Lambing 10,000 sheep at the 'pointy end' of genetic performance at Cashmore

Lambs are dropping like no tomorrow on John Keiller's 1880-hectare Cashmore Park property, 10 minutes west of Portland.

The seasoned sheep producer and his team will lamb down a large flock of 10,000 sheep, including 7000 ewes and 3000 ewe lambs, over the course of August and September.

The operation runs at the "pointy end" of genetic performance, according to Mr Keiller, who has been performance recording for 35 years - one of the longest at the game in Australia.

He first started recording with LambPlan in 1990 and every year, documents reams of paperwork and stats on each lamb born.

His flock consists of 50 per cent maternal composites, a 10-way breed cross that started back in the day with Coopworths.

The other 50pc are what he has coined the Nudie breed - the maternal composites but without the wool, with Whiltshire Horn and Dorper genetics used to get them shedding.

Mr Kellier backed his flock to the hilt, especially the wooled composites.

"They're just a fast-growing white wool sheep with two lambs and no parasites, we hope," he said.

"That's what our simple aim is."

He said the Nudie was the same thing, bred with the same selection pressures, just with less wool and no need for shearing and crutching.

"It's the same process, just two different pathways," he said.

Mr Keiller's ram breeding partner is Don Pegler, Oaklea, Kongorong, SA.

Together, their breeding sheep are marketed as 'Cashmore Oaklea' and the partnership turns out rams and breeding ewes and ewe lambs at a special online sale every December.

"We've been using common genetics and common breeding goals for a long time now which means it's a much larger business and makes a lot of genetic sense," Mr Keiller said.

So, what are the performance traits being chased with the Cashmore Oaklea ewes?

"The key profit drivers are early growth rates these dates," Mr Keiller said.

"Weaning weights are very, very important."

He said the operation focused on the 100 and 200 day growth rates for their lambs.

Outside of this, he said "reproduction has always been king".

"That's particularly at the moment when we have so few sheep in the country and they'll be all looking to restock," he said.

Mr Keiller said parasites were also an increasing concern and his sheep were bred with resistance front of mind.

He said he and Mr Kegler had spent a lot of time on the issue, gathering as many as 25,000 individual faecal egg counts on rams and ewes over the last 20 years.

"We certainly are well ahead of industry average for parasite resistant animals," Mr Keiller said.

"That may well become increasingly more important."

He said in New Zealand, as many as 20-30pc of sheep farms had resistance to triple combination drenches, a "serious threat" to the industry.

He said as his part of south-west Victoria had an average of 830 millimetres of rain a year, the Cashmore Oaklea ewes ended up not needing drenching at all once they travelled north, in many cases.

"They are so parasite resistant already that for most environments, they probably don't need to be improved any more," he said.

Lambing in 2025 had started well, with favourable weather conditions for the drop.

All sheep had been pregnancy tested for the past 15 years with mobs immediately split into empties, singles, twins and triplets, and managed accordingly before lambing.

Singles had been in containment for eight weeks due to the season but are now lambing in mobs of 250, with 13-14 ewes per hectare on 1200 kilograms of dry matter.

Twins are run in smaller mobs of 35-60, at 7.5-8/ha and on 1400kg of dry matter.

Triplets are in little paddocks close to the yards, in mobs of 30, on the best feed on the property.

This year, due to 12 months of dry conditions, scanning and ewe condition scores are back.

"This year, we're back," Mr Keiller said.

The maternal composites usually scan at about 185pc, with the Nudies at 165-170pc.

This year, the scan was back around 15pc, with a few exceptions where the older composite ewes were still at 185pc.

"We're just a little bit down on the preg test but that's about where our feed levels are so we think we're about nicely matched," Mr Keiller said.

"The ewes are probably all about 5kg lighter than where we'd like them to be - about 0.2 or 0.3 of a condition score behind."

Despite the ewes being in slightly poorer nick, he said they were having a "cracking lambing".

"You often find if sheep are run a little bit harder, you just have slightly lower birth weights," he said.

"We've had very few lambing issues and lambs seem to be quite healthy.

"There's been some reasonable weather so lamb survival has been quite high.

"You would say that it looks quite promising at the moment."

Lamb marking will start September 15 and is usually a five week process.

Weaning takes place the first week of November, with lambs typically at 31-32 kilograms and the ewes go back on to drier country.

Lambs are fed on with surplus ewe lambs sold at the December breeding sale and wethers marketed from January.

Sheep farming had "without a doubt" become about data and genetics, with a scientific approach the name of the game, according to Mr Keiller.

He said farmers were rewarded for breeding good sheep, compared to those which performed more poorly.

"It doesn't cost any more to run a good animal than it does a bad animal," he said.

He said with the price of lambs these days, producers were leaving $40-50 behind per breeding female for no extra cost, if they didn't capitalise on the genetic gains available.

"From an animal breeding point of view, it's so easy to have high-quality animals these days," he said.

Mr Keiller said his sheep, and many of those in Australia's best blocks, were the culmination of millions of sheep performance recorded across the country, and previously in New Zealand.

The latter started documenting sheep performance in the 1950s.

"So, it's the 7.5 million Australian sheep and all the NZ animals that we used to access, which might have been 10m, so they're probably the best animals and genes found from somewhere between 15-20m animals over the past 75 years," he said.

"They're at the pointy end."