The aim of this project is to develop practical technologies and management practices that improve reproductive efficiency and that are rapidly adopted by 'early majority type' producers, or in other words, successful, pragmatic enterprises that are seeking safe incremental improvement to their business. The focus in the planning year has been to develop tools and software to improve sheep management and decision making ability, to identify the nature and extent of the lamb and weaner survival problem for different regions and enterprise types and to review current knowledge on management practices to improve survival and undertake primary market research to determine solutions to improve survival that may be compelling for different producers to incorporate into their production systems. It is intended that this process will identify a segment of producers for which a specific set of interventions to improve reproductive efficiency is most compelling and that this segment will serve as the 'beach-head' target customer.
On average, more than 20% of lambs born do not survive to weaning and a further 5 to 10% of those that survive die in the 12 months after weaning. The total cost of ewe, lamb and weaner losses is estimated to exceed $200M pa. The costs of ewe, lamb and weaner losses may be high not only in terms of immediate economic value from reduced numbers of stock for sale, but also in terms of a reduced capacity to rebuild the National flock after drought and reduced opportunities to select phenotypically superior animals.
There is little evidence of changes in reproduction efficiency in the Australian sheep industry over the past 20 years. The average marking rate for this period being approximately 77 percent, albeit there is evidence of improvement in some enterprise types in certain regions. This wastage of around 10 million lambs and weaners annually is mainly due to preventable causes such as starvation, mis-mothering, difficult births, infections and predation. Most of these causes of mortality can be overcome, but management practices such as improving nutrition at key times to 'at risk' animals to reduce these losses have not been adopted on a large scale. It is clear that many of the technologies and practices promoted by these extension programs do not represent compelling propositions to a significant proportion of the target audience. Thus we need to better understand the incentives, processes and best options for adoption in the industry and develop mechanisms by which industry can access these.
In addition to management interventions there are options to make genetic change in lamb and possibly weaner survival, although other factors such as nutrition are likely to be more important in this age group. This project will take advantage of the unique opportunity presented by the Information Nucleus Flock, and other data sources such as Sheep Genetics, to identify ’indicator’ traits linked to reproductive fitness and develop new ways of genetic evaluation of these traits. It will also use parameters derived from analysis of existing data sets to expand computer selection models to identify selection criteria that will increase reproductive performance (mainly) within the current generation, taking account of other production traits, liveweight or condition score and previous reproductive performance.
The business case for this Project is based on delivery of Outcome 2 (Improved animal welfare and increased reproduction rates) and part of Outcome 1 (Improved sheep management and decision making). These will be addressed by improved management and selection of ewes, lambs and weaners and is expected to result in 10% increase in net reproduction rates and/or productivity in more than 20% of Australian ewes with an estimated net present value of this initiative exceeding $100 million. The business case relates largely to an industry practice change target, which is reflected in the emphasis on practice change rather than research.
CJ Hawkins Homestead, University of New England, Armidale NSW 2351