Making money from Merinos: Goode family of Barooka in South Australia see power in profits
THIS family’s approach to Merino sheep breeding is dictated by profits, not tradition, writes JAMES WAGSTAFF.
DEANE Goode reckons one of the biggest barriers to a highly profitable Australian Merino sheep industry is wool growers “conforming with their mates at the pub”.
“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,” says Deane, whose switch to Multi-Purpose Merinos in the early 2000s is paying handsome financial dividends for his fifth-generation family farm at Barooka, near Kingston, in South Australia’s South East.
“We’re happy to have an animal that is worthy of carrying a fleece on it and if you can have a good carcass animal that has lots of lambs, and lambs that survive, and one that gives you genetic replacements and sales — it all adds to your profitability.”
Chat with Deane and his son Henry, 25, and it doesn’t take long to discover where their passion lies. Here, on 2772ha of land settled by their forebears in the 1880s, sheep rule. But, more importantly, so do profits at the expense of tradition.
To that end the Goodes have introduced changes to their breeding and management techniques in recent years with the aim of boosting their bottom line. The results speak for themselves: 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 17 per cent in the past year.
They are now at the point where they earn $300 from each of their ewes, year in, year out, thanks to lamb, wool and surplus sheep sales.
The Goodes run about 5500 adult breeding ewes and 1400 in-lamb ewe lambs alongside a herd of 350 Shorthorn breeding cows, which Deane admits are “only about half as profitable as our sheep”.
SEA CHANGE
THE Goode farm is about 20km from the Cape Jaffa coastline and receives about 650mm of rain a year. It is a pretty reliable area for rain, which means there are rarely any problems with the availability of green feed for lambing ewes.
The country ranges from red and grey sandy soils over limestone clay to heavy alkaline black clay.
The Goodes have 290ha under centre-pivot irrigators, part of which is leased out to a potato grower, and the remainder is used to grow lucerne and finish stock.
Other pastures include dryland lucerne, cocksfoot, phalaris, barley grass and subclover.
The change in the Goodes’ sheep breeding direction came early last decade when Deane realised his flock required an overhaul. Before that, for “economic reasons” given deflated wool returns, half the family’s ewes had been mated to terminal sires, which Deane said had stifled genetic gain.
Keen to find genetics that could produce a Merino for both wool and meat (“effectively putting wool on a crossbred ewe”) the Goodes teamed up with Glendemar Multi-Purpose Merinos at Marnoo 16 years ago.
The Goodes buy about 20 rams a year from Glendemar (they also breed about 100 of their own), spending an average of $2000. Glendemar principal Ben Duxson classes their flock and with the help of Australian Sheep Breeding Values selects for early growth, eye muscle depth, fat cover and clean fleece weight.
“We want the quickest-growing, medium-sized sheep — the biggest sheep are not the most profitable sheep because they have to eat twice as much,” Deane said.
“And we don’t need to cut the most wool because if you cut the most wool you have the worst lambs. It’s about finding that medium. I wouldn’t mind cutting 8kg of 18-micron wool one day but not at the expense of carcass and lambings.”
Last year about 65 per cent of the Goodes’ sheep income was derived from meat.
Ewes are joined for five weeks from mid-January, after two weeks of running with teaser rams to improve their cycling and tighten up the lambing period. Adult ewes are joined at a rate of about 100 to two rams generally in mobs of 1000-plus drafted off according to condition score and managed with feed.
Last year for the first time the Goodes mated 2000 ewe lambs (from a drop of about 2300) at eight months of age. Weighing about 50kg liveweight, they were joined on lucerne for five weeks at a rate of 100 ewes to five rams. Deane said the move was made to get ewes generating an income sooner and to speed up genetic gain within the flock.
NUMBERS GAME
EWES are usually scanned for multiples 45 days after the rams come out. Last year, also for the first time, the Goodes trail-fed about 800g of lupins per ewe per day a few weeks out from joining. Hoggets and older set record scanning rates of 140 per cent. The ewe lambs’ scanning rate was 72 per cent in lamb or 94 per cent overall potential. Deane said all ewe lambs and hoggets had radio frequency ID tags and down the track data would be manipulated to identify ewes bearing twins, and breed solely from them. “Our ewes have a bag of milk on them like a two-gallon bucket and they will happily raise two or three lambs if they have to,” Deane said.
As a rule, twin-bearing ewes are allocated more feed to increase birthweights of lambs.
The flock recorded lambing rates of 117 per cent last year, an increase of 17 per cent on 2016. Lamb survival was significantly up at 85 per cent for twin-bearing ewes and 95 per cent for singles.
Henry said they had been aiming to get their twin-mob sizes back down to less than 100 each year.
Most lambing paddocks are 35ha, and some are as small as 15ha. Some of the larger lambing paddocks are being split up with single-wire electric fencing, which Deane said worked particularly well. The bigger grazing paddocks range up to 50ha in size.
The Goode sheep are “fairly resilient” and “survivors”, said Deane. “The genetic pattern and eye muscle and fat cover play a big part in that,” Henry added.
Rams are kept until they are about five with ewes retained until they are about 5½. Any ewe that doesn’t conceive or rear a lamb is sold, usually on AuctionsPlus.
The pair make their own trace element mineral drench, which is administered to sheep “quite often to kick them along”. All the ewes receive a pre-lambing drench.
The Goodes have not mulesed their sheep for 11 years and Deane reckons with their “South Australian fairly plain-bodied, straight sheep” it was a fairly easy move. “All I did was not employ a mulesing contractor,” Deane said.
“I tell people all the time to work towards the end, don’t just arrive. You can’t just say ‘I’ll stop mulesing’ or ‘I’ll stop treating for flies’ ... you’ve got to prepare yourself for it.
“And if you’ve got the wrong sheep, you’ve got to start again. It is a lot easier now with genetics.”
WETHER RADAR
WEANING generally takes place in late September or early October when the lambs are 10-12 weeks old. All wether lambs are sold for meat before they become hoggets.
Shearing takes place in May and November. The Goodes switched from annual shearing three years ago, partly because their wool was being discounted for being too long.
Fleeces average about 18-21 micron with the May shearing generally producing slightly finer lines. Six-month wool cuts average about 3kg/head.
“We think we’re growing about 10-15 per cent more wool just from shearing every six months — the wool is about 10-15mm longer over a whole year,” said Deane, adding one of the greatest benefits of six-month shearing was increased tensile strengths, which have risen from 18-25 newtons per kilotex to 55-65.
“You can’t break it and the buyers just love it,” he said.
The twice-yearly shearing also reduces the need for crutchings.
Wool is sold through the Melbourne wool stores directly after shearing and the Goodes employ a range of different marketing options.
They have had interest from Modiano, New Zealand Wool and H&M, among others, to supply non-mulesed wool.
Last year most wool sold to the Schneider Group, through which they have a contract to supply 2000kg of wool to premium Norwegian outdoor clothing manufacturer Devold. The Goodes are one of only 13 accredited Devold suppliers in Australia.
Deane believes there is currently a market premium of about 5 per cent for unmulesed wool, which he described as not enough.
He said many farmers were reluctant to cease mulesing because of a lack of price incentives and risk of not “conforming with their mates at the pub”. “If we were able to get 200c/kg greasy on top of everyone else, just because it is from unmulesed sheep, there’d be a lot of interest,” he said.
“There’s not enough incentive at the moment to do it so people continue not to do it. And AWI (Australian Wool Innovation) is so weak they haven’t stuck with their ban (to end surgical mulesing in Australia by the end of 2010). You don’t say you’re going to do something and then back off on it — you lose all integrity.”
EYES FRONT
LOOKING ahead, Deane says the introduction of ewe lamb joinings means they’d probably have to offload half their 18-month-old ewes this year to make way for the next drop. Traditionally, surplus sheep are sold in early December on AuctionsPlus.
Increased ewe numbers may also require wether lambs to be finished and sold earlier. The Goodes’ aim in the future is to sell all their surplus lambs at nine months weighing 24kg carcass weight “at a crossbred price — we don’t want to take a cut on that”.
They are also eyeing opportunities of selling sheep skins and marketing mulesed-free meat. The Goodes has previously supplied lamb cuts to restaurants in Adelaide.
“We reckon they eat better than crossbreds, they are not so fatty but they’ve great flavour and distribution of flavour,” Deane said.
He said any brand could be tied to “low stress, healthy soils, clean water, clean air, sustainable farming”, adding the processing industry’s introduction of DEXA and X-ray analysis, which pays according to the meat content of the carcass, would provide further opportunities.
“Merinos have had a pretty bad name about meat quality because there’s some pretty bad ones out there — when you skin them they look like a rabbit,” Deane said. “But there’s some good ones out there and the good ones are being treated like the bad ones.”
Henry sees the future of the business in “pushing lambing percentage — that is the main profit driver”. “I’d like to lift lambing percentages up to 140 per cent-plus in adult sheep and keep working on the ewe lambs,” he said. “I think we can improve a lot more with that.”
And raise the baa in the standard of pub talk.
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