Glenlee farm: No-holds-barred approach to get best return from sheep

FORMER army lieutenant colonel and foreign aid worker Craig Hinchliffe has had his fair share of rewarding jobs over the years.

Paying attention: Former army lieutenant colonel Craig Hinchliffe on his farm near Ararat.

FORMER army lieutenant colonel and foreign aid worker Craig Hinchliffe has had his fair share of rewarding jobs over the years.

But the 52-year-old’s latest deployment — that of farmer — is one he holds particularly close.

Since returning home full time at the end of 2015 to his family’s 750-hectare Glenlee Farm, in the shadows of the Grampians near Ararat in western Victoria, Craig has enforced a no-holds-barred approach to extract the best possible returns from his sheep flock.

He has rapidly invested in genetics, pastures and paddock infrastructure, and helped establish a new paddock-to-plate lamb venture he hopes will maximise profits.

Craig is the fifth generation of his family to work Glenlee Farm, which was settled by his forebears in 1862.

With wife Sue, he runs a Poll Dorset-based ewe flock, joined to White Suffolk and Dorper rams, which produces about 3000 lambs a year.

In a novel innovation, the Hinchliffes run their ewe flock in multi-generational mobs to boost eating quality in their lamb.

With meat science indicating “the more stressed an animal is, the higher the pH, the tougher the meat is” Craig runs ewe lambs “with their mothers, with their grandmothers, with their great-grandmothers and with their great-great-grandmothers”.

“The lambs learn off their mums,” Craig says. “They move around the country, they know what plants are growing where and what can be eaten, they know where the water points are. If we had a single-sex, single-age mob, there’d be a lot more battle for hierarchy, a lot more stress.”

Glenlee Farm is one of the founding supplier members of the Grampians Wild Lamb paddock-to-plate program, established last year to find high-end customers for quality local, family farm-produced lamb.

For this soldier, it’s a whole new way to serve.