Improved lambing means dollars in the bank

The best way to increase profits is to get increased scanning and lambing rates.

Speaking at the Canimbla Feedlot fourth annual Feeding Lambs for Profit Field Day, NSW Department of Primary Industries livestock research officer, Dr Gordon Refshauge said it all starts with quality.

"Successful pregnancy really starts with quality sperm and eggs," he said.

"It's very fairly fundamental, but there are relationships with hormone secretion, age of the animal and stressors.

"If you have quality sperm and eggs, you're going to get a quality outcome with a few caveats around that.

"Next, we need sexual behavior. That's the expression of mounting activity in particular. It's a function of age and also hormone secretion.

"The presence or absence of rams can stimulate excessive behavior and energy is important. If you have an animal on a higher energy diet, you'll get better oestrus and you get better sexual expression.

"Age is particularly important as you'll get different reproduction rates according to the age of the animal.

"Young lambs won't be as successful as a hogget, which will be less successful than an adult ewe.

"So age is important, in particular for ewe lambs."

Dr Refshauge said that weight and condition play a large role in lambing success.

"Weight is a good metric. You can use live weight as a guide for your decision making about whether an animal is on track to reach a mating weight and have a successful outcome or not," he said.

"Weight is more important for ewe lambs and hoggets than it is for adult ewes.

"We still have relationships with all age classes, but body condition scoring is much more of an activity that you use for adult sheep.

"International research has shown that a body condition score of three and a half is the biological optimum when it comes to increased lambing percentages."

Dr Refshauge said the work doesn't stop at conception.

"When you have got quality eggs and embryos and you get a conception, then you are going to check out what's happened with pregnancy scanning," he said.

"The ideal windows for doing that is around 70 to 100 days. The optimum windows around about 80 to 90 days.

"That's what is recommended out to the industry.

"So you have a a period of time when you can organise the pregnancy scanner to turn up and tell you how successful things are going and how many fetuses you have got.

"If you're not pregnancy scanning, the only metric you have for how successful your reproduction program has been will occur at marking.

"That's when you can count how many lambs you have for how many ewes were joined.

"And at that time, without pregnancy scanning information, you can't tell where the sources of reproductive waste have occurred.

"You don't know if you have got a lot of dry use, you don't know if it's because you have had an abortion storm or you didn't have the rams working.

"If you pregnancy scan, you can say you have got a pregnancy or you don't. You can then have some investigations around that time."

Dr Refshauge believes that weight loss during joining decreases ovulation rate and will give a greater chance of failure.

"Ideally, you'll have your ewes on a rising plane of nutrition on grass because that's the cheapest, but your production cycle is governed by a whole bunch of other factors," he said.

"But that is not always the case so grain feeding might be important too.

"But hormone stimulus can also give you roundabout an 18 per cent improver in scanning rate.

"Then there is short-term supplementation.

"You can graze the ewes on lucerne or if you don't have that available, you can feed them lupins for a couple of weeks before joining.

"Feeding them lupins one week into joining, and you'll increase ovulation rates."