Chandler Livestock Poll Merino

WHY CHANDLER LIVESTOCK

We have all heard the jokes: Two farmers are talking, one points to a mob of sheep sitting under a tree and says to the other, "Do you see that mob of sheep over there? Do you know what they are doing? Planning how they are going to die!" Or the cautionary tales of needing to be careful about shaking the hand of a New England sheep cocky at the end of summer because of the workout he will have had using a drenching gun.

Keeping sheep alive is hard enough, especially in summer-dominant rainfall areas and with the highly variable seasonal conditions that we are now seeing. But on top of that, you have to think about which sheep are the most productive, which produce the best quality product (whether it is wool quality or meat eating quality), and which are the easiest and most cost-effective to run. It is really tough to find all of this in one package.

About our sheep

We started breeding our own rams at Chandler Livestock because of the challenges around finding everything we were looking for in that one package. It was hard to find highly productive sheep that could maintain body conditions under high stocking rates without the need for high labour inputs to manage parasite and disease issues. So, more than 10 years ago, we decided to do it ourselves and started breeding our own Merino rams. More recently, we have added White Suffolk's into the mix with the same focus on profit drivers and ease of management. We hope this experience puts us in a position to help you overcome the same challenges in your business.

At Chandler Livestock, we do the hard work for you by supplying rams that combine productivity and quality of product with resilience and welfare traits.

Chandler Poll Merino rams won't just give you long, white, lustrous wool. You will also get super-fine Merinos with genetics that are above average for growth and condition scores, with worm resistance in the top 25% and weaning rates in the top 10% of all Merinos included in the MERINOSELECT evaluation.

By choosing rams from Chandler Livestock, you will be able to make balanced improvements to your flock. More lambs. Better productivity. Higher quality. Less labour.

About our breeding program

Poll Merino

– Chandler Poll – NSW Stud Merino Breeders Flock Number 6020
(Previously recorded with MERINOSELECT as The Ridge Merino unregistered flock 609264)

Not long after buying our first property in 1998, we started breeding Merinos, initially sourcing rams from several of the locally available bloodlines. While these sheep had the wool types needed for our environment, we wanted to see greater improvements in growth, fleece weights, and reproductive rates in particular. 

In response to this, we introduced higher-performance genetics from outside the district. This gave us a significant increase in productivity but came at a cost to wool type and worm and fly resistance.

In 2012, we decided that the only way to bring all the important traits together into our breeding program was to breed our own rams. We classed, fleece weighed, micron tested, and pregnancy scanned 2,500 Merino ewes to find our most productive and fertile sheep to start breeding rams from. We introduced the best genetics available by artificial insemination and classed the progeny heavily to ensure that they suited the environment that we operate in and the market we supply.

More recently, we decided to register the stud with NSW Stud Merino Breeders. Poll Merino stud ewes were purchased from Nerstane, and our existing ram breeding nucleus was inspected and upgraded. We also added Poll Merino stud ewes from Petali. 

Today, we operate under the name of Chandler Poll Merino Stud. We continue to combine the classing of animals to ensure they suit our environment and markets with the heavy use of objective measurement and technology. As much as possible, all lambs have the pedigree and genomic information recorded and are extensively measured for a wide range of traits.

We believe that the following trait groups are key drivers of profitability and sustainability in our business and our clients' businesses.