Livestock tech talks season 3 – focus farms

Host: Welcome to this Red Meat and Wool Growth Program podcast brought to you by PIRSA.

Drew: If it helps our land, helps our productivity and helps our people, then it's a good business decision. That's the mantra of Jane Kellock who, with her husband Greg and son Sam, run a mixed farm at Farrell Flat in the mid-north of the state. They've applied this philosophy to improving the productivity of their 1,000 strong Merino flock. Using a range of technologies combined with electronic identification tags, they've seen improvements, like their wool cut has changed from seven to eight kilos a head for mature sheep; the number of ewes mated and then rearing a lamb has gone from 60% to 83%; and the number of dry ewes has been reduced from 11% down to 3.7%. They're remarkable results. And in this season of tech talks, we are looking at the Red Meat and Wool Focus Farms. And Jane joins me in the PIRSA studio. Jane, thanks for your time.

Jane Kellock: Thank you for having me.

Drew: Jane, first of all, tell us about your property. What do you produce?

Jane: We have Poll Merino ewes and produce Poll Merino lambs for mate and for wool. We've gone down a line of being an unmulesed Merino business and have done that for about 15 years. And we also have a cropping enterprise and we also have a land feedlot where we buy in lambs and put them through that to fatten for the meat market.

Drew: That's a cool production. Why did you go down this path Jane?

Jane: A couple of reasons. One is for the purpose that we believe that's what the consumer is wanting. I've always been a great believer in knowing what our market is and producing something that our consumer wants to buy. But the other reason is production. We found that by not mulesing our lambs we were having much better production, that the lambs weren't taking that heat at landmarking time and they were able to recover a lot quicker and our weaning rates went up. So, to me there was a plus plus.

Drew: This Jane seems to be all a broader reflection of what you've labeled as precision management. You've put a lot of technology in on your property to try and improve production percentages, wherever possible. Just describe some of the technologies you've actually put in to do that.

Jane: With our sheep enterprise we've used EIDs in all of our sheep. So even into a percentage of our lambs that go through the feedlot because we just find it easier to be able to manage those animals and to understand what they're doing. I think it's probably seven years ago now we made the decision after going to a couple of LambEx conferences that we felt that we couldn't afford not to understand what our lambing business and what our ewe business was doing. We felt we knew but we didn't really understand, you know, what all the data could tell us. So that was the reason that we made that decision. You know, like most producers, we can't afford to have freeloaders on our farm. If a ewe isn't producing a lamb, then she's not here. It's just important that we understood what was happening within our business.

Jane: That's around wool cuts we sheer six monthly. We needed to know that the ewes that we were producing, you know, were able to do that. We measure that and to do that we needed to have EIDs to understand age individual animals. We need to know that the condition score of our ewes was at a level where they could produce a lamb. We needed to understand that our lambs were meeting our production goals as far as weight gain was concerned. So that was another use of EIDs. And it just for management, you know pregnancy scanning, we could put the use back into one mob, but we still knew which animal was a twin bearer and which was a single bearer. We could quickly draft them up when the time came to feed those twin bearing ewes to a standard that would raise a twin lambs.

Jane: Then of course at the other end of it, we wanted to know which ewes had raised the lambs. They were pregnant to start with but had they raised a lamb? We went and dry them at landmarking as well. If they didn't raise a lamb they were also gone. And, you know, and that's one technology and all of those ways to manage those ewes. It just made it a very simple decision for us to buy them. It is a bit of an investment to start with, but you can do it slowly too Drew. You don't need to go and buy it for all your ewes straight away if that's not what you want to do, but you can start it with your lambing. You can make a conscious decision that, you know, in four or five years time, you'll have all your sheep with an EID.

Jane: The other thing that we bought of course, was the technology that you need to read EIDs. We bought a scale head what we felt was the best one and easy to use because we have a motto within our business that it has to be good for production, has to be good for our land, but it also has to be good for our people. If it was going to be really difficult for our people to use then that's not something that we want on farm either. You have to consider all of those things before you made decisions about which way you go. We bought a Tru-Test scale head and Tru-Test reader, and we just used the wand and we use the wand in a combi clamp, and it's a very simple set up, but it works really well.

Drew: Jane that's a great example of putting in EID and basically it's traceability for everything, but that's a lot of data as well though, Jane to manage. What are you doing to pull all that together and paint a meaningful picture?

Jane: Yeah, so we use a program called Stockbook and, you know, a lot of people try and do it with Excel, which I'm not clever enough to do that. And I don't have the time. One of the, I think the biggest mistakes that people make is that they don't use their data enough. And you need to find a way where it's really easy and simple to use. We went down the line of Stockbook because would use their programs before, and I understood how the program worked. So that was a pretty simple decision for us. And we collect all the data, that data goes back into Stockbook against that animal. And then you pull out the information that you need.

Jane: There are ways to sort it and get the data that you need. For example, we've just been going through our hoggets and we do a visual class of our hoggets. And then we do wool test of those ewe Hogwarts. And we get their data to go back on there. And then I rank them. I rank them in order of their mate traits there. We get, we do a condition score of them. We weigh them, we do a visual class, we do a wool test and we do a wool weight. And we take all of that data. And then I rank them and then we keep the best productive animals that we can to go forward into a ewe flock.

Jane: Another use of data is we had to sell some ewes last year. So, I wanted to make sure that if I had ewes that had produced twins for three years in a row, well, I didn't want to get rid of those ewes. They're the ewes that I want to ensure that I keep. Now how do I know that, that ewe has had twins for the last three years without having that data? I also want ewes that don't lose a lot of weight when they're pregnant, nor do I want ewes that, you know, drop away in condition. I had three criteria that I wanted to select those ewes on. We did that and that's worked really well for us.

Drew: Jane that's a phenomenal amount of data that you're collecting and applying very judiciously. In terms of applying, what have you seen in terms of improvements in production or margins that you as an enterprise are able to make?

Jane: Yeah, we're seeing ewes that are keeping condition, we're seeing ewes that are producing more lambs. And I would love to think that we can continue to improve in that space. What we're also seeing is that we would like to increase our fertility rate. That's not at a level that I'm happy with. I can say for example that our maidens, the level of fertility they are at compared to our 5 year old ewes, the fertility is there. So over time we've seen ewe lambs that have done really well in the spring that they've been born on are the ewes that are the most fertile going forward. It's about keeping condition on those sheep during their whole lifetime. If ewe hoggets take a bit of a hit we've seen that, that has really reflected in their fertility rates going forward.

Jane: I think you can get lots of data and you can get lots of information, but depending on where your focus is. Our focus is very much on wool production, making sure that we've got wool length and that we've got wool weight there, so that we're getting the best product that we can get for wool. But we also want it on an animal that is high in reproduction and will keep as many lambs alive as we possibly can. That's the data that we focus in on.

Drew: Jane, a lot of these technologies can be off putting for some because they're expensive to implement. I understand you actually occasionally lease some of the equipment, is that correct?

Jane: Yeah, we certainly do. Like, I don't want to buy an OFDA machine to do my wool testing. We get a contractor in to do that. We get a contractor in to do a pregnancy scanning. We hire the equipment from Cousins Merino Services in Burra to do our wool testing and our wool weighing. There are ways that you can do it without it being a huge cost to your business. I mean, to me, your scale head, the EIDs that you use. And probably, I think it's got to the stage for producers now to have some form of a sheep handler to make things easier for yourself and your people. I think is really, really important. They are the key technologies that we felt would make a big difference to our business and the rest we can access from somewhere else.

Drew: Jane you've put an enormous amount of technology into your property. What are your plans for the future? Are there any technologies on the horizon that you think you are going to use or hope to implement that will make a difference to the way you operate?

Jane: We don't have an auto draft. So that's one of the things that we've looked at. At this stage we can't justify the cost within our set up. That may change going forward. Our business is my husband and myself and also our son, Sam, is involved in the business. He is the one that's going to be making the decisions about the technologies going forward and he'll look at that and assess it to see where he thinks there's benefit for us for our business. One of the other things we've looked at and discussed has been a walkover weighing for the feedlot. Where lambs would automatically weigh themselves and then we would draft them off when they were to a certain weight. So that would save a lot of time and energy.

Jane: That's another option that we've looked at. The other option that we are looking at is developing an automatic feed mix for the feedlot so that we can adjust the levels of grain and pellets and legume that goes into the mix to make that easier. There's a fair bit of time that goes into mixing all of that. So that would be another time-saving that we could do, and we feel that there would be some benefits. So, there's always options. And there's always things that you're looking at, but yeah, that would be one of them.

Drew: Jane 20 years ago. Did you ever envisage that you'd become part data farmer as well as farmer?

Jane: No, no but I guess in some of the roles that I do within industry, you see all the latest technologies and all the latest researchers and opportunities. We've been exposed to some things that probably other producers wouldn't have been. And I guess that's created a bit of an opportunity for us to assess that within our business. Like I said, it's got to meet the benefits of people and productivity as well as your property and your land. So, and I guess we've just found that we can do things hopefully a bit smarter that helps our land, helps our productivity and helps our people. If it means managing a bit of data, it's really not that hard.

Drew: Well, Jane Kellock, it sounds like you are working a great do smarter and certainly improving the productivity of your farm in the process. To find out more about the systems being used by the Kellocks on their farm, go to the Red Meat and Wool section of the PIRSA website, where you can find out more about focus farms. Jane thanks for joining me in the PIRSA podcast studio.

Jane: Thank you.

Speaker (14:32):

The Red Meat and Wool Growth Program is an initiative of the Department of Primary Industries and Regions and supported by Meat and Livestock Australia, SA Sheep and Cattle Industry Funds and Sheep Connect SA.

[End of transcript.]

Speaker: Welcome to this Red Meat and Wool Growth Program podcast, brought to you by PIRSA.

Drew: Data management is not a skillset that usually comes first to mind when talking about farming. Perhaps though, that's changing. Scott and Fleur Harlock are from a dairying background, where individual animal management is an important part of getting the best out of a dairy. To do that successfully requires data management skills. It's something they've applied to their 1,400 hectare sheep and cattle property at Bool Lagoon in the south-east of South Australia. The property has been selected as a focus farm for the Red Meat and Wool Growth Program to demonstrate the adoption and use of livestock technologies on farm.

Drew: G'day, I'm Drew Radford and in this season of Tech Talks we're looking at the Red Meat and Wool Focus
Farms, and Scott joins me now in the PIRSA studio. Scott, thanks for your time.

Scott Harlock: Thanks Drew.

Drew: Scott. I understand you've got a background in dairy.

Scott: That was a family farm we had down at Warrnambool. Over a period of years there, we built the herd up to about 1,250 cows we milked across three different farms and I think that's where our like for technology, which we've implemented now across our beef and sheep operation, has come from – down running all the dairy cows. It was just par for the course with all the milk recording and to be able to individually ID (identify) all the cows.

Drew: Yeah, I would imagine that's exactly the case. So you've really taken some of that individual animal management and brought it across to a sheep and beef cattle operation.

Scott: Yes, that's right and especially more for the beef and we've only just started to do it now for the sheep.

Drew: Why have you actually done that?

Scott: For our type of business it was more to, to be compliant with the EU, so we can participate in that program. Found it a lot easier if all the stock came into the yards and you might as well, cause you've got the electronic tag in their ear for the cattle. You might as well record them and if we just maintain that we found now with the herd of 280 odd cows, we calved down here in the beef herd. So each time they come through the yards, we just make sure that they're maintained, the tags are all in their ears, they've all got a management tag and it just stemmed from there and it just flows so easily and simply across all our electronic platforms. But it was more that we can manage the information that we can get off them, and without the information, you know, you still can't make a good management choice Drew.

Drew: We'll drill down into the information in a second, but you've said, okay, we're using the tags as the starting block for that information gathering, but there's a whole range of technology you've employed to utilise those tags. What's some of that involve?

Scott: So, we've always upgraded our scale system. I can remember we started with an older Rudway set when they first came out, then we progressed up to now I run a TruTest or a Datamars XR5000 and their wand, use their Bluetooth technology and load platforms, and then all that will speak into either my financial software as well and it also pushes across to another management program, which I use, which is called Cool Collect.

Drew: Primary producers these days have got to have such a broad range of skillsets and half of what you've described there, a few people will be thinking strewth, they need to be an IT Manager as well now these days, but has it been an easy process to implement with assistance?

Scott: Oh, I don't know, I tend to sort of gravitate towards the tech and I find it quite simple, but I can understand there'll be a few other people who find it quite hard. I've found employing younger staff too, always makes it pretty simple because they can seem to sort the problems for me. Or as with the TruTest gear, I find that even just to talk to the rep and they've been fantastic. I can't really fault the backup service I've got for that and if you've got a problem, most times they're hardly just a phone call away.

Drew: It sounds like a lot of technology. Is it expensive to implement?

Scott: I think what I would have spent on it would be around about 15 to 17,000 in the last three or four years, but I think the returns that I get back from that outweighs my cost. You always all get some value back on if you buy good equipment, so you'll always get some resale, you won't, you won't get your full costs back naturally, but even just to monitor the weights of our up and coming breeding heifers, which we'll run through an AI program, if you don't get two or three of those in calf, cause you've got the weight's wrong or they're starting to slip and you know, 15 to 17000 bucks is, um, quite cheap.

Drew: Seventeen grand then doesn't actually sound an insurmountable hurdle considering some of your other infrastructure costs, I imagine. Technology out in the field though, how do you go with the robustness of it? You know, a laptop in the field is not the natural domain of a laptop. Let's be honest.

Scott: Well off the good old eBay again, I found a Toshiba Toughbook, which is designed to be wet or covered in dust and I can see it's sitting here on my desk now it's all looking pretty beaten up, but I bought that secondhand for 800 bucks and that's what we use in the yards. Doesn't really matter if it gets dropped or stood on, or wet. It seems to survive and if you're really worried about at the end of the day, you can plug your phone into it and upload all the day's data straight away into the cloud, which is just great for us.

Drew: You mentioned the cloud there Scott. I imagine internet connectivity is pretty important to make all this talk, so you're in a 4G footprint. Is that really important to make that work?

Scott: Oh, I don't think so. I don't think it's that important, but it does help. We've just started a switch across to using apps on our phone now, so the staff can record the livestock movements around the farm, which is great, but if you don't have phone access, I'm sure it makes it harder, but there's these new products and devices around that you can buy to either boost your phone signal or just increase your WiFi signal around the farm.

Drew: It's not just the beef cattle side though, that you've been applying this to. I understand you're also applying it to your sheep operation?

Scott: That's right. For the last few years we've been inserting the electronic tags into all the sheep at birth, and it's really only just of late, the habit we've started to record their weights and to see their weight gains and not just on a mob basis. On an individual basis as well. Next ewe pregnancy scanning that we're going to do, I'll start to record the data against that tag as well, so I can see if she's a single or a twin and maintain some history with that ewe. So you can see that if she, if she's come through pregnant and then there at lamb weaning time, if she still read a lamb, so you can wet and dry that ewe, and record that data just to see if she does take the pregnancy right through or each year, is she only single, single, single, or multiple, multiple, single.

Scott: With that sort of information, you can start to make informed management choices on if things get tough or dry, which mobs of sheep go, which mobs of sheep or which individual sheep are actually gaining weight. Whether they're going up or whether they're actually to take a lamb right through. I think that is important for us now, and to be able to just record all that data Drew.

Drew: From what you're describing there, Scott, I assume that this isn't an instant one year result. You're looking at long-term trends for some of the data that you're gathering to make it actually useful. To make your operation far more focused and streamlined and successful.

Scott: Yes, that's right, and really my only regret is I probably should've been doing the sheep information a lot sooner, rather than later, but that just comes through with the ability to, to afford the new infrastructure or the new equipment and to have staff trained enough to do it and to have time to do it as well. It is rather time consuming, but once you start to get them into the system and you get a workflow worked out, it really wouldn't add that much extra work, throughout the year.

Drew: Bringing staff on board, you raise an interesting point there, I imagine, yes, there's a training component, but is there an excitement factor for them as well once it's so up and running?

Scott: The guys and girls that I have got, they're really keen. They're young and they're always interested in the kill sheets and the weights we get back, how the livestock are doing, improvements in their weight gain, you know, can they do better? Are we feeding the right stuff? Are we, you know, are we moving them to the right feeds? And it's really nice from an owner's point of view that they're all so excited, like I am, you know, when the stock do well and when the feed's going well, and they've got a vested interest in seeing things perform well on farm.

Drew: It must be such a quantum shift from going from, well, there's a bit of a gut feel here. We've been feeding them this, we think they look good, to actually having irrefutable data saying, well, this has been the result.

Scott: Yes. I put the staff through the lifetime ewe course, which is just fantastic for me, because you can actually sit down and calculate the amount of feed required for your sheep. It's just not on the 14th of February each year we'll start to feed them 100 grams every second day. You can bring the sheep in. You can weigh them. You can draft them into mobs like we have now.

Scott: We've got a mobile fat and lights and the light ewes, they get fed more. They're on the better pasture and the guys can see, you know, if when we bring them back around and see their weight gains now, because every individual animal's tagged and we can actually see it on a per sheep basis, and they seem to enjoy that they've made the right decision because I'll always try to involve them in as much as we can. And at the end, end of the day, it will make my workload a bit simpler if I don't have to have as much input, they just know what to do.

Drew: Scott, what about down the track? Are there any technologies on the horizon that you're keen to implement into your operation?

Scott: For me on a sheep basis, I'd like to actually parent up all the calves and the lambs and match them back to a ewe and a sire. Our thoughts at the moment for the cattle is to DNA test all the calves each year and I do the same to the bulls. We can actually match them back to a sire. So over a period of time over four or five years, you'll start to build up a pretty good database and then you'll have a DNA result for the dams as well. So you can actually match the calf back to the dam and the sire, and then I'd like to link all our kill data back and our weight data and just see if we are going in the right direction with sire selection and what we're starting to look for in the EBVs (estimated breeding values) when we do buy bulls.

Drew: Scott Harlock, it's amazing technology you're using. It sounds like you're not only just a livestock manager now, you're a data manager. It certainly sounds like you're on the path to improving the productivity of your farm.

Drew: To find out more about the systems being used on your property, listeners can go to the Red Meat and Wool section of the PIRSA website where you can find out more about the focus farms. But for now, Scott Harlock, thank you very much for joining me in the PIRSA podcast studio.

Scott: Thank you, Drew, it's been a pleasure.

Speaker: The Red Meat and Wool Growth Program is an initiative of the Department of Primary Industries and Regions. and supported by Meat and Livestock, Australia, SA Sheep and Cattle Industry Funds and Sheep Connect SA

[End of transcript.]

Speaker: Welcome to this Red Meat and Wool Growth Program Podcast, brought to you by PIRSA.

Drew: Data, it used to be a word relegated to the IT industry. However, today it's a word that's used heavily on farms trying to find new ways of improving productivity. McPiggery is one of those. It's a 19,500 hectare business in the Southern Mallee of South Australia. It's owned and managed by the McMahon family.

Drew: The business has been selected as a focus farm for the Red Meat and Wool Growth Program, as a way to demonstrate the adoption and use of livestock technologies on farm. In this season of Tech Talks we're looking at the red meat and wool focus farms. Dwayne Simon, from McPiggery, joins me in the PIRSA studio.

Drew: Dwayne, thanks for your time.

Dwayne: G’day Drew, how you going today?

Drew: Thanks, I'm well Dwayne. Now, the property that you work on is called McPiggery, but pigs are not the sole focus because I understand you're the broad acre livestock manager. Tell me a little bit more about the farm.

Dwayne: We've got a 650 sow piggery, which is probably our main business, and then we've got three enterprises of scale, I suppose, like we crop 5,000 hectares and we've got eight to 10,000 ewes as well. So, it's a good spread, I suppose.

Drew: That seems to be quite a variation in sheep numbers. Why is that?

Dwayne: We don't really have a set number because the seasons are so variable, but we hover between 6,000 and 10,000 ewes, season depending because just trying to look after that grand cover and not overfeed as well. Just a bit of a floating number but that seems to be the only way we can manage the variable climate at the minute.

Drew: From what I understand about your operation, you keep sheep and cropping paddocks very separate. Why is that?

Dwayne: Yeah, we've got that bit more marginal country that we were trying to continuous crop. We've moved away from that and expanded our sheep enterprise on that lesser ground and we've tried to acquire better cropping ground just for yield security and all that. But yeah, turning more of that marginal country into grazing country.

Drew: So that cropping land, Dwayne, is that what you're using as feed as well?

Dwayne: Yeah. So that grows all our grain and hay for our sheep and our piggery, so try to valuate that all throughout through our livestock.

Drew: So, Dwayne, in terms of wool, what are you focusing on aiming to produce there?

Dwayne: We're doing a six monthly shearing, we've been doing that for about five years now. It's been a really good management tool just for managing lamby ewes. You don't have a ewe with a heap of wool on it, and it's a bit easier to manage the ewes with six months shearing. But, we're aiming to hit that 70 mil of 19 to 20 micron wool off our ewes. If we can cut three and a half to four kilos every six months that's our target with the wool side of it, for sure.

Drew: Dwayne, a moment ago you said look, you've got a bit of a floating number when it comes to sheep. How important then is introducing new technology to try and make that number more manageable and also more profitable?

Dwayne: If we can use that eID technology to notify your most productive sheep, if you do have to reduce numbers you're not selling your most productive sheep off. When it does come time when it has rained or whatever, hopefully that lambing percentage would be a fraction higher and we can jump back straight into high production mode.

Drew: So, what sort of data then are you keeping on the sheep to make those decisions?

Dwayne: More that maternal data, like sheep that were born a twin. So, when we're pregnancy testing we'll scan the ewes and we'll know that life history of that ewe, like if she's had twins one year, then a single, or she said twins then missed. Or a ewe that's had twins every year, just so we can identify those high productive sheep and use that information to drive our flock forward.

Drew: The technology then is in the tag that lets you identify that, but then you need other facilities associated, like auto-drafters, I'm assuming?

Dwayne: Yeah. So we've had an auto-drafter sheep handler for a long time, even before we had eID tags, just for when we wean or lambs we just put everything through and process them. Because you can get variable Drench Guns and stuff like that if you really want to get into it, but just have two Drench Guns set up when you're doing the light lambs and the heavy lambs with what they actually need through your auto-drafter and stuff, which is a cost saving. And then we're just working towards adapting the electronic tag through it for sorting out information that you've got in the tags, for sure.

Drew: How do you see that being applied further down the track then, Dwayne?

Dwayne: I'd be a great tool going forward because you can have your sheep walking to your handler, or whatever, when you're classing and bang that information, that lifetime data from the animal, will be on a screen. You can go she's raised twins every year. She's not the fattest animal, but she's not the fattest because of this. It gives a reason behind how the animal looks, I suppose. [inaudible 00:05:10] that big fat ewe that never raises a lamb, that looks a million dollars, but she hasn't produced any much at all.

Drew: Dwayne, in terms of the tech though, I mean, suddenly you've got EID, there's a lot of data coming through. Are you managing that data yourself or are you looking to a third party to try and help you sort all that out and just get the information you need to make decisions from?

Dwayne: So, we've been hosting the Sire Evaluation for the last two years. There's a lot of data collection and entry that comes with that. Once we get more into it I'll... I can't justify because I'm not that good with it to do all that work. I'd rather pay a expert to smash it out. I can get the information and then use it straight away instead of me getting lost in it all, or not getting it done.

Drew: Have you got any other plans to further integrate technology in terms of the sheep operation, as you move forward, Dwayne?

Dwayne: Yeah. We've been working on it for the last few years, just a bit of a water management system. Just electronically recording water levels in tanks just to give us a bit of water security, because our properties are a bit geographically spread. So, I've got tank monitors on every farm. I can just jump on my phone and have a look through, and you know you've got water, you can see how much you've used. It is pretty interesting as well because you can work out how much your stock are drinking per day on a hot day or a humid day, or whatever as well. But it just gives you that peace of mind when you're away. You can jump on, you know you've got water and it's all working.

Drew: You mentioned there peace of mind, Dwayne, that must be quite a liberating thing. It actually lets you get away from the property. Whereas other times you would probably go yeah, I can't be away at this moment. That's got to be a positive for you, and a bit of lifestyle balance, work-life balance.

Dwayne: Yeah, definitely. I've had it before, like you're away on a really hot day and something has gone wrong. But you can't get there, but you can get someone else to go check something for you as well. Or if it is real bad you can drop what you're doing and fix the problem as well. Where if you didn't know and you got home two days later and you've had a problem for three days, it's too late.

Drew: Dwayne, in terms of getting that sort of data back, have you got the mobile phone network to carry those signals? Or is that further technology that you've had to invest in on the property?

Dwayne: We're pretty lucky, we've put the monitors on. And there is companies out there. There's more and more getting on the market for water telemetry measurement, and all that sort of stuff. But we rely on gravity so all our tanks are on hills. We're lucky that way that we do have service on our hills, for sure. But that's probably the downfall. It would be good to be able to monitor troughs, but all the troughs are in the gullies on the heavy ground when we don't have a lot of service on them spots. That's probably the biggest downfall, but them hot days you got to go clean the trough anyway, so you've got to be there on them extreme days.

Drew: Well, in terms of water, Dwayne, where are you actually getting that from? And is that an important part of being able to produce where you are actually located in the first place?

Dwayne: Yeah, definitely. We're very lucky. We've got artesian water underground and quality's good enough for livestock. If that wasn't there we'd be relying on mains and that's more of a cost. It is pretty marginal country so we're pretty blessed that we've got that artesian water there.

Drew: Lastly, Dwayne, how did you become part of the Red Meat and Wool Focus Farms? And what do you get out of being part of it?

Dwayne: We'd been running this Sire Evaluation and I'd helped with some sheep connect stuff in the past, and just wanted to try and share the information which we're going through learning at the moment. Because there was no one with the information when we started, so if we can all learn from each other's positives and mistakes, it's going to be really beneficial to the industry, for sure.

Drew: Dwayne, I have no doubt that the industry is benefiting from you sharing your knowledge and experience.

Drew: To find out more about the systems being used on McPiggery go to the Red Meat and Wool section of the PIRSA website, where you can find out all about the Focus Farms.

Drew: Dwayne, thanks for joining me in the PIRSA studio.

Dwayne: That's too easy. Thanks, Drew.

[End of transcript.]

Speaker 1: Welcome to this Red Meat and Wool Growth Program podcast, brought to you by PIRSA.

Drew Radford: New technology on a farm is a wonderful thing if it increases profit, productivity, and importantly, saves time. However, it's not always that wonderful if you're one of the early adopters going through the learning curve of trying to make it all work. A person who's been at the leading edge of that curve is Robert Pocock, who has a mixed farm in the Mallee. G’day, I'm Drew Radford and Robert joins me in the PIRSA studio to discuss some of the gains he's made from introducing new technology to his farm. Robert, thanks for your time.

Robert Pocock: Yeah, no worries Drew.

Drew Radford: Robert, your property's in the Mallee, but whereabouts?

Robert Pocock: So we're at Lameroo, at Lampata, which is 20 kilometres northwest of Lameroo. Yeah, just in the typical Mallee country.

Drew Radford: What are you running on the property, Robert?

Robert Pocock: So, we've got a Poll Merino stud and commercial flock, as well as a grain enterprise.

Drew Radford: Now, you're almost local. You've been there a couple of generations I understand?

Robert Pocock: Yeah. My great-grandfather and now I've got my boys. Well, they're only two and four, but yeah, they're kicking around now as well.

Drew Radford: Wow. So what, five generations?

Robert Pocock: Yeah. Fifth-generation now. Yep.

Drew Radford: This generation, your generation, has seen a dramatic change in terms of the amount of technology that you're able to bring onto a property.

Robert Pocock: Yeah, it's a bit scary, actually. It's great but it's also a challenging process to go through.

Drew Radford: Now, you've adopted a range of technologies, but before we drill down into them, what are a couple of the things that you're hoping to achieve by bringing on some new technology onto the property?

Robert Pocock: I probably just want to pick up the efficiencies and make work easier. So, for staff and ourselves to be able to do high-quality work and do a lot with the data we would get that we would've never done because it's just too hard to manage.

Drew Radford: Well, in terms of managing the data or capturing the data, or both?

Robert Pocock: Well, capturing the data is probably the easier part. And then making decisions based from it is probably the bit where we'll make the gains, I suppose, is where the money will be made.

Drew Radford: Now, in terms of applying technology, I understand you got into EID, but that was really for the stud side of the business, was it?

Robert Pocock: Yes and no. When we did it, we sort of jumped into everything because we've been fleece weighing, body weighing, and wool testing for probably the best part of 40 years. And we were doing that up till probably 10 years ago with just visual tags. And we're getting a lot of errors with tags being read, etc., and tag retention and what have you. So you had to start looking at it and eventually we've sort of landed on where we are. And yeah, just been evolving that since with small changes and trying to get the functions in the yards a lot more consistent, etc. So when we have sheep come through, we know good performers, poor performers, pregnancy status over their life, etc, those sorts of things in the commercial flock. And then in the stud, I guess we're making a lot of our decisions off of the data that we've collected across the whole farm, or the whole flock, and then turning that into selecting animals on their genetic potential and also their visual characteristics that we prefer.

Drew Radford: You mentioned there originally you were doing it manually and you've gone over to eID. What are some of the key technologies you've got in terms of applying that?

Robert Pocock: Probably the biggest one we did was when we first got into it. We went straight in, like we didn't really hold back. We bought a good second-hand sheep handler, come auto drafter, an older Racewell Te Pari handler, and then got a stick reader and then some software and computers, etc. Yeah, good examples of what we've done is when we used to class our hoggets, it would take two days to do a thousand new hoggets, just by the time you'd gone through, read the e-tags, marked the sheep, drafted them off into their groups manually, and then bring them back to have a look at specific groups of them to generate the flocks we wanted, etc. Now, we're drafting them and start classing them within three hours.

Drew Radford: That's a massive labour saving.

Robert Pocock: That one's being the biggest one. But then, on the other hand, now that we've got the eID and all the rest of it when we're weaning everything, every animal on the farm gets a weaning weight, its health record put against it, so every time they get a treatment it's recorded and then we know what and where and how they're being treated, if any animals have got a withholding period, or if they've had a fault at some stage, or they've had an antibiotic or something like that, if they've had an incident somewhere along the line, and they're just probably better for general management. And it's just things that are now happening in standard practice that we probably weren't even doing beforehand, that most farmers would probably like to do, and if we can do it without even realizing we're doing it, it's a positive.

Drew Radford: So you're basically talking about a lot better welfare management there and final productivity outcomes, aren't you?

Robert Pocock: Oh, certainly.

Drew Radford: And when you're able to narrow it down almost to a per-animal basis, that's what you're talking about.

Robert Pocock: Yeah, certainly. And also the time that they've spent in the yard. We can draft sheep and ewes and lambs at 600-700 an hour pretty well on average off of the data. So, whereas before the sheep could have been in for two or three days, or a day either side of what we were doing and what we'd have was they're off water, or a pregnant ewe, for example. But now they're in, they're drafted, we've gone through and got the animals out we want, and then gotten them back onto food and water, either out in the paddock or into containment. It's got to be much better for them, and us as well. And we can work with the weather. If it's hot, we just get it done early in the morning or in the evening and all that sort of stuff in summer. And if it's wet, then you pick your days when it's wet because you know... Or not wet, so you know that you can get it in and out and done.

Drew Radford: These technologies. Do they also help in regards to making a consistent approach across your properties if you've got multiple people working with your flock?

Robert Pocock: Well, that's a good question. Yes and no, I think. There's a little bit to learn with setting them up and using the software and the machines and what have you. It’s not as simple as just... we've all learned to ride a bike, but when you first did it, it was probably challenging. So, there's always the steps of education and processes to do it. Yeah, we always find it quite difficult, a lot of challenges sometimes with connectivity of machinery because a lot of it talks with Bluetooth or whatever else. And each time you turn it off and on it changes how it connects and whatever else. And if you use the same machine every day, day-in, day-out, probably not too many dramas, but sometimes it can go for a couple of months before we go back and do something with it and you just go, "Ah, not again." But then once you get it going, it doesn't... Sometimes the half an hour, a bit of heartache when you're starting, you can quite easily make up for it with the efficiency of the equipment at the time you’re using it.

Drew Radford: So what you're talking about there, Robert is a lot of complex technology that I'm assuming you've had to have a big learning curve. Is that all been you by yourself and a lot of slapping hand on the forehead or have you been able to get some help in places as well?

Robert Pocock: Well, I would have to give a lot of credit to the company that we use the software for, is Sapien's KoolCollect because they've got a great support system on the phone, etc., which yes, we do lean on them at times for when we're having trouble getting equipment to talk, etc. But it has been challenging. Like, when we first started, probably 10 years ago, there was no one really locally that you could go and see and talk to you too much about it. If they were, they were just dabbling around on the edges of the tech. Now I feel as though that we've sort of got it to a point where, yeah we're running it pretty easily now.

Drew Radford: What about down the track, Robert? What are you looking to bring on board to your property to make things work even better in terms of technology into the future?

Robert Pocock: Oh, tech into the future. Some things will be simple as just DNA testing of the flock and individual animals, and then going right probably down to the telemetry and surveillance of water systems. So we can monitor if we've got leaks and efficiencies in water levels and what have you., so we can then know before a Friday afternoon that there’s been a broken trough and we've got to go out and find water on the weekend and whatever else and fix it. It'd be much better to know and be alerted that there's an issue occurring before we pick it up.

Drew Radford: Is that access to data networks that's holding some of that stuff back for you, Robert?

Robert Pocock: Probably the fact that there's so many players in the game, and smaller players, and what system is going to be best for me? Which one's going to be expandable? Which one's good value? Merely the return on investment, so to speak. Obviously, we've all got budget constraints and you can't go and spend X amount of dollars on some things when almost what they're doing is something that you can do when you're driving around probably checking stock anyway. So we need to be careful what we're doing. Distance of territory here on our property is not too bad. Like, we're about 35 kms from furthest point to furthest point on six farms, but we're generally over them every couple of days, doing something. So yeah, you do see things happening.

Drew Radford: There's so many software solutions and you do a mixed farming enterprise as well. You do a lot of cropping. So, do you find anything that meets all your needs or have you got to be across a whole range of software and tech?

Robert Pocock: I think it's the biggest problem that a mixed farm faces at the moment is that there's no farm monitoring platform such as Agworld, AgriWebb that covers both the livestock and the grain enterprises really well. They're either really good with livestock or really good with grain, and they have big weaknesses in pasture and livestock records or cropping records, etc., and chemical treatments in paddocks and fertilisings and stuff like that. So, yeah, there's a big space there for someone to merge the two together, I think. And yeah, they will probably be very successful if they can make that happen.

Drew Radford: Robert, we've talked a lot about tech that's related to EID. What are some of the other livestock tech that you're using to improve your productivity?

Robert Pocock: So yeah, we do muscle scanning, wool after testing, and pregnancy testing. That's pretty standard practice, preg scanning, nowadays, but yeah, we've been doing that for a long time, and the muscle scanning, etc. So that's the other tech that is probably not necessarily seen as tech, but it's actually the component that helps with the genetic gain and all the rest. So, we can monitor what stock are doing what and improving the animals' generally performance over multi-generations.

Drew Radford: And your eye-muscle testing. Is that mainly for your stud flock?

Robert Pocock: Yeah. So the eye-muscle testing. Yeah, we've been doing that with the stud flock for a while. Just trying to increase the meat characteristics and improve all of that and the fat and the covering and stuff on the Merinos we've got. We've been targeting a dual purpose flock for a long, long time and I guess we're validating the animals in that that actually are by testing that.

Drew Radford: Robert, it sounds a bit like you're flying the Starship Enterprise out there in the Mallee country. What do you reckon your great-grandfather would say if he could have a bit of a gander at it?

Robert Pocock: Sometimes, I think he'd actually just say calm down a bit. There's a lot going on. And I think that myself at times, but we've just got to do what we can to keep moving forwards. And a lot of this is probably not making heaps more money, but it's making our life probably better and I can justify why we're making decisions because it's actually got an objective measurement rather than actually being an assumption.

Drew Radford: Well, yeah, your outcomes are based on science, so you can at least go back and ratify it all. But you mention they're making your life better. That's got to be important as well? You talk about water monitoring technology there. That's got to give you the confidence down the track to just get a break from the property, surely?

Robert Pocock: Well, that’s yeah, will be great. Granted, we do have to clean water troughs here regularly anyway with a dusty environment at times, but it'd just be nice to know that " Ah, yep, something's gone wrong.", I can send someone over to fix it and look at it. Or you just know that… You get your alert in the morning when you're having a coffee on holidays and yep, everything's all right, the blokes are going to have a good day. So that'd be good. Yeah, I can see a lot of stuff happening in that space that'd be good. The satellite imagery, I'm really excited to see what we can do with that, Drew. That'd be lovely to be able to go, "Yep, the sheep have been grazing this paddock here, here, and here, and then go back and have a look and see what they're actually eating and why they're into that patch more than others and what's the reasoning for it.

Drew Radford: Well, Robert, I'm almost tired from listening to the enormous amount of technology you've brought onto your property. Everything from satellite technology to cutting-edge water monitoring through to individual animal welfare management. It's an enormous amount of technology. To find out more about the systems being used by Robert, go to the Red Meat and Wool section of the PIRSA website where you can find out more about the focus farms of which his is one of those. Robert, thanks though for joining me in the PIRSA studio.

Robert Pocock: Yeah, no worries. Thanks, Drew.

Speaker 1: The Red Meat and Wool Growth Program is an initiative of Primary Industries and Regions SA and supported by Meat & Livestock, Australia, SA Sheep & Cattle Industry Funds, and SheepConnect SA.

[End of transcript.]

Speaker 1: Welcome to this Red Meat and Wool Growth Program podcast brought to you by PIRSA.

Drew Radford: Small, dumpy sheep with dense yellow wool was not the final outcome the Lymn family were looking for when they wanted to increase the fleece weight from their flock in the '70s. While they were successful in increasing their wool cut, it resulted in other characteristics they didn't want. Chris Lymn now runs the family properties on Upper Eyre Peninsula and he's been applying a range of technologies to bolster several traits he wants in his flock. G’day, I’m Drew Radford and Chris Lymn joins me in the PIRSA studio to discuss how he's achieving those traits. Chris, thanks for your time.

Chris Lymn: Thank you.

Drew Radford: First of all, what do you farm and where do you farm?

Chris Lymn: We farm Wudinna on the Upper Eyre Peninsula. We've also got a property north of Minnipa. So 4,000 hectares. Mixed farms, so mixtures of cereal and sheep and we crop about half of it is our program and the other half has the sheep on it.

Drew Radford: And how many sheep are you running, Chris? And what are they?

Chris Lymn: Well, 100% Merino ewes. About 1500 of them in total, give or take depending on the seasons a bit, but that seems to be around about the figure. I've had more and I've had less, but that's about where we are.

Drew Radford: Chris, what sort of traits have you been looking for and trying to narrow down in your flock?

Chris Lymn: Well narrow down is probably the operative word there Drew. I guess we've spent years, even though the market recently hasn't been positive for this mode of action, we've been reducing our micron and trying to maintain, or even increase, our wool cut and maintain the body size of our ewes. So it's slow progress when you're working on three variables at once, but that's what we've been trying to achieve.

Drew Radford: Chris, I understand for a long time though, you've been doing that through a manual process. What was it? From what I understand it was reasonably labour-intensive.

Chris Lymn: Yeah, so the story starts years ago with my late father in the '70s, they used to raddle the hoggets with an individual number and then as they came through the shearing shed, he’d record the number and record the fleece weight. We had a spring balance on the wool table. And over a period of years, he successfully managed to increase the wool cut. But he was really only measuring the one thing, which was the fleece weight per head. So we finished up with small dumpy sheep with real dense yellow wool, which meant that it was heavier fleeces, but didn't necessarily meet the specs of what we were trying to achieve. So after a few years of doing that, that idea was dumped.

Drew Radford: Chris, that sounds like a lot of manual data entry. And as you said, you were just focusing on one trait there. You're now moving across into EID. How are you doing this through an electronic process?

Chris Lymn: That process with the raddle was back in the '70s. And so when I came home from Roseworthy, the end of 2002, we're using individual animal numbers printed on each tag. And so as the sheep came through the shearing shed, I was employing an extra person for when we shore the hoggets. We were reading the tags, taking a wool sample, laying the fleece and recording it against, it was a paper-based system of recording. So the EID has allowed us to streamline that a fair bit. So now I've got a wand they wave past this shearer who's holding the sheep and that prints out a barcode and that's connected to a clipboard and with each stand and then as the fleece hits the wool table, the wool table has got a set of weigh bars under it and so then we use just a barcode scanner to scan the sheep's individual ID with that fleece weight. So it's fairly seamless.

Drew Radford: As you've outlined, you've got a lot of technology going on in your shearing shed. But I understand you've put a bit of a thought process into actually how that is all laid out and how the workflow goes so that things are as efficient as possible. What is that?

Chris Lymn: So, Drew, I think the main part of that process is to have the weigh bars under the wool table. That enables the shearing shed to work pretty much as it would without us weighing sheep. So as far as the shedhands are concerned, the only thing they have to do before they start picking the fleece is hands off the table and the weigh head will beep at them and they can start picking again. So it's a one second hold up to the shearing process between the board and the wool press, rather than an extra process where you have to put the fleece down on onto a set of scales and then pick it up again. And that just keeps the shed moving, maintains it as it should be. I think, like with any of these technology things, if it's easy to do, you tend to do it, and that's what we're trying to aim at.

Drew Radford: When you were doing that all manually, that might be one thing recording it, but you would have also had to analyse it manually. You must have software now that helps you distil down that vast amount of data as well, wouldn't you?

Chris Lymn: Well, I didn't. So what I did was collate the data, I guess you'd say. So I just made a spreadsheet with ear tag number, fleece weight. Additionally in the yards, we were weighing the sheep. So that meant I read the tag again out in the yard. So you'd read the tag, weigh the sheep and I'd also take a side sample and then send that off as well. And I sent that to a third party, which was Ian Bradtke from Lazerline. And so he got the fleece weights, the body weights and a side sample. And using all those three pieces of data, he ranked the hoggets from 1 to 300, 1 to 400, or however many we had.

Drew Radford: So Chris how's this actually helped you achieve the goals of what you want with the flock now?

Chris Lymn: What it achieves is it gives me the capacity to put some selection pressure on the youth side of my flock. So it's tradition to do a good job of selecting your rams. And particularly now we've got good ASBVs from our studs, well some of our studs. We can put a lot of selection pressure on the ram side, but the selection on the hogget side was always the part that was a little bit difficult and traditionally that's been running down the draft. And for me, it was pick the big ones and everything else went out the door. To then cull, you'd run them through the cull race and have a bit of a look and that was about as much selection pressure as they got. But I think without measuring it, it's difficult to improve it, is the motto we go by. So with some measurements on each of the hogget ewes, we can choose our best ones and improve our flock genetics just by selecting our better hoggets each year.

Drew Radford: Now, Chris, you've got a lot of technology going on in that shearing shed. There must be a bit of pressure from the shearers when it comes to actually making sure everything's working?

Chris Lymn: There is. We've got a fantastic shearing crew, and they're involved and understand what we're trying to do, improve our sheep all the time. So you've got them on board, which is a big part of why it's been a successful operation. But it is important to have all those technical things sorted out. You want your Zebra printer Bluetoothed to your weigh head and to the scanning wand. And you want everything working and you want batteries charged well and make sure everything works before they get there because they really don't like standing around while you press buttons and wait for things to pair up. And then you don't want to be asking them to stop sharing because of something that you've done. So it's important to get all that pretty right a long time before they get there, that's for sure.

Drew Radford: Chris, what other technologies are you looking to implement on the property?

Chris Lymn: I've had a little bit of a dabble with scanning for multiples. So a couple of years ago we scanned the right time after we mated to find out which ewes had multiples and singles and were empty. I'd like to use that as a further piece of information to develop a lifetime ewe data for each ewe as she's goes through our system. So I can tell maybe if she's been here for five years, whether she's had a single and a twin year in, year out and cut six kilos of wool, that sort of information. We can really find the high-performing animals in our flock and keep them for as long as we can and get rid of the ones that either don't rear a lamb or don't have much wool or those sorts of things. So I'd like to continue with that, although the practicalities of that are not as easy as one may seem.

Drew Radford: Does that come down to technology, Chris?

Chris Lymn: No, I think it's more to do with management once you've got them. So we run say six mobs of sheep at lambing. And if you keep multiples separate, that doubles the mobs, so then I've got to have 12 paddocks to maintain them. And the idea being that you feed your multiples, or the multiple bearing ewes, better than what you would your multiples. So you give them the pick of the country. And it's difficult in our environment to achieve that. We've got some synergies with cropping, but there's also some problems in that we run out of paddocks about that time of year. So it's just the practical nature of how to manage the extra mobs of sheep.

Drew Radford: Yeah. When you spell it out like that, that does make a lot of sense. Chris, I understand also water technology has been something that you've introduced.

Chris Lymn: Our water is reticulated on a scheme on Eyre Peninsula. So we've got water meters situated on all the properties and some properties have got more than one water meter. And so we've got leak detection units connected to the 3G network from each meter and each day I'll get a text from each meter to say the total flow through the meter and the minimum flow. So that gives me an idea of if there's sheep drinking or not drinking and mainly if there's a leak. If the minimum flow is 150 litres an hour, one would suggest somewhere there's a leak. Whereas if the day before it was 20 an hour or even zero, if you can get your water lines to zero means that it's sealed and there're no leaks. And then the next day it'll be 150 or you're going to drive to that borderline and search for a water leak.

Drew Radford: That's, first and foremost, a great saving for you. But it must also give you a peace of mind as well, to be able to monitor remotely and know that water's getting thrown everything's okay in terms of your flock having access to water?

Chris Lymn: Definitely. Peace of mind, it is a real game changer. Particularly with property separated 50,000 km between them, it was a case of driving to check the water every three or four days to make sure that, one, the sheep had water, especially in hot weather and, two, to check or drive the water line and make sure there're no leaks. So get a text every morning about quarter past seven and it says, "Everything's going all right." All that peace of mind for that day that the sheep have got water up there and you can go on with your other parts of the day.

Drew Radford: Chris, I would imagine that also might mean you're able to get away from the property for a little bit of a break with a bit more confidence.

Chris Lymn: Definitely enables that. The wife would like to imagine that's how it would work, but it does, it just gives you that bit more of a peace of mind. That's definitely the case.

Drew Radford: Chris Lymn, it sounds like a range of technologies have helped you come a long way from those small dumpy sheep with dense yellow wool. To find out more about the systems being used by Chris, go to the Red Meat and Wool section of the PIRSA website, where you can find out more about the focus farms. For now though, Chris, thanks for joining me in the PIRSA studio.

Chris Lymn: Thanks Drew.

Speaker 1: The Red Meat and Wool Growth Program is an initiative of Primary Industries and Regions SA. And supported by Meat and Livestock Australia, SA Sheep and Cattle Industry Funds and Sheep Connect SA.

[End of transcript.]

Speaker 1: Welcome to this Red Meat and Wool Growth Program podcast, brought to you by PIRSA.

Drew Radford: Our primary focus is to maintain and improve the health of our property. The technology lets us maximize our business while doing that.

G'day, I'm Drew Radford and I'm paraphrasing Georgie Keynes, who, with her husband Toby, has invested heavily in technology on their farm to achieve these twin goals. To find out more, she joins me in the PIRSA studio. Georgie, thanks for your time.

Georgie Keynes: No worries. Thanks for having me.

Drew Radford: Georgie, whereabouts are you located?

Georgie Keynes: I farm on a farm in Keyneton, which is 100 Ks north east of Adelaide in the Eastern Mount Lofty Ranges, just to the north of the Barossa.

Drew Radford: People would think that's normally fairly reliable rainfall country, but you've been doing a little bit hard over the recent years, haven't you?

Georgie Keynes: Yeah, certainly. I think like a lot of areas across the state, we've been hit with below average rainfall. Traditionally our average rainfall is 500 up on the hills, top of the hills country, that then falls away to sort of 350 mls through our native hills pastures. But yeah, in the past probably three or four years since my husband and I have been managing the place, we've had well below average rainfall for the last three years. So yeah, it's brought with it lots of challenges, but also lots of opportunities.

Drew Radford: We're going to talk about some of those opportunities in a minute, because part of that is actually managing watering your stock. But on your property, what are you running?

Georgie Keynes: We are currently running 2,700 Merino ewes. The majority of those are mated to Merinos for a self-replacing flock, but we also mate a portion of them to Border Leicesters and sell off the ewes as first cross ewe lambs and the wethers off to a feedlot. That's the majority of our business. We also have a block in the southeast that runs cattle as well.

Drew Radford: Now you are very focused on technology to improve the quality of your flock and also what you're getting from them. So let's talk about some of the things that you've introduced on the property. You've been running eID for five years now, haven't you?

Georgie Keynes: Yeah, yeah. Originally we had a bit of a Merino ram stud, so we got involved in the eIDs in that sort of space, but with the time commitments that it took to run the stud, we decided to stop doing that. But we've continued on with the eIDs through our whole commercial flock. Yeah, which seems to be working quite well.

Drew Radford: You say it seems to be working quite well. What advantages is it bringing you? What are you tracing through it?

Georgie Keynes: So our aim on our property is to manage our stocking rates so that we are looking after the land. Our main focus is to look after property at the soil and look after the regenerating trees and as much as we can improve our property. So we want to run a low stocking rate, but to do that, we have to make sure that every animal on our property is performing. So every ewe needs to be pulling her weight, so to say. By having the eID tags, we're able to pick out the true performers and also get rid of the ewes that aren't producing quite as well.

Drew Radford: Now, you're tying in some other technologies with this as well to work out who the true performers are, aren't you? A thing such as preg scanning.

Georgie Keynes: Yep. So we've been doing preg scanning for a very long time now. We stick to a five-week joining, so we make sure that we get all of our lambs born in a shorter period of time. With that, we make sure that we've been pulling out our dries every year and we sell our dries every year to just reduce that number of ewes that don't get in lamb every year. So that's helped us to increase our lambing and joining percentage over the last sort of five years.

Drew Radford: So that's one trait you're able to work at in terms of productivity. What about wool? Is it helping in regards to that?

Georgie Keynes: So we use the EID to fleece weigh our hoggets, so every year that our hoggets come through, we'll fleece weigh them across the board in June, normally. And that allows us to pick out the ewes that have the best fleece weight and they go into our Merino flock and the ewes that have the lower fleece weights tend to go into our crossbred mob.

Drew Radford: You said this was about managing your land. So obviously crucial to this is being able to cull out under-performers. So this is all being benchmarked continually. So you can quickly do that if the season turns bad?

Georgie Keynes: Well, we haven't had to do that in the past couple of years. We run a containment lot, so that allows us to manage the number of ewes that we have through the summer period. So we take our ewes off the country and manage them in a containment lot through the summer time and let them out just on lambing, so just prior to lambing, when we lamb in June. So we've been able to manage our stocking rate that way. I suppose the best thing that we've been able to do is to sell off the dries straight away so they don't need to continue going through the containment lot. But it's also really helped us to manage our wether portion as well. So our wether lambs get an eID at lamb marking, and then we follow through their growth rates from weaning all the way through. And it has just allowed us to monitor their growth rates and run them through a feed lot and sell them off depending on the season.

Drew Radford: I mentioned wool earlier. I assume at shearing time that all the results are being tagged individually in terms of ... are you barcode printing out as they're being shorn?

Georgie Keynes: Yep. So our roustabouts are fantastic. We have one extra person on the board and ... Well, that's normally me, and we use the wand to scan the animal as it comes onto the board while the shearers are holding it. That then Bluetooths to the barcode printer and the barcode printer prints that out. We put the barcode with the shearer's counter, so we know which animal relates to which shearer basically. Then when the roustabouts come along and pick up the fleece, they'll pick up the barcode with the fleece and take that up to the weigh box. That gets weighed and the barcode gets scanned into the XR5000, which is the indicator that we use, and that all gets automatically recorded straight into basically the computer. So that's the way we tend to run that one.

Drew Radford: Georgia, you got a lot of information here you're collating to try and narrow down several traits. How are you managing that information?

Georgie Keynes: I just use everything in our XR5000. So we have in the past used computer programs with our stud. I've found that I don't need quite that much information for our commercial flock. I'm basically just following through on their classing status. So we have a classer that comes in and classes are ewes based on wool type and confirmation. So we use that information, married up with the fleece weight and their body weight, which all those three bits of information come into our scale head. Then we run the ewes through the auto-draft based on those three different bits of information to put them into either the Merino mob or the crossbred mob or the cull mob. So we basically just put all the information to the XR and then use the auto draft to draft them out.

Drew Radford: You make it sound remarkably simple there, Georgie. I'm sure it's been a little bit more complicated getting it up and going.

Georgie Keynes: Well and truly. Yeah, it would have taken at least two years just to work out how to use the information and to work out how the technology speaks to each other. So that was the biggest barrier. Originally, we had a different company's indicator that didn't speak to our auto-draft, so in the end we just settled on one company. We settled with Tru-Test. They provided support that was fantastic. So they were on the end of the phone every time we had a problem and knew exactly how to fix it, and also they spent one day in the yards with us when we were drafting so we could just sort out any of the problems that we had. So that was a really beneficial way to break through some of that information technology barriers.

Drew Radford: Often, Georgie, the hardest part about trying to get these gains is trying to implement the technology in the first place. It's a lot of deep breathing and forehead slapping to get over that, isn't it?

Georgie Keynes: Yes, absolutely. I think the best thing that we did was get all the technology that actually spoke to each other, and then we didn't have to worry so much about the connection issues. They all just worked together.

Drew Radford: What about the overall management of it, though? You talked about the technology, particularly in relation to wool and what's going on in terms of drafting stock in and out of your wool shed. What about overall farm management? Are you using some software there?

Georgie Keynes: Yeah, so we've been using AgriWebb for quite a few years now. There's three of us working on the farm, so myself and my husband and my parents. So using AgriWebb, it really helps us to be able to pick up your phone and look and see where the sheep are. I'm terrible with numbers and knowing how many sheep are in each mob. My husband Toby is fantastic at it, but I'm really, really terrible at it. So having something on my phone that I can just bring up the numbers straight away is really, really helpful. Also, we've got the block in the southeast so having that information that we can share between us and my parents is really beneficial as well. You always kind of know what's going on at the click of a button.

The other benefit of it is when I'm filling out NVDs, we put in all of our animal treatments. So it's got when you Glanvaced them, when you drenched them and we use that a lot to fill out our NVDs, and you've got all that information at the click of a button rather than having to go through a notebook or any other way. It's very quick and efficient.

Drew Radford: I'd imagine, too, it's particularly important for your primary goal of managing the land as carefully as possible.

Georgie Keynes: Yeah. So that ties in a lot with how we do our feed budgeting through the winter and the spring when we've got the majority of our pastures growing. Yeah. I can sit down with the AgriWebb figures and I also in the winter time, particularly in our annual pastures, use a plate meter to measure how much pasture we've got growing. So then I can come back to the office and sit down with all of the figures for the stock numbers and the pasture quality and quantity figures and the paddock size and relate that all back into a feed budget so we can move forward with our feed budgeting.

Drew Radford: Georgie, you talk there about moving forward. What other technologies are you looking to bring in onto your property? We talked at the start about water management and how crucial that has been for you over previous years. Are you bringing technology on to help you with water management?

Georgie Keynes: We're hoping to. So, yeah, as I was saying, our property is very reliant on surface water and in the past two years, all of our dams have dried up. So we've been madly putting out pipes. We're lucky enough to have access to mains water on a restricted flow. So we've been madly putting out pipes to try and get water to at least half of our property. With that, we're hoping to be able to put some flow meters and some tank monitors into this system so that we can monitor leaks and that sort of thing. So we're hoping that it will help our business. At the moment we're driving up and down, checking tanks. It doesn't take a really long time, but it's just another job that you have to do. If it's at the click of your fingers, that should be able to save time. But we're also hoping that it will allow us to get away for a couple of days, perhaps over the summertime. You don't always need to have somebody here to monitor the waters. That's our plan for the future.

Drew Radford: I understand you're also involved in an Adelaide University trial on lamb survival. How important will that be for you down the track?

Georgie Keynes: Lamb survival for us, for our business, I think is one of the most important factors to improve our productivity and our profitability. I'm really hot on lamb survival. So the project that we're doing, working here with an Adelaide Uni honours student and we've conditioned scored a mob of 200 twin ewes. We've conditioned scored them three times throughout the summer. They have now lambed down and all of the lambs will be connected up through DNA and E-Shepherd collars to work out who the lamb's mother is, so that we can relate that back to what the ewe's condition score was to the number of lambs that she's reared. So that also involves picking up dead lambs and doing autopsies on them to work out why they died so that we can then hopefully relate it back to a condition score and how successful the lambing process has been and the rearing process has been for the mother.

Drew Radford: You're really pushing the envelope here and pioneering a few things, particularly with the Adelaide Uni work. Are you sharing the information and are you finding out information from producer groups?

Georgie Keynes: We are a big believer in sharing of information. Farmers learn from farmers and I'm very involved in the Barossa Improved Grazing Group, which is a group of local producers that come together to basically learn from each other and run little projects. We find that that's a really great way of not only sharing the information that we get from our property, but also learning from our neighbours who most of the time are going through the same sort of situation as you with the same problems. So it really does help to share that information and learn from each other.

Drew Radford: Just going back to your original intent. With all the technology that you brought onto the property, I know you've had a tough couple of years, but if you hadn't gone down this pathway, how do you reckon the land might be looking now?

Georgie Keynes: I think for us, the land is always the most important factor, so it would still be looking the same, but our business would probably be not looking the same. We potentially would have gotten rid of some ewes that were performing really well through the culling process. So traditionally you just throw out your old ewes, but we're hoping that using the EID and the information that we get from it, is that we're keeping the ewes that are performing well. I think even though our land would be looking the same, perhaps the profile of our flock would not be quite as high if we didn't have all of this technology that we were using.

Drew Radford: Georgie, you've adopted a lot of technology there to try and help you meet that fine balance of maximizing your business whilst also preserving your land. To find out more about the systems being used by Georgie and also her husband Toby on Keyneton Station, go to the Red Meat and Wool section of the PIRSA website and click on Focus Farms. For now though, Georgie, thanks for joining me in the PIRSA studio.

Georgie Keynes: No worries. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: The Red Meat and Wool Growth Program is an initiative of Primary Industries and Regions SA, and supported by Meat and Livestock Australia, SA Sheep and Cattle Industry Funds and SheepConnect SA.

[End of transcript.]

Speaker 1: Welcome to this Red Meat and Wool Growth Program podcast, brought to you by PIRSA.

Drew Radford: You can live in your world too much. Talking, learning and expanding networks can be really beneficial. G’day, I'm Drew Radford, but these aren't my words. They belong to David Eckert, a farmer from the Upper South East, and he lives by those words as he's volunteered his farm for a Merino Sire Evaluation Program, to see what he can learn from other producers. He's also been selected as a Focus Farm, with the Red Meat and Wool Growth Program. This lets him share what he learns from applying a range of technologies across his property, and as part of that, he joins me in the PIRSA studio today. David, thanks for your time.

David Eckert: Thank you, Drew.

Drew Radford: David, I understand you've probably still got a bit of dirt under your nails from clearing some of the land you now farm on. When did you start farming in the Upper South East?

David Eckert: We first bought a block here in 1972 and it was, principally, three quarters scrub and we endeavoured to clear that. In 1989, when I got married, me and my wife moved out here and we've farmed here since then, so that's 32 years. Now, we have 6,000 hectares here in the district of Malinong.

Drew Radford: David, that's a reasonable size. What are you actually running on that?

David Eckert: We crop about 3,500 hectares of that, today. On the other 2,500 hectares, we principally run sheep, a self-replacing Merino ewe flock, of about some 3,200 ewes, of which the older 900, like the five-and-a-halfs, we mate to Border Leicesters and then we on-sell the ewes, as one-and-a-halfs, to the Naracoorte sale down there and a couple one-and-a-half-year Merino ewes, we often put in the Keith off-shears So it's a closed flock, and we have today about probably 35 to 40 Angus cows.

Drew Radford: David, it's a reasonable sized operation. You've got a lot going on there. And today we're going to talk about some of the technology that you run on the property. But in terms of technology, what's the driving force for you to actually introduce new technology on the farm? Has it got to meet some criteria? Is it just productivity or is it safety or is it a range of things?

David Eckert: I think Drew, it's a range of things. Hopefully it's to be more efficient and to save time. As farmers, we tend to be time poor and, as we grow, we like to get more efficient and have better use of our time. So, I think initially technology perhaps might appear to slow you down, but we're hoping in the long term it makes us more efficient and more traceable, I guess. Technology tends to record everything you do nowadays, and you can have that data to go back and analyse and keep moving forward.

Drew Radford: They're all great reasons. And I think one of the key ones you point out there is traceability and also it makes it quantifiable in terms of you’ve actually got hard numbers to go back and compare. But you made a point right at the start there, you said, "Yeah, but it's about going through the hard phase initially, introducing it. That can be sometimes the problematic area."

David Eckert: Yes, at start it seems quite frightening. And being in the older generation, that seems to be quite complex, but having two younger sons does help that. And I sort of give an example the other day, when we started to put some sheep through an auto drafter, it took us quite some while to iron a few problems out, to get the system rolling. And then after that it does its thing. And then you look back and you think, "Hmm, that wasn't so bad." And we're in our very early days of that sort of technology. And I think with a bit of sheep yard redesign and small things like that to make it work more effectively, I trust that we'll grow to love it.

Drew Radford: Well, let's talk about the sheep drafter, David. What was the driver for putting in the auto drafter? What benefits are you hoping to gain from that?

David Eckert: Running a self-replacing Merino ewe flock, the benefits I see is being able to, when we class our ewe hoggets, is to have each and every individual sheep, we'll be able to build a record of data on that sheep and put them into groups that we'll never lose that data of. So I'm hoping that we can grade them into groups when classing, then run them back together. And when it comes to mating, we'll be able to run them through the auto drafter, draft them off into their groups and then accordingly select rams that we think will better enhance those sheep.

That's one of the big advantages I see of having this auto drafter is I don't have to run 10 different lots of ewe hoggets, and try and keep them separate until mating and then get the right ram with them. I'm hoping that we can run them, grade them, run them back together, put them through the drafter, add the particular rams we would like. It will just help a lot less confusion. I think that's one of the main benefits I see of the auto drafter in that sense.

Drew Radford: You're also incorporating other technology to get the result that you need. I understand you've introduced preg scanning this season for the first time, is that correct?

David Eckert: Yes, that is yes. We've never preg scanned our whole ewe flock. The only time we've ever preg scanned is if we've sold a few ewes in lamb, and that's very few. This year, we brought it in across the whole board mainly to enhance our lambing percentage and be able to separate the multiples from the singles, and give them more nutrition prior to lambing. Also, being able to then split those twin lambing ewes into smaller mobs to further enhance their lambing. To my experience, the smaller the mobs, the better the percentage. That seems to be the case and especially in twins.

So once our ewes all get electronic tags, it'll mean we can preg test and find out the singles and twins and then we could actually run them back together in early pregnancy until that time, and we could then easily separate them again. That's the advantage of electronic eID tags—is the ability to actually separate things again. And even in the case of, sometimes farming doesn't always go to plan and someone leaves a gate open or the fence gets knocked over or they just get into each other. And if we have that sort of data, we can actually hopefully rectify that a lot easier.

Drew Radford: It makes a lot of common sense when you describe it like that, i.e. that farming sometimes doesn't go to plan as well. And that gives you a great tool to try and sort problems like that out. David, I understand you're also involved in a Sire Evaluation Trial. What is that? And what are you hoping to achieve from that?

David Eckert: It's basically 15 different studs bringing their selected ram and putting it over one type of ewe base. They each get 60 ewes. So it's 900 ewes, and they'd like them to be of one type so that then they can benchmark themselves to other studs in a fair and equitable way, I suppose. And for me, I just thought it would be a very interesting path to take and probably launch me into a lot more technology. And just being around those guys often you can pick up a fair bit of knowledge.

Drew Radford: So David, is it early days in that trial?

David Eckert: Yes, it's very early days for me because we've just had the first mating and we've had the first marking, but the data really only starts to happen from here on in. They'll be DNA tested. So weaning, we'll start to put them back into sire groups. So we'll know which lambs belong to which sire. And we'll work that out from the eID tags, which we've just put in them as lambs. So, we'll be able to follow that through and see which sire actually gives the best quality lambs, I guess.

And 15 different studs, you get quite a different broad spectrum. And we may be surprised that a stud that I thought may not do our flock any good, may actually quietly surprise us. And that's the thing I think I'm sort of chasing. The studs that I think are good for my flock, maybe I might find different. So it's that thing of chasing what would give me probably a truer direction of breeding, I think. And likewise, that goes the other way for the studs.

Drew Radford: David, fascinating trial. And now you're going to have the hard data to follow it up with as well. So I'd be really interested to see how that goes. David, you’re not a bloke though that sits around idly and lets the grass grow under your feet, you've got a bunch of other tech running on your property. Safe Ag—now that's an app that piques my interest because that does a couple of different things. What's it help you achieve?

David Eckert: We initially went into it because we're trying to bring our farm to a safe environment to work in. So it's on your phone and it's on our worker's phone and they can log into it and record things that aren't right. So if there's something that's wrong or a breakdown or something needs fixing, they can actually put that in there. And that's what we find is good. It also comes with a service management record. So at any time if you do something to a piece of machinery or something along that line, you can always record it. So that hopefully, that if something goes wrong, we have a better log of things. It’s something that we see as just moving forward to create a better work-safe environment.

Drew Radford: It sounds like a great thing in terms of maintenance too David, as opposed to like, "Oh, when did we last change the oil in that?" You actually know when you did it as opposed to running it until it blows it up.

David Eckert: Exactly. We're finding that very good in that sense. And we do have a couple of trucks, on the road. So all maintenance issues are recorded on this app so that when they come to an audit, we can just open the app up and say, "Well, this is what happens to the truck." We're hoping that that will give us a true record of maintenance. You often go down three months down the road and think, "Hmm, when did I put that in?" Or, "That didn't go very long." You can just look back on the app. It just tells you.

Drew Radford: I understand also you've got mains water on your property, which is great, particularly for summer season. But you've now embraced some technology to help you with your water monitoring. Has that led to some savings?

David Eckert: Oh definitely. That's probably the one thing that has really worked very well, I'd have to say. Because we all know how mains water's really expensive. And one of their major costs, we always said, it's not the water use often, that's costly, it's the water you waste. This has really hit that head-on. It monitors our use of water every day so it'll give you the total litres you've used for the day and that's great. But more importantly, it gives you your minimum use of any particular one hour block in that 24-hour period. Generally, the lowest water use is between 3 am and 6 am. So that data comes on your phone every morning at seven o'clock and you try and get your lowest water use down to zero. And that means you have no leaks. Probably under 10 is acceptable. There might be a few drips or something like that, but because it's in front of you every day and you look at it every day, you learn the trends and the patterns and it gets infectious. You want to get it down to zero. So you go past the troughs and you look at them all the time and you think, "Oh, that one's just weeping or dripping. I'll stop that." And then you wait for the next morning to see if it's gone down. That really does have cut our water usage back because what you don't get is that leak that blows out. And you don't realize for two weeks. Because supposedly you're supposed to check your meters once a week. But you know what happens during busy times, that throws out the window and you don't do it.

And if that's that crucial time, a lot of water can go through your meter if you've had a major blowout. And this tends to stop that instantly, within 24 hours, you think, "Wow, what's going wrong here." And you can either go around and attend to it, switch the meter off. And that's where it really saves you, to me. The other place I find it really good is on your more isolated lines where it's the furthest to travel to, or in our cropping areas where we tend to not use water much through the winter, but you might want it on for some particular reason. You know that every morning on your phone, it's okay because the numbers are good.

Drew Radford: It must also give you greater confidence if you want to get away for a few days as well, David.

David Eckert: That's another big advantage because you can go on holidays and you can be anywhere and look at your phone and know that the water's good. And obviously you can divert that information to your workmen, if you wanted to. My two sons have it on their phones, three of us are continually looking at it and they tend to look at where they live. If there's a problem on their line, they're instantly on it. So it's great because you soon learn from the data, the trends and you know, straight away, whether that's abnormal and you need to attend to it.

Drew Radford: David Eckert, there's a lot going on on your property. Thank you for sharing your story through this podcast. To find out more about some of the technology being used by David and his family on Mentara Park, go to the Red Meat and Wool section of the PIRSA website where you can find out more about the Focus Farms. For now though, David, thank you for joining me in the PIRSA studio.

David Eckert: Thank you, Drew. It's been a pleasure and I hope in some way that can help someone else.

Speaker: The Red Meat and Wool Growth Program is an initiative of Primary Industries and Regions SA and supported by Meat & Livestock Australia, SA Sheep and Cattle Industry Funds, and SheepConnectSA.

[End of transcript.]

Speaker 1: Welcome to this Red Meat and Wool Growth Program Podcast, brought to you by PIRSA.

Penny Schulz: I think farmers need to work out the things that are really hard on the farm, things that they hate doing, the things that bug them, and then go and find the technology that fixes it.

Drew Radford: This is a great perspective, but it can be hard to adhere to in a world filled with countless organisations selling shiny new, amazing technology. That voice you heard was Penny Schulz, who, with her husband Jason, run a 1,000-acre sheep and cattle property in the Upper Southeast. G’day, I’m Drew Radford and the Schulzes join me in the PIRSA studio, to discuss how they're applying technology on their property, to make it more efficient.

Jason Schulz: Our property is called Coolaroo, and we're based in a district called Field. It doesn't have a town, but I guess it's between the townships of Meningie and Coonalpyn in the Upper Southeast, not very far from the iconic Coorong.

Drew Radford: How long have you been in that part of the world?

Jason Schulz: My family moved here. They were dairy farmers in Murray Bridge, and they moved down here in the late 1960s, and the property that we now reside on or farm today, my dad bought in 1976, as a 17-year-old. I've been here my entire life, and obviously Penny moved for work, and she's still here today.

Penny Schulz: I'm still here, yeah. I came here as an agronomist, and then married a local farmer, and I'm still here today.

Drew Radford: You've got an agronomy background, so that's a great match.

Penny Schulz: Ah yeah, I didn't enjoy the agronomy world so much. I ended up working in dairy extension. I just loved pastures, and I loved cows, which is what brought me here and I still work in the livestock space today off the farm too.

Drew Radford: So what are you running on the property, then?

Jason Schulz: We're a sheep and beef enterprise. We annually mate or join 800 breeding ewes. Merino breeding ewes. We mainly have breeding ewes, which we put to Border Leicesters. And then on the cattle side, we've currently got a Limousin stud, which we calve down 120 registered animals a year, as well as having some trade cattle as well, which, I guess, opportunistically with the feed curve, we trade some cattle to match the feed on hand, and to make use of the pasture that's available.

Penny Schulz: Yeah, we tried a few sheep, too, but our commercial cattle operation, we run on a separate lease block so, that we can hold a pretty high biosecurity status here on Coolaroo.

Drew Radford: So you've got a bit going on, and you mentioned there, biosecurity, and there's a range of technologies to help assist with that now. You've both got an interesting take on technology, and I just want to get your insights on it. Penny, first, what's your take on what tech needs to offer for you to adopt it?

Penny Schulz: I guess, initially, it needs to just make our life easier. Farming itself these days is so complex. It's certainly not a simple business to run a farm. So it needs to simplify things, not make them more complicated. And also, I guess, in much the same sense, it needs to improve some efficiencies as well. When we choose a new tech for our farm, it's got a specific job that's going to make things a bit simpler for us, which we've done with some of our recordkeeping.

Drew Radford: What about you, Jason? You've got a slightly different angle. I understand.

Jason Schulz: I do. I guess I'm the hands-on practical personnel to the business. So, look I think technology has a fantastic place, particularly in our business and I guess, when I looked through the list of technologies we've adopted over the last few years, it's really about efficiencies and improving efficiencies. But what I look for is something that's really easy. If I have to muck around in the office, or if it gets a bit complicated, I lose interest pretty quickly. So it's got to be easy. Also, customer service or support service is essential, because otherwise I've only got Penny here and if I'm in the cattle yards or in the sheep yards wanting to use a piece of this technology, and it doesn't work straight away, it does make things a little bit slower, so ...

Penny Schulz: It ruins your day.

Jason Schulz: It ruins my day. So, at the end of the day, support service, and also, simple technology that's easy to adopt, and ultimately improve efficiencies.

Drew Radford: They're all really great approaches to have in terms of technology. I understand you're in the process of moving to EID for your sheep flock, and also looking to build new sheep yards. Is that about doing both of those things at once, because you're going, "Well, we might as well go all the way in?"

Jason Schulz: Yeah, Drew. Basically, we've got a original set of sheep yards that is doing a job, but is very tired, and well, speaking of efficiencies, it's probably not the most efficient use of time. Any operation in those sheep yards is a family affair. It can't be done singular, and by the end of it, sometimes it's questionable whether we're going to stay a family anymore. But in the cattle yard, so our cattle yard facilities, I operate all on my own. Pretty much most of the things on farm, I operate on my own, because Penny works off farm as well, and we've also got kids' commitments, and lots of other things going on. So it needs to be able to run by a sole operator, maybe with a couple of work dogs. Our sheep yards is one of the few things on our farm that requires multiple people, and there's a lot of inefficiencies. So we decided a new set of yards was needed. But then whilst we're doing that, let's make it the yards for the future, rather than you know, in a few years’ time going, "Oh, I wish I had that," or, "I wish I allowed room to put that piece of technology in there."

Penny Schulz: I guess, on the eID tags front, the reason we don't currently have eID in our sheep enterprise is that we buy in replacements so unless the person we buy them from is using that tech, we don't have it, but we see into the future that it will be mainstream pretty soon and we also want to be able to, I suppose, strategically use tags for our lambs as well, whether that's for the next buyer, whether it's collecting carcass data, whether it's collecting breeding data for our ewe lambs that we breed. We just see collecting more data for the next person might be valuable as well, from a marketing perspective.

Drew Radford: So you are moving into eID for what you breed on your property?

Jason Schulz: Yes, yeah. And first and foremost, we already do things like, we preg scan our ewes. Now they are drafted at the point of preg scanning, whether they've got a twin, a single, or they're dry. Our scanner has the capabilities of connecting that to an individual eID. So I can envisage, in the not too distant future, that we'll be able to just put them back together. And then, several weeks later, run them through our auto draft, and I'll be pushing up the back, like a sheep dog, and the actual drafter will do the drafting for me. Again, that's efficiencies. It also allows us to run mobs as one mob, for a longer period of time, rather than having sheep spread throughout the property and trying to keep them separate.

Drew Radford: Yeah, I was reading, you're getting 90% survival rate with twins. I assume that starts with the preg scanning you're doing, and then dividing the flock up accordingly. So this will just make things a lot more efficient.

Penny Schulz: Yeah, I think that figure might have been from the case study, Drew. We have achieved that with particular groups. Getting the lamb survival in twins is such a tricky game. We've found, not only do mob sizes help a lot, so the smaller the mob size at lambing, the better your lamb survival, but we've found a huge paddock effect. So we've had a particular paddock where we have achieved 90% survival, and then another paddock will have much lower so that’s sort of, I suppose, we're doing a little bit of our own on ground, own research here at Coolaroo. Not an exact science, but we're trying to note the characteristics of each paddock, and how that affects lamb survival.

Jason Schulz: Drew, just, I guess, to clarify that, the topography of the paddock has a big impact on where trees are placed, where there's hills in the paddock, and where the water points are. The other thing that we found this year, we actually did divide up our ewes in age groups. There was an age group effect, as well, on lamb survival, with the older ewes obviously needing a little bit more TLC than the younger ewes. So again, if they had an eID in them, we can tell their age via color, via visual recognition, but if they had an eID, we could draft them out again, using an auto draft type system, pre-lambing, and then break down the mobs, and hopefully put them in the right paddocks with the right typography, to maximize those lambs survival rates.

Drew Radford: You're in the process of setting up your yards for the future. Is that been a straightforward process, in terms of trying to work out supplier and layout, or has this been a big thing to go through?

Jason Schulz: Yeah, look, it has been challenging. In the current world we live in, it's challenging just to get materials, and also get things in a timely fashion so that's one challenge. The other challenge was, because I guess ag industry's in a buzz time. The demand for infrastructure and livestock equipment has never been higher. So the service from some of the companies was a bit questionable, but yet we had some companies that spent a lot of time with us on designing the yard, and making sure that it fits our enterprise, as well as our layout with our shearing shed, and our laneways as well. It has been difficult, but I guess my take home message to others going down this path is to work with the companies that provide the service. Anyone can buy a set of sheep yards out of a catalogue, and set them up, and I'm sure you could do it quite cheaply, but are they going to be yards at work really well for you, and efficient for you, and work in harmony with your laneways, shearing shed, your sheep handler, etc.

Penny Schulz: Yeah, we also find other farmers were really helpful as well. There wasn't one farmer that we didn't approach that didn't say, "Yeah, hey, come and have a look at our yards." And we spent some time with them, and they show us the strengths and weaknesses of their designs. I was actually really taken aback by how useful and how valuable their input was for the designs that we put together.

Jason Schulz: Fellow farmers were probably the best, because they gave the positives about their new yards, because we approached some people that have built yards in the last few years. But they also said, "Look, if I had my time again, I would do it this way. Or we had that piece of equipment, and we didn't get along with it." So farmers are very good, they're black and white, and I guess it's fantastic if we can learn from other people's errors or mistakes and no doubt, we'll have some ourselves, too, that we'll pass on to the next people looking to build yards.

Drew Radford: In terms of other technology you're using on the property, I understand you're using AgriWebb. How's that helping you?

Penny Schulz: Well, AgriWebb just takes the general pen and paper out of everyday farming, I guess. We took it on, initially, just for compliance. So, you know around animal treatments, animal movements, taking things out of scribbling in a little notebook in your pocket, or saving the ends of vaccine boxes in your fridge, to collect batch numbers, to make sure that there's some decent record. But then, from there, it's grown as a tool itself, and you can use it as much or as little as you want. AgriWebb does so much more than what we use it for. But yeah, for basic farm operations and keeping records is our main use. But another use that I hoped to use it for is, they're working with a remote pasture monitoring company. It's not quite commercial yet, but very, very close to help us manage and utilise our pastures a bit better, just as another, I suppose, eye from the sky tool that we can use to take a bit of the gut feel or the guesswork out of what we're doing here.

Jason Schulz: With AgriWebb, from a farmer point of view, farmers like maps. I think the AgriWebb platform really makes things quite visible for farmers when they're in a paddock, seeing where their livestock are, et cetera. But like all technologies, they're only as good as what you put in so I think that's probably one slight challenge is, you just have to be disciplined to make sure you put the information in. Otherwise, it's not going to put the information out.

Penny Schulz: And we've found AgriWebb good when Jason's not here, because for a fair bit of the time, it's a bit of a one-man band, and it's Jason so if he's not here, and stuff needs to be done, we can use AgriWebb to fall back on what, what is where, and what tasks need to be done. And that was really important earlier on this year, just before New Year's Eve, Jason burned his leg, unfortunately, quite badly in a firefighting incident, and we had to employ somebody to help us on farm here and Jason was able to almost remotely manage the farm and inform our great worker, Tom, for a few months and the value of AgriWebb certainly came into its own, when that occurred. He's all good now. He has an awesome scar, but he's real good now.

Jason Schulz: Looks like I've been bitten by a shark.

Drew Radford: Okay. You make a really good point there about that piece of technology freeing you up from the farm, being able to almost be remote control in a time of crisis. But you've also, I understand, put in water monitoring. That must give you the potential, as essentially single operator, to get off the farm as well, I assume. You're fortunate enough to be on mains water but to still have everything monitored must bring a level of confidence, if you're away.

Jason Schulz: For sure. Drew, the water monitoring, I guess we took on that piece of technology out of necessity, as you pointed out we've got a fantastic, endless water supply being that the mains water, it's a really good quality water supply, but we paid for the privilege. Because we pay, we just want to make sure that the water is actually going to our stock, and not into the ground, with some sort of leak or so forth so the water monitoring technology we've got is supplied by Alpha Group, and I get a daily text message in the morning. It's a nice little thing at breakfast time, to tell me my daily usage for the day before, as well as the minimum usage, which I guess indicates whether you've got a leak. If all of a sudden it spikes, you know that there's something amiss, but these come every day. They even come when you're on holidays, which is not always good, but at least then you can alert someone to go and have a look, or turn your water off, or attend to the problem.

Penny Schulz: And there are some alerts in the system too, so we can get messages during the day, if something does go awry. The really good thing about it is that we know what's going on every day, whereas previously, it might take weeks before there's a problem, at which point there's a big soggy mess, somewhere on your farm, or a little oasis that um, you didn't know you had. And by then, you've lost thousands or tens of thousands of litres of water, which is really costly, and just a waste, as well, in a time when water's such a precious asset.

Jason Schulz: The cool thing about the monitoring technology, it just clips into the back of your water meter. And I think within the first month, we did pick up a leak, and it pretty much paid for itself. The technology is not expensive. Yeah, if you're saving water, it's good for the environment, but also good for the hip pocket. At the end of the day, technology has got to be a solution to a problem and for us, if we go and actually look at every piece of technology we've employed, it's all about efficiencies so whether it's improving efficiencies of water use, AgriWebb improving efficiencies of keeping records, or the yards, improving efficiencies, flow of sheep through the yards, and obviously being able to do that with as little labour as possible, it really does come back to efficiencies, I think. And it has to be a solution to a problem.

Penny Schulz: I think it's all about pain points, right? So there's lots of bright, shiny tech out there, and there's more and more, as every day goes past and I think farmers need to work out the things that are really hard on the farm, the things that they hate doing, the things that bug them, and then go and find the technology that fixes it, rather than people trying to sell them technology, and then trying to find the fit on the farm. So I think it really needs to start with those things that really bug you on your farm, and finding a solution to make life easier.

Drew Radford: Well, Penny and Jason Schulz, it sounds like you've gone through several pain points and resolved them, and brought a lot of great efficiencies onto your property. To find out more about what's been used on Coolaroo by the Schulzes, go to the Red Meat and Wool section of the PIRSA website, and head to the Focus Farm section. For now, though, thank you, Penny and Jason Schulz, for joining me in the PIRSA studio.

Jason Schulz: Thank you very much, Drew.

Penny Schulz: Thanks, Drew. It's been great.

Announcer: The Red Meat and Wool Growth Program is an initiative of Primary Industries and Regions SA, and supported by Meat and Livestock Australia, SA Sheep and Cattle Industry funds and Sheep Connect SA.

[End of transcript.]