Market prompts a shift back to Merinos at Lue Station

The couple, with help from their son Ted, run 1200 breeding ewes on the 4850-hectare property, along with 550 breeding cows and their progeny, while also running the Louee Enduro and Motocross Complex.

The Combes family uses rams from Andrew White at Havilah North Merinos, Mudgee, purchasing 20 top grade young flock rams last year.

“We bought 1200 ewes, from Andrew and John Webb, but we’re trying to take that up to 2000 breeding ewes,” Mr Combes said.

“In the past we’ve had 5000 breeding ewes but we’re not going to that level again.”

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Markets have driven changes on the property for many years, resulting in Mr Combes and his father Ned both leaving the industry after a long history in wool production.

”My father got out of sheep in 2005 and I stayed in until 2012 then I sold all of my sheep and moved to cattle production,” Mr Combes said.

“In the past we haven't really had much success as far as generating a profit, but market has come up and it’s a good opportunity to get back into fine wool sheep.

“We've got some country that lends itself to fine wool production, and some of the property is steep, so it's good wether country.”

The first drop of Merino lambs are on the ground now, and Mr Combes plans to keep a large portion of ewe lambs to build numbers quickly.

“We’ve got 1000 Merino lambs on the ground at the moment and we’ll keep 400 wether lambs and retain the best half of the ewe lambs. We’ll keep them all for a year and class them out at 12 months of age.”

Classed out sheep will be sold through the Dubbo saleyards.

Mr Combes has already experienced good returns from his wool.

“We had 250 Merino ewes that we'd purchased. We shore them and got $54 a head with seven months wool, which is a huge change – it was about $5 a head when we got out of sheep.”