Lambing rates soar at Deane and Henry Goode’s Kingston farm

SHEEP FINALIST 2018: FARMING with their heads and not their hearts is paying dividends for father and son Deane and Henry Goode.

Bosses of the board: The Goode family — Henry, Sarah, Deane, Tom, Prue and William, with Kelpies Ned and Digga — run an innovative sheep business. Picture: Yuri Kouzmin

FARMING with their heads and not their hearts is paying dividends for father and son Deane and Henry Goode.

Despite their family having operated around Kingston SE, in South Australia’s South East, since the 1880s, the pair has found success by giving tradition very much a back seat to innovation.

Well aware that profits, not “bragging rights at the pub”, pay the bills, the Goodes have introduced a raft of changes to breeding and management techniques on their 2772 hectares in recent years all with the aim of boosting their bottom line.

The results are truly spectacular: a switch to shearing sheep every six months, instead of once a year, has lifted production by 10-15 per cent while a focus on fertility has seen lambing rates soar by as much as 17 per cent in recent years.

The change in the Goodes’ sheep breeding direction started last decade when Deane realised his wool-focused Merino flock required an overhaul.

Keen to produce a Merino for both wool and meat, the Goodes teamed up with Glendemar Multi-Purpose Merinos — winners of The Weekly Times Coles 2016 Sheep Farmer of the Year — and with the help of Australian Sheep Breeding Values began selecting sheep for main profit drivers such as fertility and carcass.

The move has enabled the Goodes to cease the controversial practice of mulesing within their 6900-ewe flock. They now mate ewe lambs at eight months of age, generating an income sooner and speeding up the flock’s genetic gain. There are also more lambs — last year the flock recorded lambing rates of 112 per cent, down slightly from 117 per cent in 2017 but well up from 100 per cent in 2016.

The Goodes are rightly proud of these achievements.

“If you’ve just got a wool sheep you might be making all this wool money, and you’ve got bragging rights in the pub and everything else, but you’ve got nothing else going for you — that’s where we differ,” Deane says.

To that, we say cheers.

FINALIST Sheep Farmer of the Year 2018

GOODE FAMILY, Kingston, SE South Australia

ON FARM: THE GOODE FAMILY