How many times have we heard a statement that goes something along the lines of “we have filing cabinets full of science results, what we need is more extension”? I could also argue that we have boxes full of extension materials and messages and that what we need is a fundamental shift in what we believe is possible. To reach peak science is to reach peak knowledge and it is fair to say that as we learn more we continue to discover just how little we know. May government and industry support of science continue long into the future, an industry that doesn’t invest in the unknown is doomed. I’m going to write the next article on what the process of deciding on which science to fund should look like from my perspective so I will park that for now.
In the last few presentations I have delivered in Australia I have purposefully focussed on talking more about why we need to change rather than what we need to change. It is a quarter of a century since I started my career in science and extension, while there have been some important knowledge shifts over this period, many of the core principles haven’t changed a lot, yet remain poorly adopted. I thought I would flesh this out a bit and look at some of the fundamental components of a livestock business and consider their current uptake.
- Matching seasonal pasture production with animals capable of converting it into dollars
It doesn’t get much more fundamental than this in a pasture-based livestock system. This is where most of the money is made or lost. Pasture is the cheapest form of feed but it’s value changes throughout the year. An optimum system has minimum mouths on board at the ‘expensive’ times of the year when pasture growth is slow or zero and heaps of mouths on at the ‘cheap’ times when pasture growth is good. There are two key components to this, firstly, there is setting up the ‘normal’ system to utilise the pasture appropriately. This involves carefully choosing lambing and calving times to ensure that peak pasture demand is matched with peak pasture supply. There are some acceptable nuances here to ensure product-market fit, but many people get caught in the trap of chasing markets and forgetting about the fundamentals of peak supply and demand of pasture. Secondly, there are well-thought-out plans for annual short-term increases to the stocking rate, such as trading cattle, trading lambs, or grazing options for either sheep, beef cattle, or dairy cattle.
In addition to the ‘normal’ system for the ‘normal’ season, there are tactical options that need to be deployed to do your level best to match the stocking rate with carrying capacity within a given season. Modelling shows that in most years you can make money if you can flex the stocking rate to reach the carrying capacity adequately. This is a lot easier in hindsight than on the run but the fact that you’ve tried will pay off. This includes knowing which components of the ‘normal’ system that will be altered and in what order as the season progresses. You need both ‘better than average’ and ‘worse than average’ plans.
The good managers do this exceptionally well and make timely rather than reactive decisions. But, if we were to put a number on it, I think we’d land somewhere in the 15% range of producers that are active on this front and are regularly optimising the utilisation of the pasture resource. This is despite, field day after field day, workshop after workshop and webinar after webinar explaining the importance of many of the key underpinning principles.
- Adequately managing the energy requirements of breeding females throughout the year
To do this well requires a few underpinning management strategies and skill sets:
- Regular condition scoring and separation of animals based on condition score at key times
- In sheep, pregnancy scanning for multiples and managing the single-bearing and twin-bearing ewes separately for the last 60 days of pregnancy
- Pasture availability assessment throughout the year, often called Feed-on-offer in Australia and Pasture Covers in New Zealand
- Testing pasture, silage, hay or grain for digestibility, fibre content and protein
- Energy and feed budgeting to ensure individuals are getting what they need and when they need it.
Again, these things have been covered at almost every conference, field day or workshop for decades. There have been some great increases in uptake through programmes like Lifetime Ewe Management in the sheep industry of Australia but there remains plenty of potential for further uptake.
- Taking a proactive approach to animal health
Managing worms in your sheep without measuring worm egg count is like running a tractor without a fuel gauge. Sometimes you will be filling it up when it already has plenty and other times you will be on Shanks’s Pony to go and get some diesel and have the joy of bleeding the engine. Yet this is what a lot of sheep farmers do, they drench on gut feel rather than real numbers. This policy has not only contributed to millions of litres of drench being used unnecessarily over the years but also to a significant industry problem of anthelmintic resistance in worm populations. Concepts like worm egg counting and leaving some sheep in a mob undrenched to provide refugia have been around for decades yet still we see a lot of blanket drenching.
I will cover the general use of appropriate genetics in the next section but it is well worth mentioning here the opportunity to improve animal health and reduce necessary animal health treatments through selective breeding. From flies to worms and ticks to feet, there is enormous potential to breed sheep and cattle that are less reliant on chemical interventions to maintain a high welfare standard. In practice, there is a very small proportion of producers that deploy all of the strategies necessary to make the most of the genetic opportunity around animal health.
- Farming with the best genetics for the production system
There is better uptake on this front in the beef industry than the sheep industry but there is still plenty of room for improvement in both. We’ve seen the phenotype versus breeding value game play out many times across the last few decades. Without exception, livestock industries end up embracing the power that EBVs can bring while utilising the knowledge of phenotype to guide selection and keep traits in balance. Depending on which species or breed you look at you will see varying distances travelled down the journey. In some cases the arguments for and against EBVs are still being had, in others those discussions are no longer relevant.
I know this much to be true. If you want to make the most rapid genetic gain to an animal that allows a better return per hectare then you will need to use EBVs to reduce the white noise in your decision-making. This is not without risk and there have been plenty examples of flocks or herds that have ended up liking like a science experiment but combining appraisal of the phenotype with the available EBVs can achieve great things. To date, this has largely been completed with one eye on the animal and one on the data. We are also starting to see this move toward EBVs being generated on both the performance traits and the physical traits which is the most exciting advancement in the last few years.
For a business that is serious about maximising returns they must be utilising available EBVs (or ASBVs in the Australian sheep industry) to help guide their sire selections. The year-on-year compounding impact of improved genetics is not something that can be ignored. Some gain can and is often made without breeding values but it will never be as fast and as sustained as it will be if they are used to their full potential.
Again, these are not new messages, one of my first jobs out of University was to run sheep breeding value workshops in Victoria in 1999. That is 25 years ago! We are still running breeding value workshops!
What is it that we need to believe to utilise what we know to its full advantage?
There are more examples than those above, we could get into fertiliser use, paddock size, labour-saving infrastructure and many more areas, but let's face it I’ve run with my favourites and the ones that we here at neXtgen Agri support people to navigate the necessary changes.
So why is there a gap between what we know as an industry and what we do as individuals within the industry? For a while, I thought that it was because there are a number of ways to assess business success and that some people may not be operating the most profitable system because they like the way they do things and are willing to forgo some profitability for lifestyle or enjoyment. However, when we run events with a business profit focus we get more attendees than for any other topic. I then discovered a short book called ‘Who moved my cheese?”. The book is written in a style more like a nursery rhyme than a business book but the 30 million copies that have sold worldwide have been read by adults, not children. I now propose that the reason we haven’t seen whole-of-industry uptake of examples like the best practices above stems from our lack of belief that things can be different. To change what you do you must change what you believe and changing what you believe is difficult.
