Mooralla farmers Anna and Jarrod Sweeney look outside the square with sheep production

Farming with an environmental conscience comes naturally to Anna and Jarrod Sweeney from Mooralla in western Victoria.

SPRING on Wattle Park at Mooralla, west of the Grampians, this year has been heaven sent.

Its paddocks are lush, the sheep well-fed and thick with wool. At least they were before shearing in late October.

Before early November rain, Wattle Park’s annual rainfall for the year was sitting at 473.5mm, well below its 600mm average, but what rain came over the year, fell at the right time.

Anna and Jarrod Sweeney run this 607ha Western District farm on the southern boundary of the Wimmera on the western side of the Gariwerd mountain range. Macquarie Bank’s bluegum plantations nose their boundaries.

Aged just 42 and with two sons, Will, 8, and Lachie, 6, plus Jarrod’s daughter Holly, 12, the Sweeneys are 10 years into a sheep grazing enterprise that has at its foundation an ambition to build the soil and replant country cleared 50 years ago to make it viable long-term.

Not that it isn’t now. Even after 20km of new fencing, 50,000 trees, a new 20-megalitre dam plus new tanks, pumps, pipes and troughs and new ram stock, the Sweeneys have turned a profit annually since they arrived in 2010 and set out to try something different. Boosted by good equity and rising recent prices, they’re modern farming’s environmentally conscious, business-savvy ideal.

They’ve switched to cell grazing, and are converting paddocks that were up to 50ha into 5-7ha lots. Five years ago they stopped using chemicals, banking instead on creating habitats for biodiverse insect life to keep things in check.

Not ones to do things by halves, they’ve also just spent $20,000 buying 18 clean-breech rams from Mumblebone stud in NSW in the first step to switch their entire flock to clean-breech, mulesing-free wool on a dual-purpose Merino sheep.

“We’re aiming to get a clean breech that we don’t have to mules at all,” Jarrod says. “The first cross, we are definitely going to have to mules but as we breed off their progeny in the future, maybe in three or four years, we don’t know how far off, we want to not have to mules at all.”

“It’s not a punt. It’s the way to go,” says Anna, who is also savvy to the higher prices that Europe is offering for wool from non-mulesed sheep.

The couple know that with less skin on their new rams’ progeny, they could lose kilograms in wool.

Instead they’ll aim to shear six-monthly rather than annually and estimate that what they lose in wool, if any, they’ll make up with meat.

WAY AHEAD

IT’S a big change, but both are convinced that ethically and financially it’s for them.

“We’ve looked at breech freezing and I don’t think it’s the way to go for us,” says Anna.

“We’ve also looked at using pain relief long term. Jarrod is a mulesing contractor but he doesn’t do much these days. Physically he’s finding it more challenging but ultimately he doesn’t like doing it. I don’t like it. We have the kids around the lamb marking cradle helping out and they accept it, but it’s just not pleasant. When we first moved up here and were mulesing, we lost a lot of lambs.

“You could see how significant that was on the welfare of the animals so we’ve been really interested in the market and what Meat and Livestock Australia and Australian Wool Innovation are doing.

“Obviously they made the call a long time ago that the Australian wool industry was going to stop mulesing but there have not been many alternatives. We’ve been watching this carefully.

“We’re using two types of pain relief at the moment which is certainly effective – we don’t get the lamb losses now and we walk our lambs straight back to the paddock after marking and they don’t get mismothered which is fabulous – but we really see that the only option from an animal-welfare perspective is to completely cease mulesing.”

Anna and Jarrod chose Mumblebone, from Wellington in NSW, for its use of SRS Genetics, a brand that promises its sheep will produce 15 per cent more lambs than wrinkly wool Merino sheep, are more heat tolerant and are naturally resistant to fly strike, wiping the need for chemical protection. Jarrod agrees the wool looks to have a broader crimp and is more open but doesn’t believe their 19-micron flock average will increase much.

EYES ON PRIZE

BIG changes like this are par for the course for the Sweeneys whose smarts and work ethic combine brilliantly.

Jarrod, a contract fencer and livestock worker in his spare time, sold part of a cropping and beef farm he’d run at Modewarre, near Winchelsea, with his mother, when he and Anna branched out.

“Land prices were so high down there and I was at the stage where it was get big or get out,” he says.

The couple settled on Wattle Park, swapping vast investments in machinery for, as Jarrod puts it, “a couple of dogs, a ute and a good set of yards and a woolshed”.

He’d been a sheep farmer early in life (he used to crutch sheep using hand shears as a 17-year-old), had switched to beef and cropping and now was returning to something he’d kept skilled at via contract livestock work.

“It’s a lot easier to manage and a lot less stressful.”

That wasn’t all. The couple examined and compared beef, lamb and wool prices over the past 100 years. Historically, markets had favoured the latter two.

Anna, a triple-degreed sustainable agriculture and environmental management consultant who was raised in Bahrain and worked with an indigenous corporation north of Broome before meeting Jarrod, says the decision was multi-factorial.

Making the place suitable for beef would have entailed big infrastructure costs. The soil — light sandy loams with a clay base that pugs easily — wasn’t suited for cattle. It was too small to crop. They wanted to avoid cropping’s chemical inputs and with a young family, the stress of long hours contracting away from home required to justify any continuing investment in Jarrod’s cropping machinery, wasn’t on. Sheep came up trumps.

FLOCK SHOCK

ANNUALLY over the past 10 years the Sweeneys have run up to 6000 sheep — 60 per cent for wool and 40 per cent for meat — cutting back on wethers and old ewes in harder conditions. It’s a self-replacing Merino enterprise, including 1200 crossbred ewes and 1800 Merino ewes and turns out 1500 terminal lambs sold for meat annually.

The first cross is with Border Leicesters and the resultant crossbred ewes are mated with Poll Dorsets to produce the lambs sold for meat.

The Sweeneys also cut 5.5kg of wool on average from their Merino flock, sending 80-90 bales to auction annually.

To date Jarrod has installed 20km of fencing at about $3.30/m for materials excluding his labour and machinery costs. Anna says he’s the fastest, fussiest fencer she’s seen.

They rotate the sheep in three big mobs through 15 small paddocks or cells, allowing on average two days in each and aim to have 70-80 per cent of the place not grazed at one time.

This allows grasses to recover and the natural fertiliser left behind by the sheep is absorbed into the soil.

At lambing they split the mobs into smaller groups to keep the ewes and their lambs together.

“Some people keep their sheep in big mobs all year around,” Anna says, “but given that a lot of our grazing cells are set up with windbreaks and shade and shelter, they tend to do better in smaller mobs.”

The Sweeneys have sown the country with cocksfoot, phalaris, sub-clover, white clover and perennial ryegrass, boosting it with organic fertiliser at 247-370kg/ha annually and are finding that the sheep are eating out the capeweed that got away on them when they took an extended break earlier this year.

Over time as the soils builds up, they hope that, like their mentor neighbour further down the valley who hasn’t fertilised his cell-grazed farm for 10 years, they can eventually cut fertiliser costs altogether. Last year they sold 600 tonnes of silage stored in their farm pit buying in higher-protein grain to feed out to the sheep in the extended dry.

“There’s less money tied up in (silage) machinery sitting for eight months of the year unused so we get more bang for our buck this way,” Jarrod said.

THROWING SHADE

A KEY hallmark of the Sweeneys’ business is the extensive tree planting, which they do together, planting 1500 an hour into ripped and mounded lines, to create shade and shelter but also to heal scalded salty valleys and creek lines, salt they believe has surfaced in reaction to the country being cleared and overgrazed.

They say it’s important as the creeks that run through their place flow into the Wannon and Glenelg rivers.

The rain and spring-fed dam, with a deliberately small surface area to reduce evaporation, is 12m deep and sits near the high point of the farm.

Water is pumped up to three tanks and gravity fed through pipes to concrete troughs across the farm.

One change, they’ve noted that’s not so good is the increased fire risk. (Jarrod is Mooralla’s CFA Brigade captain.)

Ten years ago their immediate district had rarely experienced fire. Since they’ve been there they’ve had three big fires and other smaller ones. Changing seasonal conditions are adding to the risk and the possibility of fire is a constant stress.

Anna notes that “more often than not” the spring is cutting out early and decent summer rainfalls seem a thing of the past.

“We tend to get a little bit of rain in the summer but mostly they’re dry summer storms. We get a lot of dry storms with lightning strikes and the autumn breaks come later too. We mostly get the 600-700mm of rain but it all comes in winter.”

The Sweeneys are undoubtedly a dynamic couple. They both work on and off-farm.

“Two heads are better than one,” says Jarrod who’s happy to leave the bookwork and budgeting to Anna.

Their focus is clear. To increase productivity by building soils that retain water for longer and to build ecosystems that support their sheep.