Numbers add up for Felix Rams at Greenethorpe

RODNEY Watt is fanatical when it comes to numbers.

The numbers stack up

RODNEY Watt is fanatical when it comes to numbers.

“I got up to almost 38,000 on this thing yesterday,” the 55-year-old sheep breeder from Greenethorpe in southern NSW says, pointing to the device on his wrist that measures the number of steps he takes per day. “If it’s got anything to do with numbers, I’m obsessed with it.”

Numbers associated with his White Suffolk and Poll Dorset sheep flocks, registered as Felix Rams, spark particular interest. And for Rodney, there’s plenty, with joining rates, birthweights, lambing percentages, weaning weights, growth rates, dry sheep equivalents, performance data, input costs, output charges — more numbers than a Chinese phone book.

But as Rodney’s bottom line reveals, the numbers stack up, with a growing client list and the sale of an impressive 400 rams a year. Not a bad feat for someone who “wasn’t ever supposed to be a farmer”.

CHANGE OF PLANS

A SEVERE bout of asthma as a child meant Rodney was actively discouraged from becoming a farmer. His father had died in a farming accident when he was just nine and he was sent away to boarding school, where he excelled in four-unit maths, physics and chemistry.

“I could have gone on to do a lot of things,” said Rodney, who instead returned to the family farming partnership with his father’s uncle (which was dissolved in the mid-1980s).

Sitting in the kitchen of the home built by his great grandfather, Rodney acknowledges the “good mixed farming country” around Greenethorpe.

“We can grow (feed and crops) right through the winter … it slows right down but even in a bad year if there’s any sort of warmth at the end of July  or  early  August  it  will  grow.”

The farm comprises 500ha split between sheep and crops and receives an average 600mm of rain a year. Soils include “everything in the book” (some paddocks have three or four soil types) but mostly granite with some alluvial clay and red country. Its elevation of 450-500m above sea level means the farm is subject to frosts but “not really bad frosts”.

CHOP-A-HOLIC

TO question what Rodney’s main game is when it comes to farming is to ask the bleating obvious.

He is passionate about his sheep, and has adopted a born-to-perform, take-no-prisoners mantra to ensure his flock’s genetics are firmly on the top shelf. Rodney joins 520 adult Poll Dorsets and 240 White Suffolks, as well as about 100 ewe lambs, a year. The stocking rate hovers at about 4.5-5 dry sheep equivalents per grazing hectare, peaking at 13DSE/ha the day before the stud’s on-property sale in early September.

For the past 12 years Rodney has conducted a monthly feed score and ranks it against his stock numbers. If the stocking rate is up, and feed score is down “I know I need to sell those lambs or need to shut them up and (supplementary) feed them”.

Rodney has recorded the performance of his flock since 1984, when he charted the growth rates of his first drop of White Suffolk lambs at weaning, weighted for things such as the age of the lamb’s mother and whether it was a twin or a single.

The Felix flock is registered as gold on Lambplan — in recognition of the accuracy of its performance data.

HAPPY FEAT

RODNEY aims to produce a ram that can breed lambs with a moderate birthweight and a high growth rate, a feat he described as “a challenge”.

A certain emphasis is placed on fat — “not a lot” — to cater for Felix’s range of clients, some of whom opt for lean rams because they are more focused on producing for the export market while others seek more fat to produce easy-finishing­ lambs out of Merinos.

Rodney also incorporates information on lambing ease, worm egg counts and eating quality, including intramusc­ular fat, sheer force and lean meat yield into one index, which forms the backbone of his mating program.

“I’ve got a spreadsheet program, so if I say I want all the birthweights to be less than 0.4, I want all the growth rates to be above 15, I want all the fats to be such and such … I can work out which ram can I mate to that ewe to give me that progeny,” he said.

Rodney conducts an artificial-insemination program annually and for the first time last year experimented with embryo transfer. Nineteen embryos were harvested from three ewes.

Joining starts on January 20 for five weeks, before a three-week break (during which the ewes are pregnancy tested) before the back-up rams go in with the ewes on St Patricks Day, March 17.

In single-sire matings, ram lambs ideally service a mob of 30-40 ewes while their older brothers cover up to 60 in paddocks averaging 18-20ha.

Watts up: Rodney Watt of Greenethorpe in NSW is sold on the benefits of performance recording within his sheep flock.

DROP AND ROLL

EWES lamb in June — up until 1987 it was March-April — and Rodney said “other than getting the ram lambs big enough to sell” the following spring, he’d go later if he could to maximise pasture growth.

Pastures are mostly winter-active fescue, summer-active lucerne and a bit of clover.

Depending on the summer and the condition of ewes at joining, the White Suffolks have a lambing rate of about 175-180 per cent. Poll Dorset ewes are usually about “10-15 per cent behind that”.

Lambs are weighed at birth and receive a National Livestock Identification System electronic tag.

Depending on the season, up to 1280 lambs make it through to marking, which occurs at two to four weeks.

Weaning occurs in the middle of September when the lambs are eight to 12 weeks, “if you go over 12 weeks the ram lambs will start getting the ewes in lamb”.

Here, birthweight and weaning weight figures are compared, and any surplus rams culled. All ewe lambs are generally retained, unless they have “a really obvious structural fault”.

Surplus lambs are fed in a feedlot and sold at 30kg carcass weight direct to abattoirs. Rodney avoids the saleyard system at all costs, save for a “uteload of old culls”.

The lambs are shorn at the start of November.

RAM RAID

LAST year the Watts sold 387 rams, including 183 at their annual September on-property sale for a credible average of $1330.

Rodney said his base price for rams was $650, (up from $600 in recent years) which he admitted was “probably too cheap but when you’re trying to sell 400 rams, you’ve got to sell rams”.

“A lot of people got into (selling) rams probably 10 or 12 years ago and it took out that bottom end … there was always someone selling a cheaper ram,” he said. “There is no fortune in rams for $600 when I can sell those lambs for $6/kg and they dress 30kg.”

Most of the rams are sold within 150km of the farm. Rodney said 90 per cent of clients who purchased rams privately used figures to select rams for one or two traits, such as fat or birthweight.

“They’ll choose 10 (using the figures provided) and then maybe visually select six,” he said.

Rodney said most clients turned off lambs at tradeweight supermarket weights.

“They want to have that option. They’ll carry some on if the season is right or the grain is right or the price is right, but everybody wants to sell a large percentage of their lambs as suckers,” he said.

DUAL PURPOSE

THE Watt family’s crop program of about 250ha comprises mostly wheat and canola split between varieties for grain and to be grazed by livestock. They have grown dual-purpose crops for 30 years, introducing grazing canola varieties seven years ago.

Last year canola averaged 2.25 tonnes to the hectare while wheat went 3.3 tonnes/ha.

Grazing varieties are the first crops to be sown, usually in early April if the season allows. If the autumn break hasn’t arrived by Anzac Day, the Watts sow into a dry profile.

Rams are grazed on the crops for a month after being shorn in early July. Rodney uses a strip-grazing method with the help of electric fences.

A contractor shared with a neighbour starts harvesting the canola in the second half of November, followed by wheat. Harvest is usually done and dusted by early December.

Rodney sells most of his grain within two months of harvest and employs the services of a local broker. He said if wheat was selling at the silo at Greenethorpe for $250 a tonne, he would instruct the broker to sell it for $270-$275 a tonne. “The gyrations of the market” over those two months ensure it “almost always gets there”.

FLOCK FORWARD

AS to the future of the sheepmeat industry, Rodney, who served as a director of Sheepmeat Council of Australia for eight years and Meat and Livestock Australia for three, said the only figure that really mattered in farming was “dollars in the bank at the end of the year”.

“I think there is good money in ag as long as you run it like a business and you’re half smart,” he said.

“If you want to try and make two and two add up to six, you’ll fail.”