Sheep Industry Business Innovation

Auto Jetting Race case study video transcript

Featuring

  • Andrew Slade (Interviewee, Farmer)
  • Peter Rowe (Interviewee, Economist)
  • Rhys Jones (Voice Over)

Andrew Slade

Sheep certainly are hard work if you're not set up in the right way. There's a lot of equipment out there to make sheep handling a lot easier and more efficient.

My name’s Andrew Slade and we farm in Mount Barker WA.

We run five and a half thousand breeding ewes and 700 breeding cattle in a mixed livestock and cropping enterprise.

Previously we were jetting with a fire unit and getting limited control. Maximum control period was around six weeks. The only other option was to use click, which was considerably more expensive. We purchased the Electro Dip six years ago. We saw the Electro Dip as a more cost effective and productive solution. We were able to get up to12 weeks control and not have to treat the ewes as often, and at a lot more cost effective rate.

Having that 12 week protection period we've gone from treating at a minimum two to three times a year back to once. Probably halved the amount of labour needed to treat our ewes.

We apply 2 liters of water per ewe. The mix is two liters of Vetrazin per thousand liters of water. We can put through upwards of 1500 ewes an hour and get effective control.

The key element of the Electro Dip is the high pressure pump which delivers constant pressure and 120 psi or whatever rate you set it at. And you get the penetration down to the skin.

So the sheep run through and trip out the seeing eye, which is behind this little bit of glass here and that triggers jets that come from underneath and jets from the top and also jets on the side. There are a number of people that hire Electric Dips or similar systems so that may be an option, but the effectiveness is vastly greater than what you'd get using the fire unit to jet.

Peter Rowe

I'm Peter Rowe. I'm an agricultural economist with over 20 years’ experience and I was approached by the Department of Agriculture and Food to look into the economics of the Slade’s Electro Dip Jetting Machine.

It was costing the Slades about $13,000 a year for fly control. They've managed to reduce that down to $5000 a year a saving of about $8000 a year.

The system cost $14 000 to buy and across 10 years will save them about $4.10 for each dollar they've invested. The payback period is just over two years.

Andrew Slade

The Electro Dip is an invaluable piece of equipment on our sheep operation so we wouldn't trade it for any other system that’s out there at the moment.

Rhys Jones

The Department of Agriculture and Food WA, through its Sheep Industry Business Innovation project, made possible by Royalties for Regions, is supporting and sharing new technologies in the sheep industry. This is improving labour efficiency in the sector and making it easier all round to run sheep.