Breeding Merino sheep: Woodpark Poll takes scientific, no-nonsense approach
STEVE and Carol Huggins’ Merino sheep are true to type — their type, writes JAMES WAGSTAFF.
WHEN it comes to breeding Merino sheep, Steve and Carol Huggins don’t adhere to mob mentality.
On the vast, sun-drenched plains of the NSW western Riverina, a region steeped in Merino history, the principals of Woodpark Poll stud are well aware that tradition doesn’t necessarily pay the bills.
So, through a scientific, no-nonsense approach, they are paving the way forward with their own “type” of sheep.
STEVE AND CAROL HUGGINS
HAY, NSW
RUN 6500 Merino breeding ewes on 15,740ha
OPERATE the Woodpark Poll Merino stud
EWES cut 7.5-8kg of 18.2-micron wool
SELL up to 800 rams a year
And the results speak for themselves: in recent years they have maintained lambing rates at an impressive 120 per cent, lifted wool cuts to more than 8kg and, since 2012, have increased the number of rams they sell by more than 60 per cent. It’s a significant feat given the emotional and financial hurdles the Huggins have had to clear in the past 15 years, not the least of which were the millennium drought, when the bulk of their flock was sent to Queensland on agistment, and a major sheep theft.
The biggest blow came in 2005 when Steve and Carol purchased a 4410ha farm neighbouring theirs southeast of Hay only to have a “big chunk of the equity taken out of it” three months later when the NSW Government resumed 83 per cent of its groundwater entitlement.
“It meant we were so far behind financially and we just had to get up and run every morning,” Carol said. “We just couldn’t afford for things to go wrong.” “Sheep are all we do, so we had to do them pretty well — we didn’t have cattle, there’s no cropping in pastoral areas — so we just had to make the sheep work, with dry years as well,” adds Steve.
SET THE SCENE
WOODPARK Poll was founded in the mid-1980s by Steve’s uncles and aunt, Doug, Owen and Helen Huggins, at Jerilderie.
With no client base to be guided by, or pressure to breed a certain type, the Huggins were able to set up their own type of animal, which Carol added was “perhaps very different to what was in the Riverina at the time”. “At the time there wasn’t the depth of poll sheep in the industry,”
Steve said. “You couldn’t go out, like you can now, and say ‘well I’m looking for this’ and go and select it. They really thought that to get anywhere we’ll need to do it ourselves.”
In 1985, Owen started off joining fine-wool, tablelands-type rams with horned Woodpark stud ewes displaying poll depressions. In an effort to build up numbers, he later bought three drops of cast-for-age stud ewes from the Poll Boonoke stud at nearby Conargo. “What they had going for them was constitution and stability,” Steve said. “The tablelands sheep weren’t quite the stretch and the shape we were really chasing.”
After Steve returned to the business in 1992, Owen decided that “to be able to class our own type we needed numbers and we needed space to do it”, which led to the purchase of the 11,300ha Eurolie property at Hay a year later.
The neighbouring 4410ha Narrawong was added in 2005, two years after Steve and Carol took over running of the poll operation, which now comprises 3800 commercial and 2700 stud ewes.
DRY THIRST
THE long-term average annual rain across the two properties is 325mm but the Huggins say this total has become more the exception than the rule. About 175-200mm falls in a good year now, which has forced the family to plan “for it not to rain but hope that it does”.
“Last year we hit average but we got four inches (100mm) in December, we’d only had seven inches (175mm) before that,” Steve said. “Two years before that it was 6.5 inches (163mm), but the rain is reasonably well timed and we’ve been getting away with it.”
They have received just 2-3mm of rain so far this year but aren’t panicking yet, with their traditional autumn break arriving in late May.
Working on the theory that “if you look after the country, the country will look after the sheep and the sheep will look after us” the Huggins family has divided the farms into more manageable-sized paddocks according to soil types, which vary from heavier clay country to lighter red dirt and sandy country.
Red clay and creek areas have been fenced off to help natural bush regenerate with pine plantations introduced on sandy areas.
The country does have annuals but the significant grasses are mostly perennials “which we try and focus on a bit because we have got to harvest the rain when it falls — because it is so infrequent”. “That’s the beauty of the past 12 months, the rain hasn’t been massive but it has been well timed and the feed quality has been good,” Steve said.
SUMMER LOVE
STEVE and Carol aim to produce a “well structured, framed meaty sheep” with quality wool and fibre density, but one which could also be a good first-cross mother.
An emphasis is placed on increasing fleece weight but Steve says “we want to do it in the right way — we don’t want to go back to necks and skin, which provide complications in sheep”.
“We want big, easy doing sheep, the skin has got to be mobile on the carcass and that combination is a doing-type sheep,” he said. “We find the sheep that have that, and have that loose, mobile skin, cut the most wool and tend to be the finest, with the heaviest body weight. That goes against what we’re sometimes told by the industry.” “Measurement aids this — we find if we measure for it and select for it, we end up with it,” Steve said.
Rams are joined to ewes for six weeks from December 1 ahead of a May lambing. The Huggins also run a spring-lambing mob, which Steve said allowed for another crop of young rams for clients from late November through to January-February each year. While a portion of ewes are artificially inseminated, the number varies. This season about 980 ewes were AI’d.
The Huggins mostly use their own sires but occasionally bring in an outside ram that is “well proven and well measured in the industry” to help drive the accuracy of their Australian Sheep Breeding Values. At the most recent joining they used semen from a ram from the Centre Plus stud at Tullamore, which itself was sired by a Woodpark Poll sire.
Any sheep that doesn’t get in lamb in December is joined again in the autumn. If it fails to get in lamb again it finds itself out the gate.
SIZE MATTERS
THE size of joining mobs are dictated by paddock sizes, ranging up to 650 ewes but including “lots of 200s, 180s in the stud mobs”. The Huggins work on one ram servicing about 65 ewes.
“In the past, when I was really trying to push the better rams I was giving them 100-120 and getting good results but it is fraught with danger, of course,” Steve said.
Ewes are scanned for lambs at the start of March and managed accordingly. When it comes to lambing rates, Steve and Carol budget on an average 120-125 per cent.
Big fans of both objective and subjective measurement, the couple began fleece weighing, micron testing, body weights and indexing all their sheep during the early 2000s, then running them in groups according to where they ranked in relation to flock average. “And that really started us working with numbers,” Steve said.
That information also began being presented as deviations to the average — “for example 115 per cent fleece weight, minus two micron, percentage of body weight etc” — at the stud’s annual ram sale.
“It was a really good natural progression into ASBVs because we definitely noticed people using that information,” Steve said.
When it comes to ASBVs, the Huggins aim for balance — “we don’t try and pull any one lever too hard” — with a particular emphasis on building eye muscle, fat and carcass attributes, which they say drive profitability.
TIGHT GENES
LAST month, for the first time, Steve and Carol DNA tested every stud ewe and all lambs to allow for a full pedigree of their flock. They say it was a lot of work, but important.
“That is what is really going to drive the ASBVs, having accuracy,” Steve said.
“With our paddock sizes, which we need for practicality and management, getting the pedigree has been the hardest thing for the ASBVs,” Carol said.
Steve initially classes the flock himself, streaming ewes into performance groups, then turns to consultants Michael Elmes and Craig Wilson for further advice and mentoring. While they don’t have any set culling rate at classing time, given high lambing percentages they can afford to take off 40 per cent “and still be growing our numbers”. “But it is not set to a number, it is set to a standard,” Steve said. “And each year we try and lift that standard.”
Surplus ewes and wethers are sold to clients or through the feature spring store sheep sale at Jerilderie, where they regularly feature at or near the top of the averages.
At Woodpark Poll, shearing takes place annually for two weeks in February. Rams follow for a week at the end of March.
Mature-age stud and commercial mature ewes cut 7.5-8kg of wool. Last year, the 2015-drop flock averaged 8.2kg of 18.2-micron wool while the entire drop of ewes — from two year olds to seven year olds — had a micron range from 17.7 to 18.7 micron.
Steve and Carol experimented with shearing every eight months and while it was “fantastic … the wool length was ideal, as was the tensile strength and yield” it presented logistic problems from a workload perspective.
This year, 400 bales of wool were produced at shearing, with bigger wool cuts meaning it was up from 360-370 previously. The Huggins sell most of their wool at the end of March but have increasingly been using forward contracts. The contracts — which this year worked to their advantage — are taken out on fixed and minimum prices “according to when we are happy with the price”. “We are using forwards to manage risk and spread the marketing — so the whole year’s work is not at the mercy of the market on any given day,” Carol said.
RAM RAID
WOODPARK Poll has a client base spread from southern Victoria north to Longreach in western Queensland.
They have sold 684 rams this selling season, down on 794 last year but well above the 158 it placed in 2008 and 490 in 2012. Up to 150 are sold at the stud’s annual production sale in Jerilderie each September (last year 135 averaged $2437) with a further 10 offered at the Hamilton Sheepvention in August.
Carol said they picked up 17 new clients this year, eight of whom were breeding Merinos for the first time or returning to the breed, which she described as exciting. Steve said he was most proud that at Woodpark, they “stand for something”.
“We are our own bloodline — we are not a jumble of genetics … we’re not using five or six different sires every single year, where their ewe lambs then get joined to another five or six different sires so there is this massive spread of genetics,” he said.
Carol, who has sat on The Merino Company’s grower advisory board, been a director of MerinoLink and last year completed the Australian Rural Leadership Program, said there was a bright future for the Merino, given strong returns for wool and meat.
“If we take responsibility as growers for making sure that we are doing what we can to make our industry a success, it is going to help us be better at what we do,” Carol said.
“It is not about individual bloodlines or studs or operations, it is about all working together to get the best product and to try to make sure the rest of the world know about it.” And breaking that mob mentality.
“Sheep are all we do ... we didn’t have cattle, there’s no cropping in pastoral areas so we just had to make the sheep work”.
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