People and pastures lead recovery
A series of AWI and Meat and Livestock Australia workshops have helped develop management mechanisms for drought recovery.
With support from Elders, Landmark, the NSW Department of Primary Industries (DPI), the Victorian DPI and Primary Industries and Resources SA, the workshops – in Jamestown (SA), Corowa and Parkes (NSW), and Ararat (Victoria) – covered the business and human sides of drought recovery.
Lu Hogan, AWI’s manager for sustainable production systems, says although speakers talked about cashflow, reproductive performance and nurturing pastures back to life at the events, the greatest impact was from speakers discussing the need to look after people during drought. “One of the motivating factors for holding the forums was to give producers tools to recover from the drought, but that cannot happen if they are not feeling motivated or energetic about their industry,” she says.
Greg Meaker, NSW DPI livestock officer at Goulburn, who also manages the implementation of the StockPlan® program, spoke at the Corowa forum about getting cashflow back on track. He presented a number of recovery strategies, such as breeding-up stock numbers, buying-in stock or cropping land not required for stock. Interestingly, the economics of each strategy varied little, with the end result being at least two years before profits returned.
“Planning for your recovery is going to be even more difficult than planning for drought,” he told the forum. “If you plan for drought, please plan for recovery: it’s absolutely critical. If you don’t have a plan, you can’t recover.”
Mr Meaker says producers must understand that the key risk factors in a grazing enterprise – pastures, livestock, water, fodder and people – have all been heavily affected by the drought. “Therefore focus on recovering these aspects and on how you are going to utilise them to restore cashflow.”
One of the tools presented was Lifetime Wool, an AWI-funded project to optimise Merino ewe nutrition and lambing performance.
James Whale, a sheep and wool livestock officer with the Victorian DPI who coordinates three Bestwool/Bestlamb producer groups and represents the Lifetime Wool program, says healthy ewes will contribute significantly to drought recovery by increasing lambing rates and producing offspring that go on to be productive wool producers themselves. He suggests woolgrowers need to condition-score ewes to develop appropriate management strategies leading up to lambing. Ewe condition during pregnancy has implications for productivity, through lamb survival rates, ewe mortality and lifetime impacts on the woolgrowing potential of progeny. The actual condition score of ewes at lambing is the most critical condition score target to meet. To achieve this target, the first step is to determine what condition score the ewes are in now.
Mr Whale says that managing ewes to maintain condition, instead of losing half a condition score prior to lambing, has been shown to lift twin survival by 22 per cent and single lamb survival by 14 per cent, based on Victorian data. “The cost to the enterprise in missing the ewe condition score target 3.0, at lambing, has been estimated at between $9 and $10 per ewe condition score, with any subsequent increase in ewe mortality being additional to this figure. So if producers can maintain ewe condition during pregnancy for less than the associated costs incurred by losing condition, the benefits will outweigh the costs.”
He says the difference between maintaining the condition of a 50-kilogram ewe, compared with allowing her to lose 4kg in the last 70 days of pregnancy, is about 2.25MJ of energy per day: “Even under the worse-case scenario, where grain’s at $300 a tonne, and she needs to be fed right up to lambing, you can make it pay.”
Information was also presented at each forum on nurturing pastures back to life, reducing risk, and wool through to market.
More information: www.lifetimewool.com.au; speaker notes from the forums are at www.wool.com.au/events
Image: Victorian Department of Primary Industries sheep and wool livestock officer James Whale, left, with Burrumbuttock woolgrower Lyle Burns of ‘Yaralla’.
Photo: Kellie Penfold
Return to Beyond the Bale Issue 28 index page.