Making EID (Electronic Identification) add value to a sheep enterprise
- [Hannah Marriott] So I'm farming up at Greta, in northeast Victoria, and running a commercial sheep flock there. And so, I'm going to explain how what we do on farm and how EID allows us to do that. So I'll be referring to these ewes out here, which are different maternal lines of ewes, and how we're measuring their production just through using EID. So, Jason started this trial because there was very little maternal ewe trials being done, so he kicked one off himself. And this has been the timeline of events. And I'm just gonna step through this timeline of events and break it up a fair bit, so don't stress out and think, geez, that's a lot of measuring. But the black lines are where we've taking a measurement. So they're the events that have happened. And then the red lines are, what do I get out of that? What information do I get out of that? So it started back two years ago. So these ewes out here are two years old. They're about to lamb down as their second lamb now. So looking back at 2015 when they were born, we looked at... we did lamb marking and added the lifetime data to them. And I'm gonna show you very easily how you can add data to an animal without even bringing it in the yards. And then, yeah, looked at the weaning weights. Got a weight gain, and that sort of thing, and survival of those lambs. So, of the six different maternal lines, outside we got their lamb survival as lambs. Whether or not that's their genetic impact or not. But that's what we measured. And a weaning weight, a 130-day weight, which was their slaughter weight as well. But I'll just quickly talk you through, because it's now mandatory in Victoria, everybody will order their tags and get a tag bucket file. Has everyone heard of a tag bucket file? There's a few people that haven't, and I certainly didn't know what it meant when I first got sent one or what an earth you could possibly do with it. So this is what it'll look like, and I was gonna work through it on Excel because it's very easy to add some simple life data to these animals just on this bucket file before or at lamb marking, but you don't have to have any equipment. And this is what I would do very first up. So I get this Excel file. Save it as a file. But then start another file and call it 2017 Lambs. Delete that column, don't know, don't care, don't need it. Delete that, and then delete who manufacturers it because I don't really need to know that either. And you'll get an EID number and your visual tag number on the outside, linked up. And then you can go through and your first lamb marking log is twins. Put twin in there, like this is that night, you're lamb marking and you can just write down in your notebook, number one to 270, they were twins. They came from maiden ewes, maiden ewes, copy paste down to 270. You're getting some life data of who these lambs are, but you don't have
to scan them or anything. You don't have to own anything. Put down what age they're from. And I'm gonna explain very simply in example why that can be very important to know if they're from maidens or from older ewes. Maybe you know the breed of the ewe or the certain class if you're classing on Merino. Maybe you're in six month shearing, and you got some still in 12 months, you can say these lambs are all from the six-month shearing ewes, these ones are from the 12 months, so all of a sudden you've got some information about some history behind that lamb, because at lamb marking you're gonna go boom, put 'em all together, and you lose all that information, so it's a really good time to then capture what you know, whether it's paddock that they were born in et cetera. So I was gonna do a quick example of that, but hopefully that all makes sense, and you can just use that as a quick data capture of critical information, and you may not even use that then, you might put it aside, but at least you know who the lambs are if you ever do need it. So this is an example when I was doing one up field a couple of years ago of a farm in New Zealand, and why it is important for them to know if the lamb came from a maiden or if a lamb came from a older ewe, because we know the older ewes all milk better, so the lambs will probably be heavier at weaning than a lamb from a maiden ewe. So they knew this, they then joined the lambs as ewe lambs, and to get 80% of the lambs that were born from maidens, they really only had to be 37 or eight kilos to achieve 80% in lamb, whereas lambs born from the mature ewe are up round 40 kilos. So if you're at the draught gate going, anything under 40 I'm not gonna join it because that's what we're meant to do, but you're taking out all these lambs that were born from maidens but you didn't know that. So genetically they're probably better but they just didn't quite get enough milk, or other reasons, but they're lighter, they'll join at exactly the same, so that's when that life starter info can help, because you can make sure that you've got some information behind who you're selecting in. And so if that ewe is 38 but she's from a maiden, maybe we'll keep here. So they now have that two-kilo difference, if she's from a maiden versus if she's from an older ewe. So that was quite a real example of how that data that you can't see can actually help make a pretty important decision. So back to the ewes outside. We took the wether lambs kill weight, followed them all through the abattoir and got a carcass weight, dressing percentage, and lean meat yield and fat score on them all. So I'll just show you that. And all of this data is out on pen cards, so go and have a more in-depth look if you're interested, but this really just compares to the mob and I can do that for the individual as well, I mean that's why we're using EID. But this is down to the mob of the percentage of wethers that were turned off at that first kill. So quite a range, 96 to 70. The different carcass values of those wether lambs.
The dressing percentages. We've got a live weight obviously before they got killed, a carcass weight, and then a lean meat yield, and a fat score. So back home, to make any use of that, I converted it to
dressing percentage, and thought I'd just, because you can see that there's a huge range in dressing percentage, and obviously, it's I think I worked out six dollars a kilo. It's 20% difference of $60. It's quite a lot of money. But on farm, so I wanna target, say these lambs, so to explain, so the light rain and the better out of spec product, and so would be discounted if that system was brought in, so I want to keep those lambs in spec for weight and fat. So we used LDL at marking, talked about, which is livestock data linking. I think it's brilliant, 'cause you get direct feedback on what it actually costs you for those non-compliant animals, and how many failed in the spec, so you can make some changes for next year. So that to me was quite interesting to see that range. So looking at the 2016 year. We then joined all those ewes as ewe lambs, so I got their scanning percentage, a marking percentage and a weight, and I'll just show you how I did that. Because we had so many lambs fall out of spec the year before, I thought I need a marking weight so that I can track my growth rates a bit earlier and sell those lambs earlier. So that's what I did. Then we got growth rates of lambs and also a wool value per mob. I didn't do individual, just per mob. And this is just a quick video to show you this lamb weigh box that my brother made, 'cause he's a brain, So I used this last year and all the lambs went in, into this box. There's a reader on the side there reads them, and got the weight there, automatically weighs them, lets them out and The lambs are in the system from the get go. And then you can add all that information that you already know about where they come from, and track your growth weights a lot better. So that was just a video I made for Tom, it wasn't meant to be promoting it. It was just to show you. That's why I quickly clicked off it. Anyway, so got the ewe lamb weight and the scanning percentage, and then a lamb mark to ewes join figure, which I think is an important figure, and I mentioned this to the other groups, but it's one of those figures that lamb marking percentages so highly quoted, over-quoted I think, because you don't know, you start comparing yourself to someone else's value that you don't really know what they're quoting. So I think quote it to yourself, understand your lambs marked to ewes joined figure, and you can work out where your wastage is, is it in your ewes, are they getting in lamb, and so you can start targeting where your leakage is there. But I reckon just quote it to yourself and benchmark your ewe year, rather than quoting it to everybody. We got a wool value just per mob, so it's quite a range in wool value there, and so there's a total productivity value, which is the idea of all of this, is you get a lamb value and a wool value, and you've got an economic value per animal or per group at the end of the year, you can start to make a bit more informed decisions. Again with that growth rate, see there's a bit of a range there in growth rates. At weaning you can target anything growing over a certain grams per day and draught on that. When I was feedlotting, I used to draught on weight gain per day, and you'd group all the animals growing at a certain weight together so that you could target them, you can put them on your forage crop, and you can order the truck, you know sort of when they're gonna go, and just be a bit more specific with your numbers and when they're going and all
that sort of thing. So I think that having the growth rate at weaning and targeting where you're gonna put your weaned animals is quite helpful. And then so coming along to where we are today. These ewes outside are now two years old. They're about to have their second lamb, so they weaned the lamb, they got back in lamb, and I took their adult weight, their condition score, and a scanning percentage, and then what we'll do down the track is get another lamb marking weight, 'cause they're all joined to the same sire line, sire breed. And a percentage and then I'll look at matching those ewes and lambs, getting a ewe to lamb weight ratio. So if they're enormous they'd better have an enormous lamb to make me put up with them. So just sort of correlating the adult weight to the kilo of the weight of lamb that they'll raise and then also a wool value. So this was quite interesting to me. There was a bit of a range in condition, but it didn't necessarily correlate directly with a scanning percentage in the second lamb, so it might indicate that ewes don't need to be higher condition, they're not gonna respond if you want to feed them more to get them high condition, you might not necessarily see that in high scanning percentage. So even knowing that, how your lambs respond to extra feed, and will you get that back is quite important, 'cause some ewes will and some ewes won't, but you know, that top ewe that are running at 3.2 sort of condition scanned the best, while that's quite the valuable information. And then that's what we sort of wanna look at this year. So we'll continue on the thing and at the end of the second year I think we'll have some really good economic data to make some more informed decisions at classing based on not just how it looks but what it's done economically. That's the aim. So just a few things I've learnt and still learning, is that data analysis takes a lot of time, and don't underestimate that. It's something I think probably is underestimated with everything if you want to start measuring things, but to actually analyse it, use it, and make sense of it, it takes a fair bit of time, so just take that into account. There's some alternative ways is that you can actually, there's people out there now that
you can send your data to, and say, "Can you please sort that for me, "and send it back to me," and they'll know what you want to breed, they'll know your breeding objectives and work with you. I think it's probably not a bad option, 'cause they're very quick at it, and it's really quite cost effective. Or you could use programmes that do the same thing. I quite like them, I'm not very good at it, but I like to see the results. So I use a programme to do that. Take note of things that you should have measured, or that you measured and you probably didn't need to, 'cause I've certainly measured a lot of things that I didn't really need to, but you discover that along the way, and if you forgot to measure something, and go, oh that would have been handy if I knew that, then just do it next year. It's just an evolving thing, it has been for me anyway, I certainly still get it wrong sometimes. I try and convert a measurement to a value, not just an interest's sake. Just go, oh that's interesting, isn't it? But what value is it? So you're not over-measuring. And I think keep refining your breeding or your business objective and understand what it is. Keep refining it as you improve one area, you might have to start improving another area. And align what you measure with your breeding objective. And I think if you can get your breeding objective up nice and early and just target the things that you need to, and marry that up, that's when it is most simple and most effective. And I think just being realistic with your figures. If it's low, go, oh I'm not gonna quote that to anyone, I'll quote it to myself, but I know what I need to improve now, or the other way round, that's really good now. So I think just be realistic, you don't have to share them with anyone but yourself. So in summary, it's allowed us to look at total productivity on an individual level and a mob-based level. On an economic level, it's certainly made it a lot more accurate than taking all that sort of measurement without EID, and it also allows identification of production you can't see, and I think specifically around you know, your weight gains per day. You can't see that. You can't see what ewe she was from. So some of those things, or what she scanned last year. How can you see that unless you... So that can be really where it's beneficial, is the things you can't see, but are quite critical. And I just add to that is, bring in the human side of it, and understand what you like to do as well, what
animals do you like? I know that if an animal's really productive, but she's just a pig of a thing to handle, and I don't really want to breed more of them. So they've gotta be able to be handled, you gotta be wanting to handle them. If they're gonna get flystruck every year, that's not in there. So you've still gotta take into consideration that human side, or what do you want to do. You know, do they like pushing under fences? Or do they go, oh it's a fence, I might stay here. 'Cause that's really inconvenient when you've gotta draught sheep all the time. So things like that, and there's others, just as important as cold hard data. So that certainly aids the decision process, but you've gotta bring in that other human side and visual side as well. So really it's just helped us get where we like to go. Yeah, and that's an example.
Thanks.
- [Audience Member] Would that be worth looking at or. (too quiet)..
- [Hannah] Oh definitely, yeah. We certainly look at the survival as a segment so you know how many ewes you put in there, and how many lambs should there have been, and how many are there, and that'll give you definitely if you need to target that, and then put that figure I think in how many ewes did you join. Looking at the whole picture, 'cause I mean, lambs marked to ewes alive at lamb marking is fairly not helpful if you want to, if you've got other areas that you need to work on. You should be sent it, 'cause you're, is it Victoria?