Crawford Lamb Breeding and Finishing

Barry and Julie Crawford were finalists in the 2014 Lincoln Foundation South Island Farmer of the Year competition and they won the best use of technology prize.

Their farm Rosebank is a 510ha intensive lamb breeding and finishing farm focussing on producing export lamb.

Rosebank is a Farm IQ focus farm and a genetic breeding partner for Focus Genetics.

It’s a 100% sheep operation with a flock of 5400 commercial ewes, with some grazed off farm and in spring 2015, they docked 8500 lambs excluding the stud, which is owned by Focus Genetics.

The Crawfords want to see the sheep industry survive and be profitable. “We would like to see that we have done something positive for the sheep industry and we are leaving it in a better place.”

The Crawfords use electronic identification across all their ewes and lambs, both stud and commercial, which gives them a wealth of information about the performance of their stock.

They have been trialling innovative ways of using EID tags such as a parental gateway where lambs are matched to their mothers, and they are trialling drafting ewes based on condition score by weight.

“Our story is all about being efficient farmers, and pushing the boundaries by using new technologies and systems. We place huge emphasis on measurement. We feel you have to be able to measure to manage. For us EID plays a huge part of this measurement. I t allows us to treat every animal as an individual. Our lambs can be traced back to their first handling at tailing time.”

“We can accurately monitor weight gains and forages consumed, record all health treatments. Then when our lambs are sent off to Silver Fern Farms for processing, we get a weight and meat yield and quality information for each animal, creating a history for each one.”

“This is all recorded on our Farm IQ farm management system and this allows consumers to know that our product has been farmed to the highest standards, whilst satisfying animal welfare and environmental requirements.”

The farm management system lets them record all animal information such as animal health, forages, condition scores, matings, scannings, tailing and weaning, land activities such as planting, cropping, fertiliser, chemical applications and pasture measurements, as well as health and safety reporting. The system shows weight gains and weaning data at the hit of a button, and compares year on year. It also shows the previous week’s individual lamb carcase reports from Silver Fern Farms.

“We have set ourselves a goal of achieving 450kg/carcass weight/ha of lamb production, with the gains coming from tweaking management, so every animal and every paddock of our farm must perform.”

Over the three years to June 2014 they increased production per ha by 50kg to 370kg/carcass weight/ha. In the last year this dropped back to 332kg because they added 175ha of land of neighbouring land which needed development.

Lambing percentage is a key driver for the farm, and their Highlander ewes scan consistently around the 200% mark, currently lamb at 157% with an average carcass weight of 19kg.

EID is a very powerful tool which gives sheep farmers many options the Crawfords say. “A lot of people still record information with a pen and paper but we use cell phones and wands now.” Transferring the data is so fast it is incredible, they say.

The Crawfords have been exploring novel ways of using their EID tags. “When we started with Farm IQ we were getting really high scanning rates but were losing 22% of our lambs from scanning to lambing. We wanted to see why.   We came up with this idea of using the EID tags to look at the parentage of the lambs.”

The tag file from the 2014 gateway was analysed by Australian company Exact Livestock. From the repeated patterns of EID tags read through the gateway, they were able to determine the parent ewe of 80% of the lambs in the mob.

With last year’s mob of twin-bearing ewes there was “a huge range in ewe efficiency” and it has been clearly shown that lamb survival drives ewe efficiency.

Condition scoring has traditionally relied on a person putting their hand on each ewe or drafting by eye but Barry was getting a sore back from bending down to condition score every ewe. They wanted to ensure every ewe had a condition score of 3.5.

By using EID and previous body condition score and weights, they are drafting ewes by condition through the automatic drafter by assigning each ewe an optimum weight. They have worked out that for their ewes, one condition score is 7.7kg. If a ewe is a condition score of 2.5 then she weighs around 50kg, and to get her to a condition score of 3.5 she will need to put on 7.7kg of weight.

The idea is to allow those ewes which are under condition to be identified and preferentially fed throughout summer.

The assigned weighing trial is now half way through the four years needed to validate the algorithm. “Once we have understood the relationship between condition and weight for our ewes we hope we can build an algorithm for the wider sheep industry.”

“It’s not what you would expect every farmer to do, but some farmers are pushing the boundaries. We are striving to do innovative things and bring new things to the table. In our Farm IQ group now, compared to when we started four years ago, it is just amazing to see what everyone is doing. We do benchmark quite a bit and measure our performance. We decided to do this in kg of lambs produced per ha.”