“To change your life, you need to change your priorities.” Mark Twain
I trust you’ve enjoyed a more relaxing time over the Christmas period. You’re probably back at it again by now I suppose!
(Make the most of this recent rain! If you need more rams, we still have 40 top quality grade and auction quality rams available. Arrange a time to inspect, or look at them online.)
This month we’re going to start looking at how to class merinos and why the first thing you probably do, and that we instinctively do as well, is wrong.
Keep in mind that different environments and management systems will favour different selection criteria. Your objectives will probably be different to ours, but many of the fundamentals are the same.
We want to breed sheep at low cost and input with high animal welfare and profit per hectare. They must have exceptional wool quality and thrive at high stocking rates in our variable climate.
When a sheep enters the classing box or race, what is the first thing you look at? If you’re like most people (including us), you probably part her wool. That is the wrong thing to do!
We love wool here! I’ve said many times that it’s harder to cull a ewe with only 3 legs and half an udder because she has exceptional wool, than to cull a thumping good doing ewe that is slightly off in the wool.
That’s exactly why the worst thing to do is to look at the wool first.
But it's so pretty!
If there’s just one thing to take away from this article, it’s this.
The first thing you need to do when a ewe is presented for classing is to condition score her!
Get your hand across her loin and feel the eye muscle and short ribs. If you are new to condition scoring or need a refresher, there’s plenty of great articles on how and why you need to start condition scoring, such as this one: neXtgen Agri article: Condition Scoring with Darren Gordon.
Here’s a few good reasons you would want to prefer a high condition score ewe:
- Better fertility in all seasons. She is carrying extra energy on her body in fat and muscle to help her rear and raise lambs. Plus, she goes to the ram in better condition and is more likely to get pregnant with multiples and in the first cycle.
- Better tensile strength. Since she has readily available energy stores, she will be less susceptible to seasonal variations and have better wool tensile strength.
- Lower CV. Similarly, her wool will have lower coefficient of variability, meaning a higher quality and more valuable fleece.
- Worm resistance. Not guaranteed, but higher CS is favourably correlated with better worm resistance.
- Less feeding. All too often we are forced to feed our animals to keep the poorest animals alive. Why not cull those lowest performers to save money on feed?
- Sleep easier. Ewes that hold their condition well are less susceptible to nearly all forms of illnesses and much less likely to die.
Look at that width!
Why should this be the first thing to do? It helps with our wool blindness.
We know how hard it is to cull a sheep with pretty wool even though she is poor doing and will struggle to raise a lamb.
If we condition score first, then we straight away realise that she needs to provide something exceptional to warrant staying on the property.
Depending on how you weight your own selection criteria, she might have enough good points in other areas to stay, but you will make better decisions by condition scoring first.
Look at the difference in depth of these two sheep. They both stand a similar height but look at how much more body the one on the left has! That’s an engine room for success.
Secondly, take a step back from the sheep and look at her overall constitution and shape.
This is very difficult in a drenching race. We would highly recommend finding or making a classing crate or single file race for classing. Like the image above, you want to have narrow rails to obstruct your view as little as possible and ideally a platform or concrete floor so the feet can be clearly seen.
There are a lot of things to look for. Feet structure, leg structure, depth of chest, an open face, good jaw, straight backline, good shoulder alignment, depth and width of body, depth of twist and so on.
It’s a lot, but if you have in your mind a picture of the ideal sheep, it only takes a quick glance to see how closely the sheep in front of you matches that ideal.
In future articles we’ll look at some of those other traits. The one I want to focus on here is depth of body.
Both cattle and sheep (particularly maternal breeds, but increasingly merino breeders as well) are going in the same wrong direction of bigger is better.
We all want to skite about our big lambs or steers (such as one of our clients who sold most of their drop of lambs at 32kg dress weight by 12 months of age). That’s outstanding!
These results were achieved by selecting for early growth whilst also selecting for a moderate adult weight.
The industry perception is that to grow big lambs, you must breed big sheep. However, those large animals require more feed and energy to survive. This results in low condition score ewes that don’t produce as many lambs.
You might breed big lambs, but if it takes a 100kg ewe to produce it, you will be making less money.
We would much rather have a 55-60kg ewe that is easier to handle and kinder on the shearers, if her lambs reach mature weight early.
If a 55kg ewe can wean 1.3 x 30kg lambs that then fatten and dress over 24kg at 10-11 months of age, that is an efficient ewe.
What does this have to do with depth of body? Well, that’s how those efficient ewes tend to be. They have a good depth and width of body that houses an efficient rumen engine.
She fattens well, matures quickly, can grow a top-quality elite fleece, lambs well and makes you money.
Once you’ve condition scored and glanced over the sheep (it should take no more than 3-4 seconds per animal), THEN we can open her wool. YAY! Maybe that’s for the next article…
Until then, happy classing!
The Rissmerino team
