Willswood Farms counts on sheep to make top dollar
LOOKING at opportunities and doing the sums has allowed Willswood Farms to diversify into a rich mix of enterprises, but prime sheep remain its key profit, writes DANNIKA BONSER.
TIM Williams in a numbers man. Top price of the last Merino wool he sold? 1640c/kg, with most bales averaging $3000 gross. Average price made for first-cross ewe lambs last year? $257. Current skin price? About $8.70.
Ask Tim for a statistic on the mixed cropping and sheep enterprise and he can usually fire it straight back.
This could be one of the reasons his family’s South Australian business, Willswood Farms, recently won the triennial award for best lamb supplier to processing giant JBS.
They supply lambs into JBS’ Farm Assurance program, which is designed to guarantee animal welfare and traceability to consumers.
The Williams’ have a close relationship with their processors — literally. Sheep are walked 1500m down the road to JBS’s Bordertown abattoir, a saving on freight in the order of up to $20 a head that other producers from as far afield as Western Australia otherwise have to fork out.
Nearly 10,000 Willswood lambs make the journey each year to JBS, representing about 220,000kg of lamb which is sold under JBS’s Great Southern brand.
Lamb sold under the label must be grass-fed, hormone free and Meat Standards Australia quality assured.
From the recent sale of two lines, the heavier line averaged just over $200 and dressed out at 23.2kg, while their lighter siblings went for $195 — not bad considering five years ago a lamb of the same spec was pushing to make $120.
“Even when my dad was farming in the late ‘80s we topped the Naracoorte market at $24 for a crossbred lamb, and Dad was ecstatic to get that much,” Tim said.
TIM WILLIAMS
BORDERTOWN, SOUTH AUSTRALIA
RUNS the Willswood Farms business spread across 2400ha and five properties
TURNS off 10,000 lambs a year
JBS top lamb producer of the year
RECENTLY opened feed pellet mill
BRED AND BUTTER
OF the lambs turned off, 5000-6000 are bred on property, and the balance are found privately or through Auctions Plus to fatten then sell.
“If they’re on good feed with pellets to top them up we hope to flip them within eight to 12 weeks to get them to an average of 51-52kg,” Tim said.
“We recently bought 500 lambs from Marra Farms at Netherby, north of Kaniva. They were a bit dry early in the season so they called and we took the complete drop.”
Being on top of the numbers at Willswood is crucial.
Stock run across five properties, three close to Bordertown and two 25km further south.
Tim, his wife Josie and brothers Greg and Nick, along with parents Peter and Barb each oversee different arms of the business, with self-confessed stockman Tim taking the reins in the sheep department.
To simplify the breeding program, Merino ewes are bought in annually as 18-month-olds to maintain flock numbers at 2500.
When buying, Tim looks for a big frame, 20-22-micron wool and a sound constitution.
About 80 bales of wool are shorn from these each year go under the hammer, this year making a 1500c/kg average for a very tidy wool cheque.
“Wool used to be a thing that would just pay the shearers and pay a couple of bills but now it’s a pretty good income,” Tim said.
The recent price kick has been a welcome boost for the Merino side of operations, although the commodity’s upward trajectory isn’t tempting the Williams’ to change course back to wool any time soon.
Border Leicester rams are put over the Merino ewes in December, and of their offspring 1000 first-cross lambs are sold off-shears into the Naracoorte blue ribbon sale the following November, last year for an average of $257 a head.
The first-cross wether lambs are finished on bean stubble and walked down the road to JBS.
CROSS POINT
THERE are also 2500 first-cross ewes on property, which are joined with Poll Dorset rams from Netley Park stud.
With lambing percentages of 130-150 per cent from the mature first-cross ewes and 100 per cent from the maidens, walking 4000 second-cross lambs to JBS at current prices is undeniably good business.
Prime lambs haven’t always been the main focus at Willswood — Tim was a wool man in the beginning.
“As soon as I left school I did a wool classing course in Adelaide for a year and worked on a lot of stations, mainly as a rouseabout up north, and went to Coober Pedy and Roxby Downs and places like that,” he said.
“Then I used to do 10 months-a-year wool classing around here, but then the farm got busier and busier and I got out of the wool classing.”
Peter was the one in his family to get the farming itch.
Although growing up on a farm, he started Williams Concrete Products in Bordertown, selling mostly concrete water tanks and troughs, and used the profits to buy his first farm in 1980.
The concrete business has been a crucial anchor in tough years.
“In the late 1980s when wool went belly up, we didn’t. We were lucky to have that business as a base,” Tim said.
GROW FOR IT
AFTER building the farm size to near 2400ha and acquiring several local business on the way, Peter is still on farm duties, mostly helping out son Greg with cropping duties.
Nick now runs the concrete factory, along with the Mundulla Hotel.
In a town of 186 people, a pub can be more than just a watering hole.
In 2013, friends and then pub owners offered the business to the Williams family, noting the three brothers were ‘loyal customers’.
“So we ran the numbers, and thought ‘Yeah, that makes sense’,” Tim said.
All the businesses the Williams family have accumulated in their local empire run under the same umbrella of Willswood Farms.
The most recent addition is a pellet milling business Williams Pellets, overseen by Greg.
The $500,000 plant in Bordertown was an opportunity for the Williams’ to cut out the middleman and stop buying pellets that had crossed half of Victoria and back from their origin nearby.
“We were buying pellets from Coprice in Cobram and Kapunda in the mid-north, and they’re both 500km from here. Both those companies were buying oat offal from Blue Lake at Bordertown, and we thought ‘We’ve got everything here and we grow our own barley and beans to put in them’. And now we buy a lot of other grains off farmers locally to put in them too,” Tim said.
The plant came online at the beginning of this year, and is on target to press out 5000 tonnes of pellets this year. On the home front, it’s been handy to get their 5000 annual tonnes of finishing pellets at cost price too. Ewes in the paddock get a boost with them pre-lambing, and then are also fed a lactating pellet.
“When we’re lambing in autumn there’s quite often not enough green feed, so the pellets have got everything nutritionally that they need,” Tim said.
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