New facility aims to boost sheep profits

The 21 hectare facility will be used for student and farmer training, and field days and demonstrations, as well as research.

Last week Justice Minister Amy Adams officially opened the LincolnSheep Sheep Technology Farm, which is sited on the grounds previously used for the South Island Agricultural Field Days.

Professor Tony Bywater, of the Lincoln University Faculty of Agriculture and Life Sciences, says in the last five to ten years sheep and beef farming had been on the back-foot, and it was an exciting time for research in the area as there were ''a whole series of questions'' about it.

''The central question is how do they farm profitably,'' he says.

''But done right sheep farms can compete with dairying.''

A major research focus at LincolnSheep was on maximising profitability and consistency on summer safe and summer dry production systems.

This involved increasing stock numbers to maintain pasture quality on non-irrigated land and moving sale stock to a smaller irrigated finishing block before the dry period. This would mean higher numbers and returns on the breeding unit but less water use.

Bywater says irrigating a finishing block to intensify numbers would not be capital free but would be about one third the cost of a dairy conversion, which, with nitrate levels coming under scrutiny, may not seem as attractive as it once did.
''The true opportunity cost of an irrigated lamb finishing block is not what you might get from running a dairy farm, it is what you get on your dryland breeding farm if you don't have one, '' he says.

Research would also look at ewe 'elasticity' by using a CT scanner to measure body composition over a full production season. This could give some guidelines on how the fat or protein content is changing by looking at body weight changes as they occur.

A unit at the facility was also double breeding old cull ewes after hormone treatment to test the potential of gaining more lambs in a season.

There would be work done too on identifying more efficient ewes in terms of weight of lamb weaned, which could mean big differences in productivity ''without really doing anything else'', Bywater says.

This would be coupled with the increased use of technology to monitor individual animals through electronic tagging to gain a level of management similar to that which many dairy farmers have now with their animals. They needed to become more attuned to what feed quality did to their stock, he said, and hoped this would encourage sheep farmers to use available technology to a greater extent.

There would also be research done on the effects on selective drenching, or not treating animals which showed no evidence of parasitic infestation. This would lessen the chances of breeding resistant parasites and prolong the life of the drench.
'' It might shake a few long held-attitudes,'' he said of the research.

Lincoln University Vice-Chancellor Dr Andrew West says LincolnSheep provides easy access for the University's academics and students to many of the fundamental elements of farming sheep and of producing red-meat and wool, and complemented similar ease of access to dairy farming at the Te Waihora campus.

He says Lincoln University intended to scale up findings at LincolnSheep at the Lincoln-Westoe Trust's drystock training and demonstration farm, Westoe, in the Rangitikei.