwagon, all looking to win a slice of the lucrative and seemingly inexhaustible market. But while the strong lamb market was a saving grace for producers when the wool market crashed and crops failed in the dry, some producers, including East Gippsland prime lamb producer and trader John Bates (pictured), worry that a mounting oversupply situation could saturate the industry. Having run a self-replacing Merino flock and Hazeldean stud for 22 years before switching to prime lamb production and trading, Mr Bates is new enough into the business to recognise areas that need to be improved, and experienced enough to know markets don’t just come to you. Mr Bates currently sells most of his lambs over the hooks and a handful through the store sales. “I would prefer to support the local market, but it seems more and more people are breeding lambs and at times we struggle to get the demand,” Mr Bates said.Lambs traded from the family’s Wellington Hill operation at Stratford consistently achieve above average yield and when the local butchers can beat meat processors’ prices and buy Wellington Hill lambs, they get regular feedback from customers about how flavoursome the lamb is.