Cashmore Oaklea leads on composites, data accuracy and shedding sheep

John Keiller from Cashmore Oaklea says he is balancing productivity, parasite resistance and eating quality as he shares the story behind his stud.

John Keiller, Portland, along with his business partner Don Pegler, Mount Gambier in South Australia, are some of the key breeders responsible for driving the development and expansion of composite sheep in Australia.

The pairing – a unique team work approach in the world of seedstock production – has enabled the two to generate a lot of progress for their genetics.

Today, the Cashmore Oaklea studs – set in some of the toughest sheep testing grounds in Australia, the wet and cold Portland and Mount Gambier regions – sell more than 1000 rams annually, as well as providing thousands of breeding ewes.

Cashmore Oaklea started 35 years ago, and from the beginning Don and John have run their studs side-by-side, giving them more genetics and data to draw on.

The stud is highly regarded for the accuracy of its performance recording, and John said Cashmore Oaklea’s Data Quality Score of 99/100, or “the highest recorded in the country” for the accuracy of the data input into Sheep Genetics.

“That means for clients who use Cashmore Oaklea rams they are much more likely to get the results that the EBVs say they will get,” he said.

“Scale has really helped from a genetic improvement point of view,” John said.

“Also, working alongside someone else creates accountability and timeliness in the data collection process,” he said.

“He says to me, have you done that, and I ask him, have you done that, so it drive you to strive to do better and you can bounce ideas off each other.”

John aims to see $3.50/ewe mated/year gain from genetic progression.

John Keiller’s rams, Cashmore, at Portland.

The studs produce maternal and terminal composite lines, and in 2003 John started breeding shedding sheep, dubbed Cashmore Nudies, and began performance recording those in 2007.

Since then 15,000 Nudies have gone through this process with around 400 rams now sold annually.

“They are going everywhere, from central NSW and SA to the bottom of Tasmania and in between.”

Early on demand for the Nudies was “steady” but has ramped up from 2017 onwards as costs rose, then Covid disrupted the shearing sector.

“It started with people in extensive areas and larger stations who didn’t have the infrastructure and labour for shearing, but has moved to the Murray and then the coast.”

For some, the ease of management was the driver behind a move to shedding sheep, for others it was more than they didn’t want to incur the cost of shearing maternal composites to make a loss on wool sales.

However, John said there were many ways to look at this, given self-replacing maternal composites were highly productive.

“So you could argue that from a different perspective drenching two to four times a year is a sizeable cost and activity as well (on sheep that did not have high resistance to parasites,” he said.

All breeds and enterprises had their strengths and weaknesses, John said, and instead of picking one breed over another, it was “about the right sheep in the right place at the right time”.

“Once we never had the options in the south for self-replacing sheep, now we have that choice.”

A recent independent analysis of profitability found that the average maternal composite remained $12/ewe more profitable than the best of the Cashmore Nudies, he said. But the composites needed shearing.

Future genetic progression for all breeds would be aided by EBVs that looked at shedding and productivity, and further out, artificial intelligence would be able to fast track collection of information at speed, and analysis, lower costs, he said.

John Keiller, Cashmore

Meanwhile, on property at Cashmore, just near Portland on Victoria’s wild south west coast, John said it had been one of the worst seasons in memory.

It came as producers had a shocking price hit last year, and John was expecting the impacts to be felt with more flocks mated to terminals than to self-replacing rams.

“There are reasonably sound market projections that the backlog of lambs in being chewed through and I think in this particular patch there will be a shortage,” he said.

“We have been on an absolute roller coaster,” he said.

Aside from season, John said the next big question for the lamb industry was how producers would be rewarded for putting more focus on eating quality traits, which had an antagonist correlation to lean meat yield and parasitic resistance.

Now, lamb producers are primarily paid on weight, and their profitability determined by their animal’s ability to grow, and thrive from an animal health point of view in their local conditions.

Resistance to parasite drenches was a looming issue the sheep sector would need to tackle, John said, and a focus on breeding for animals that had resilience to worms would be required. It had been a key breeding focus for at least 20 years at Cashmore Oaklea.

“We need to focus on what is best from an economic point of view for the farmers and for their position not be eroded over time,” he said.

“From a welfare point of view we need to keep moving to easier care sheep, from a cost and environmental, and customer point of view.”

The Cashmore sale is scheduled for October 4 and an inspection open day will run September 30th at Cashmore and September 27 at the Oaklea property at Kongerong in SA.

AGBU’s Sam Walkom will give a presentation on the research into shedding sheep EBVs. “We are in our third year of data collection for phenotype and have 50,000 genomic snip chips, Sam’s talk will be on how the EBVs are being developed to have a production and shedding index.”