Our guest this week needs little introduction. In this episode, Ferg catches up with Jamie Ramage, a passionate individual in the agricultural industry. Ferg and Jamie begin with one of their favourite topics: maternal efficiency.
From there, the conversation covers the evolving landscape of sheep breeding, especially the shift towards composite sheep. We also dive into the ProBreed programme and glimpse into the future of sheep breeding in terms of shedding, wool and health traits, as well as the role marketing plays in the genetics space.
Jamie shares his experience running a motel and the lessons he’s learned about customer service and how they apply to running a farm business, especially one in the market of selling genetics.
This podcast is a whopping 47 minutes long and covers a huge range of topics so, sit back, relax and listen in as Ferg and Jamie share their thoughts on the world of sheep breeding, genetics and much more.
Head Shepherd is brought to you by neXtgen Agri International Limited, we help livestock farmers get the most out of the genetics they farm with. Get in touch with us if you would like to hear more about how we can help you do what you do best - info@nextgenagri.com.
Thanks to our sponsors at MSD Animal Health and Allflex, and Heiniger Australia and New Zealand.
These companies are leaders in their respective fields and it is a privilege to have them supporting the Head Shepherd Podcast. Please consider them when making product choices, as they are instrumental in enabling us to bring you this podcast each week.
Check out Heiniger's product range HERE
Check out the MSD range HERE
Check out Allflex products HERE
Our guest this week needs little introduction. In this episode, Ferg catches up with Jamie Ramage, a passionate individual in the agricultural industry. Ferg and Jamie begin with one of their favourite topics: maternal efficiency.
From there, the conversation covers the evolving landscape of sheep breeding, especially the shift towards composite sheep. We also dive into the ProBreed programme and glimpse into the future of sheep breeding in terms of shedding, wool and health traits, as well as the role marketing plays in the genetics space.
Jamie shares his experience running a motel and the lessons he’s learned about customer service and how they apply to running a farm business, especially one in the market of selling genetics.
This podcast is a whopping 47 minutes long and covers a huge range of topics so, sit back, relax and listen in as Ferg and Jamie share their thoughts on the world of sheep breeding, genetics and much more.
Head Shepherd is brought to you by neXtgen Agri International Limited, we help livestock farmers get the most out of the genetics they farm with. Get in touch with us if you would like to hear more about how we can help you do what you do best - info@nextgenagri.com.
Thanks to our sponsors at MSD Animal Health and Allflex, and Heiniger Australia and New Zealand.
These companies are leaders in their respective fields and it is a privilege to have them supporting the Head Shepherd Podcast. Please consider them when making product choices, as they are instrumental in enabling us to bring you this podcast each week.
Check out Heiniger's product range HERE
Check out the MSD range HERE
Check out Allflex products HERE
Welcome to Head Shepherd Jamie.
Speaker 2:Ramage, thanks for the opportunity to come on board for you.
Speaker 1:Excellent, ramo. We've had a fair bit to do with each other over the last little while, so this could be a pretty casual chat. Apologies if we get out of line listeners, but I'm sure we'll be able to add some value as we go along. I guess we might. As we do, we might just start with, I guess, your background, how you ended up in agriculture and passionate about genetics generally, I suppose.
Speaker 2:I was born and raised on a property near Violetown in North-East Victoria, north-central Victoria. My mum and dad, donnie and Barb, and with my brother, adam, we run a mixed farming operation, or dad and our family did run a mixed farming operation. It was pretty complex sort of a system that was set up to manage risk. That meant that we had quite a few enterprises a bit of a good grounding, I suppose, for understanding sheep and cattle and wool sheep and meat sheep. We also ran a pole-dorset stuff, mostly for our own use but also to supply the local neighbors and so forth.
Speaker 1:Excellent. So, yes, similar grounding to me. Probably A bit of a menagerie by the sound of it. Well, I'm making that up, I'm putting words in your mouth, but we had lots of different things going on at home and mainly caused by me and my brother being keen on breeding stuff, which didn't help particularly. But I guess recent times heavily involved across. Well, in the last couple of decades, involved in a range of different breeding enterprises and I think if anyone watches you on social media see the hashtag maternal efficiency mentioned fairly often. What does maternal efficiency mean to you and why do you reckon it's important?
Speaker 2:Well, I suppose one of the things that dad allowed me to do pretty early on was get involved in the pole-dorset stuff and until I was in that space I probably knew that news and cows had calves and lambs, but not how different they can be depending on what sire and what dam. And I got to about 19, I think it was had the opportunity to go and purchase AISis and try them over the breeding program which had been probably a pretty typical inbred pole-dorset flock that then out-crossed with performance genetics and even back in the early 90s it was very profound to see the difference in the lambs. The lambs were a kilo to a kilo and a half heavier at earth and performed just out of the box in comparison to and I got to buy the ram that had won the show ribbon and using that type of methodology to try and make good sheep. I've also got taught about structure and how to cut horns off pole-dorsets that shouldn't add horns and all of that type of stuff. But I suppose understanding that the?
Speaker 2:U was what drove the performance and production on the farm rather than the thinking it was all about rams also was instilled into me by dad and that AI experience that sent me down a path of wanting to find out. What can you do? Yeah, excellent.
Speaker 1:And yeah, I guess, as you've gone through that career, it's sort of yeah, I guess we all went playing at Chats getting pretty excited about some of the opportunities these days.
Speaker 1:And I guess when we started O&J systems like Lampline have started there was a few traits, those growth traits and muscle and fat sort of came into it. But now we've got any number of traits that we were looking at and makes it all the more exciting, makes it a little bit harder but a little bit different. I suppose it's sort of easier in some ways because you can almost have a breeding way for everything and as we move towards structural traits, we will have everything covered pretty much. And yeah, I guess that experience early days is something that I really cherished as well getting seeing performance, animals that have been selected based on their performance and how the gap between them and the rest, and I think that is a major opportunity for the industry. And one of the things that sort of drives me to do better, I guess, is once you see that you can't unsee that and you kind of get really and you're almost, the addiction kicks in not very long after seeing that. The power of genetics.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, and I suppose in my experience the drift was towards understanding the lame industry really well. I got frustrated with the conservatism that was inside the Mourinho game, even though we were running lots more Mourinos than what we were old Orchards or Crossbreed sheep at the time. And I can remember talking to a DPI staff member at Rutherglen one day and I said who's the best land producer in Australia? I want to go and copy off them. And they said John Keeler. So that was.
Speaker 2:I got in the car and got on the phone and talked to John Owen. I was very fortunate to get a really good grounding of understanding the power of pulling together multiple breeds and selecting them from maternal traits and trying to create that ultimate U. That wasn't the cold Mourinho U joined or Bordelester, it was something that was perfect purpose. It was bred with a purpose and then I suppose from there it was well. I wanted to help other farmers understand the benefits or the opportunities that were in self-replacing maternal meat sheep. I had a couple of trips to New Zealand where I went and looked at what I thought were even better or larger programs to try and get some perspective and then come back and worked a lot with particularly John Owen working on getting into Shearing Sheds and explaining the power of algorithms and how they could be used in maternal programs and how we didn't really need the Bordelester concept. If we had a purpose for a view, we could make it do pretty much what we wanted it to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's been I guess since those days. It's been a shift. There's obviously still the Bordelester first-cross-u market out there, but very much a road compared to the I guess 20 years ago where it was sort of off to Narragorn to buy your first-cross-us and then buy after a RMO's dad to buy a couple of pot-all-sort rams and away you go. That was sort of the standard land production system I suppose in Australia and certainly has evolved in many different directions since then. All of them are a more efficient system and I guess that's not saying anything against the first-cross-us. They've served lots of people very well and produced some fantastic lambs.
Speaker 1:But at the end of the day there is risk in that when you're always having to buy those maternal genetics in. Some people it works, some people it doesn't. But the bigger I guess what we see is the more scale you've got, the more you need to control what you can control and your maternal genetics are a big part of that. If you're just always at the kind of roulette table trying to buy those use, it's a struggle. If you're running a few hundred sheep, that makes sense to buy in those maternals probably and you've just got a bit of capital depreciation and then you're turning out lambs. Once you get to a scale, it's certainly a lot of value in closed flock or driving your own maternal performance.
Speaker 2:Certainly one of the things that I suppose we saw a few hiccups in the wool job late 80s, early 90s. A lot of people that perhaps never run prime lambs before were open to the idea of moving into composite type sheep, particularly in the Western District of Victoria I think there was a lot of people come and tried and didn't enjoy it too much and then others come in and thought that it was really good. But I think the maternal traits and the performance of those animals enough people found that there was one that they could buy those composite use at a discount to the first cross-unit market, which meant that they were more trading one on a slightly discounted article that performed really well. But when it comes to doing the self-requiring job themselves, they were then not at the mercy of what the top-priced pen and maracle banks but they were at their own cost of production. They were driving the dollars and performance of their animals more so for the land industry.
Speaker 2:And yeah, there was certainly some hiccups around skins and processes that were uncomfortable with skins that were more open. At the time it was work that we needed to do to make sure that they did have functional skins on them. But I suppose the journey over time. We were a bit crazy in the early days, but it sort of proves to be a system that can work pretty well in not everywhere but lots of parts of Australia.
Speaker 1:Often think it's maybe it's just because I'm getting older, but often think it's amazing to think back. Like now you just sort of think of all the same composite sheep in Western Victoria. But when I first moved there in 1998, I'm going to say there was very much the big wool bales and still a lot of people reeling from the late 80s or early 90s when after the wool reserve price crash. But yeah, I think it's easy to forget how much change actually has occurred and we're often sort of in the game of farmers don't change or whatever. But there's been massive evolution in terms of what breeds of sheep are out there now and yeah, the composite is very much a mainstay of a big chunk of the land ministry now in Australia.
Speaker 1:It's interesting considering I guess now we're living in New Zealand where the composite probably isn't as strong anymore, sort of almost have been and gone and sort of backed a lot of people back to the Romney and in that time the Romney has changed massively and can sort of has moved on from the one good lamb status through to sort of scanning over 200% and different, very different beasts and what it was and probably has probably has either throw through osmosis or planting, picked up a few of those genes from the, from the composite, throughout those those periods as well. But yeah, interesting how much change there has been in the last couple of decades, or 25 years.
Speaker 2:That competition is interesting To see breeds happen to the pole lawsuits. When the White Suffolk started it happened to a degree to the first costume market when composites really got going. I was excited to be involved in bringing Highlanders out of New Zealand many years ago and certainly recent times. Some of those really good Romney genes that have been utilized probably mostly south of Hamilton, illinois and Victoria but it's created some really good pressure on the performance of those euflocks and the tools that the farmers have got are great and if we could have taken a snapshot from the Hamilton sale yards yesterday and gone back 20 years before or maybe even 15 years like the animals would be completely different.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very much. So it's interesting, I guess, how perceptions have had to change over time. We talked about skins before and I certainly have memories of a good mate of mine who probably won't be listening, but I'm going to do him soon With him with the fire hose over the top of his lamps before he'd send him into Hamilton to make him look a bit sappier. He used to overdo it a bit and people wondered how on a blue sky day he got a shower rain on his sheep.
Speaker 1:But there is a lot of that sale yard as it's a blunt tool for price setting. I suppose it's a big part of big feature of Australian ag still, but I guess in New Zealand it's very much a minor part. Everything's sort of direct to processor. But I think the more we see value add happening and well, I guess eating quality becoming important and those sort of things and people focusing on direct to processor, we're going to. Yeah, some of the traits like openness of skins we need real pricing is about whether that's a perception difference or that is real in terms of the value of that skin, or is it just saying, well, it's not a second cross slam, so therefore it's can't be any good?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think you're right, ferglock. I've spent a little bit of time working in supply chains and the thing that I came away from that experience was that there's lots of friction around the transaction and that the people who add value don't always get paid. And my hope is that I've put my head in a nurse a few times trying to find a way to have the right people get the right reward but also that the information is shared in a transparent fashion so that people can modify what they're doing to better suit their consumer or their customer, which is not always the person chasing the land chop around a plate. It's quite often somebody inside the, you know, quite often an elaborate supply chain that's that is adding value. But when you're behind a farm Gaikwotsa times you don't understand or respect that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely. If we move forward to recent times and think about ramage, rural business and the opportunity in the sales in the genetic space. I don't know how many times I have the conversation with breeders that tell me that they love breeding stuff but they're really terrible at marketing. I think that is one of the issues. There's lots of people out there who are really passionate about breeding stuff but probably then left trying to sell a secret. There's certainly an opportunity there for people to tell their story better, make sure people are aware of their product. I think, as we see this shift going from 20 years ago where breeding babies were a bad word, to today where there's less circles, that's true and more circles where there are people who actually value that information, there's a big space there to help bring a lot of transparency to the whole genetic game and through making sure people tell their story properly.
Speaker 2:I think my journey in sales and marketing and communicating on my own behalf or for me, is about being really clear on your values. I check them morning and night because when you're involved in sales, there's always those little shades of grey that you need to be really careful of. When I'm interviewing a ramage rural client or a ram client that I'm dealing with, my first thing, I assume is that I'm wrong and they're right and my job is to ask questions. A part of that process of asking questions is trying to drill into what are their dreams and aspirations and where's the gap from where they are now to where they've got to go, not trying to approach a sale or a marketing proposition from what's in my paddock and then who do I fit up with these sheep?
Speaker 2:I think that's the example that a lot of people and rightly so as suspicious of salespeople. If you're able to move your thinking just a little higher and try and serve, as somebody like Cindy and Crane would talk about, the need to serve people is the thing that you should stay focused on, and that's what I try and do. How do I serve the client? What do they need? Not what have I got?
Speaker 1:to sell. You do get around a lot and you're pretty hot following what's happening in the markets. It's been an interesting period of time. I suppose 2023, moving into 2024, when this goes out, will be into 2024, and it's amazing what a bit of rain will do to markets. If we are at a higher level, what sort of shifts are we seeing in the kind of animals that people are thinking about breeding today? That maybe wasn't in their mindsets 10 years ago? What are the new things coming into the game?
Speaker 2:I've seen the shedding industry change a lot in my view, a really blunt pool, and that might be contentious to some people. But I think from a big picture perspective and the way that social media and sales and marketing has evolved over time, we've got to take the opportunity to try and listen better to where community expectation is moving with things like provenance of food, how does it get from my plate, and who's involved with that. A significant part of that are animal welfare traits. I know, obviously, that next-gen agri and yourself your career is littered with making animals better everywhere, ferg. What we need to as a broader industry is to understand that animal welfare is real and that we can actually be profitable and tick those boxes and do a really good job on farm. Just like in the start and the sales part, we need to become profoundly better at communicating that to the broader population and the public and our customers.
Speaker 1:I couldn't agree more, and we had Hayley Perbrick on recently and she's obviously into that field as well, more from an environmental standpoint than a welfare standpoint. But all they call an opportunity for us to to get outside of. I guess we're pretty good at talking to each other. We were very good at preaching the converted and making sure each of us and then arguing, I suppose within our own little bubbles and stuff about like we kind of get, and that's one of the greatest concerns. I suppose it's not, it's kind of okay. Well, it's bad enough that we're not communicating our story very well, but when we're in fighting, that's sort of just anyone that does poke their heads in just sees an industry that's having a bit of a crack at each other. Not ideally either. But yeah, I think we do have an opportunity and obviously we would have taken millions of dollars of marketing budget to do anything, probably even as recently as 10 years ago. But now if you've got a phone and you're half handy, you can build yourself a profile and tell stories, and I think we have to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the more advocates out there, the better we go, and I think we know that we work with great people. We're working great locations with great people, with great animals, so there's no shortage of storage and I think, as I was talking to Haley about, there's. Often people just are blind to how special their day is almost like because you get up and there's flies and heat and there's sand and dust or whatever, whereas someone who's walking down Burke Street in Melbourne is going to the same office job they've had for the last three years or four years or whatever. That would actually wouldn't mind a bit of selling their back and all seeing someone with a bit of selling their back. So yeah, often I find myself on farm taking a photo that the owner of that farm or a staff member on that farm would have driven past a walk post 10,000 times and not taking the photo because it wasn't, didn't look special, and I think we need to remember that the people we want to communicate with aren't don't get to see what we get to see us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think at a higher level we probably we hear the waffle that comes out of politicians' mouths, where there's a cynicism that's really disappointing, but I think for me there's a massive amount of hope and opportunity in our industry based back on just how good the people are that are involved in the gun and often and I say this quite regularly that I have the benefit of being able to move around Australia and make a lot of really good sheep and cattle farmers and they're limited by the wire around the boundary fence line that they have and what they have to be able to do is transverse that wire and get off the farm and have their say and make sure that people that are leading their advocacy organisations are getting the message, because often it's not, it's not the individual person that can make a profound difference with a viral post on Twitter.
Speaker 2:These people that are our advocates are actually on social media. They want people to like them. There's plenty of opportunity to talk to them via direct message and get your message and your disappointment or your excitement across to them.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, just switch gears quickly and talk about your sabbatical, when you ran a motel for a while. You dropped out of Ag for a bit, while you're still heavily interested around Ag, but obviously were 24-7s going nuts on running a motel. What did that? And running a motel through lockdowns what did that teach you about humans and yourself?
Speaker 2:Well, we went into the motel game off the back of my brother, adam, having plenty of experience in the motel industry. It wasn't a flippant choice, but it was off the back of internal family succession planning and my boys wanted to do things other than chase sheep around a paddock and Jady and I said what can we do? So it was pretty strange probably strange to a lot of people to be running marking for a sheep stud but also behind a desk inside a motel Managing staff and customer expectations and a front-facing business. It was challenging in the sense that you are really working. We're both working 100 plus hours a week. You get to about one and a half year. It's really hard to keep a smile on your face.
Speaker 2:But the most profound thing that my brother advised me around and, being a business accountant, you probably think it had better do with money, but it wasn't. It was the biggest change that you can make to any business as a smile on the front desk. And we made sure that we looked at our client base. There was a significant number of those that were travellers, that which room at the motel they liked to stay in. They knew how they wanted to be treated. They wanted to check out at an exact time. It was very specific and if we wanted to look after them and have them stay as repeat customers, we needed to cater to that business and what we did was we made sure that we had a smile on our face and a cold beer ready to be handed over to the sales rep or the farmer or the truck driver or whoever it was that was coming to stay. It's just basically being friendly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's probably how we ended up, friends, weren't you? You had to be a cold beer at your motel. Absolutely, mate. Very easy to buy a bloke, like me, yeah. But yeah, I think those little things are a massive part of business success that some people get and other people, other people. You wonder how the hell they ended up in a public facing role because they're not very good at it.
Speaker 2:It was funny. It was funny like the time inside the motel, like I'd always been somebody that I didn't like school, whatever's wrong inside here didn't like conventional learning, and I learned that I needed to continue to learn if I wanted to be any good at anything. So I needed to work it out for myself. So I tried to do a lot of different sales roles so that I could get some perspective and understanding.
Speaker 2:But spending time in the motel and the advent of audio books because I'm a poor reader and need to read things like Estimate and Reading Days I probably had to read them 10,000 times before I started to actually get it stuck in my head how I could read them is that I'm on a journey, not a chasing, a destination, and self-improvement was what I was about. So, like yourself, I run, I stretch, I try and look after my diet. I want to be a good example to my kids and I also very much think it's important that you find a cause, and one of the causes that I've had throughout my life is being involved with football administration and sport and helping young people get the opportunity to express themselves on the sporting field. It's been 30 odd years that I've been involved with boards and the like, and it's been great time and I highly recommend it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I guess that the community involvement you get from those sort of roles and sort of something that now is not something I get directly involved with I'm never in the same place often enough, but certainly see those people pretty much holding a community together in sporting clubs, because that's the place where people meet and interact and really very important roles in our culture. A quick interruption here to remind you of Head Shepherd Premium and our consulting services at Next to Niagara International. If you love this podcast and want to hear more of them, visit the hubnexttonagrycom and sign up for Head Shepherd Premium and get an extra podcast each week. If you're listening to this and thinking you really do want to maximise the journey going to your lifestyle and feel more confident around the decisions you're making on farm, then send me an email at mark at nexttonagrycom and we'll get in touch and see where that takes us.
Speaker 2:It's an exciting business for me because it has three elements. It's got the terminal program that's very focused on survival and early growth rate and making sure that we've got a solution for those people that are looking for a terminal ram for their overall sheep farming system. The maternal, which is highly fertile, is an extraordinary sheep that when it first came out from New Zealand it was probably a little bit too lean. With the help of your good self we've been able to put a little extra fat in there, get some good connection into the Australian sheep breeding game so that we can accurately describe the animals. The super exciting part for me at Probreed is the fine cross program, or our whole end program, where we're pulling down micron and creating a really functional fine cross sheep 22-24 micron that has lots of limbs that grow really fast and ticks all the boxes from an animal welfare perspective.
Speaker 1:I think that particular sheep type the pluses and there's a few breeders putting some sort of combination of runes and composites together around a place. I guess I've gone on record a few times saying that fine wool and unallocated and I think like that will potentially play out. There's certainly some specialist roles of what specialist very good maternal sheep, romney and composites are going to be hard to knock off. But ultimately that's the challenge really is to get these other, either a shedding sheep or a fine wool composite that has a fleece value that's sufficient to cover the extra costs of growing wool or having wool worse In the income stream. That kind of says, well, rather than have a triplet, let's have a fleece on their back and go, or maybe that's an end rather than an all and that depends on how we go. It's an interesting challenge and it's one that we relish in something that we pretty much have wandered into in New Zealand.
Speaker 1:It was really the first conversation I had before I moved to New Zealand. Was ag research or asking because I knew about the New Zealand Transformation Project, which is what New Zealand Runa had funded. They were asking about the opportunity to bring a different fine wool sheep together. I think, being the eternal optimist, you can always do that. That starts from like a race car starts with the wheels. Probably the feet are a major component. We build them and we build up from there. But I think that area of breeding is something that's got a lot of potential. In that, the Pro-Broad Plus and the equivalents in other flocks around Australia, I reckon we'll be putting some pretty cool sheep together in Tom.
Speaker 2:It's interesting to watch the shedding programs that are seen to be gathering pace at the moment. I think that's fantastic because it builds that competition thing into the marketplace. People have to make conscious decisions about what they run on their farm. For me, the Plus program is the best thing in probably 15 or 20 years because we've got that competition in the lamb industry. We've got a tool. Now I want to serve my clients. If somebody comes to me that's running a 32-micron flock, one cross of the Pluses and you're going to have sheep that are under 30-micron, you're going to be at least cost positive from your shearing enterprise rather than losing out.
Speaker 2:The people who have marinos that are unproductive or are not as productive as they could be. They're a very good top cross in that program. I'm super excited.
Speaker 1:I think there's these various streams that are all moving in. I think, how you said, it was exactly right the competition is a good thing. We need different breeds, different breeders. People can make their choice about whether they want to have a shearing shed or they want to have a winter, whether they want to be the risks that come around having wool and stuff or they want to embrace it and build that value. There's always going to be people doing different things and all these different. I guess the options 30 years ago were marinos and borderlusters and pole doors. It's pretty much and that was it. A few other things are around the edges, but now it's a lot more choice. A lot of people are doing great things.
Speaker 1:I guess the thing that brings all of our discussion together really is that data piece and making informed decisions rather than and that's what's allowed all of this to happen really it's genetic gain. If the Romney were still doing one good lamb with a fluffy head and growing slowly, then there would be none of them in New Zealand. If the marino had stayed at what it was good at, there'd be less of them around as well. There's lots of the genetic changes. What's keeping people in the game.
Speaker 1:I think the more people understand that and more we embrace that, the better our industry goes. Probably the most frightening aspect of what we do is the amount of opportunity that gets left on the table every year, with people making uninformed decisions about their genetics and just doing what they've always done, or just not taking that extra time to be that lifetime learner, I suppose to say, well, what I know now is what I'm always going to know. That's what we really need in our game is to always consider what's possible I think definitely from starts with us in terms of we know what we know, but we also know that we're going to learn every day. Every time we're in a new mob sheet, we're learning something about what's going on.
Speaker 2:I think one of the things that excites me about when I travel around the countryside, I can almost pick a next-day and aggregate client out. When I drive in the gate and start asking questions around planning, they actually have a plan. I think a lot of people are very reactive to either season or financial situations and quickly chase something that's not in their own best interests. If we look at the human nature, it's a powerful thing. We look at the disastrous forecast that we had back in January and February and the impact that that had on industry. I'm just disgusted that that was something that happened to us, but we've got to learn from it. It's like throwing stones at the Weather Bureau isn't the answer. It's understanding that none of this is 100% exact. You need to have a plan and you need to stick to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I guess a really good point, particularly that around around, where the forecast and I guess, if we start football analogies, I mean you got to play the game, it's in front of you. There's no point thinking about how that team played last time or how you thought it was going to play out in the change room before. Once you're on the field and it's, it's a different day, it's different, it's colder than you thought, it's wetter than you thought or whatever. Then you've got to play the ball in front of you and that's I think we have to be.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was yeah, and I wrote recently in our newsletter about momentum and I think we're very good when, yeah, momentum is a massive thing in our game, if it, whether it's going bad or going going really well, but everyone gets on the same 100% snowball and it just grows and grows and it's it's we have to be and this, yeah, this certainly me included. We have to remember to get up each day and and challenge what we know and challenged what people are telling us, and just try and see the wood from the trees. Yeah, true, right, wood from the trees, forest from the trees.
Speaker 2:You can make it up when it's your podcast mate. You'd say that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly that's how it generally rolls, right, mate, we might. We might wrap it up there, or is there some other stuff?
Speaker 2:we should talk about. Can you? Can you just fix one thing for me, please, Like a one thing? So get your wand out and go and fix this export of seaman issue so that we can access to fine cross in New Zealand into the pro-vary program.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that is a massive opportunity and there'll be formal yeah lots of shape. We've got here now that, particularly in Fete, where we've done a lot of work that, yeah, are going to have a big impact on the game.
Speaker 2:If we can get them out of this country, yeah, if we can just get them in like it'll really, it'll really have our industry pumping, if we can have and it's that pressure thing again for like been able to put some pressure on breeders in Australia with a tool that's come out in New Zealand that's had this extra work done on it. Our fleet issues will decrease rapidly and our farmers will respond if they've got access to the tools and an example to follow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I guess, fortunately, we've now got that funding from Mental Health Australia and AWI that on the final game at least, where we're putting some, we can replicate the work in Australia, and so we'll soon be. That's underway now, so that's going to be. That's very exciting. But it'll be awesome if we could also leap frog 5, 10 years of work here, grab the good work here and then go on where it is going to be. Yeah, that'll be just absolutely awesome.
Speaker 2:On the cake, hats off to those guys for investing into the program and just so grateful that Next Gen Agri's got the link back over into Australia where we can use, utilise your combined knowledge to bring it on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's exotic stuff, and I think, yeah, that we need to capture some of the stories that are happening over here now with people who just sort of don't have to foot bar. There's a lot less lame sheep, there's a lot less sheep getting cull for feet, and that's all while we're running a decade in. Really, it's not, it's only just getting started, so it's.
Speaker 2:Is. It is a challenge for Dapsis food.
Speaker 1:Hard to know the places that, yeah, I don't know. That's a question that certainly. A question we've got as part of our current project in Australia is kind of trying to put some data around for Dapsis. As you know, that's one of those things that kind of is a bit sporadic and a bit of a curse of the good farming. When you've got fat, when you've got lots of twin bearing sheep and that are in good condition, which is what we would all tell every farmer to do, and then when they do, that foot abscess is, then you predispose yourself to more foot abscesses generally. So, yeah, we don't have the data. I suppose what we have written into this, definitely in this current project, is to try and find out, but at the moment we haven't sort of looked properly at that.
Speaker 2:So do you drill into like stuff like AI and looking at genes and those sort of things in that process, or how do you approach a problem like that when somebody puts it in and says, yeah, fix this Foot abscesses.
Speaker 1:I guess what we've, our current approach, is just to gather some phantom types and see what we see. If we can find some sire effects is kind of the first thing and like so all of the work we've done with foot shaping stuff, our first job is score the sheep up, go home. If we can find a significant sire effect in there, then there's a good chance genes are at play. If it's just random, then there's a good chance there's not genes at play. But I'm pretty confident that GeneXen are involved in everything. That's kind of my bet.
Speaker 1:But yeah, so for foot abscesses, start at first principle is just try and get some data and see if we can get enough power to do a half-baked analysis, to have a look and just see if, like if, there is genes at play. Then we can work towards what we do with that information. And then basically, well, depends on the heritability. I suppose if it was really, if it had really high heritability, then we could look to build a genomics based sort of a genomics approach, a single step approach. But I guess the highly high likelihood is that it would need lots of phenotyping of foot abscesses. So it's, yeah, it's probably it might be on the wish list for a while because of its sporadic nature and difficulty. And, yeah, like the chance of maybe having to convince somebody to purposefully run their sheep to get foot abscesses fairly remote and not even something I'm even sure if I would suggest it if I could.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I guess phenotypes drive phenotypes and pedigree drive genetics and gathering that those phenotypes are going to be definitely tough and I guess we're hopeful that if we, if we take or we know how it works, I suppose if you haven't got an open skin lesion in the foot and you can't and there's no place for that foot abscess to form, well, no way for that bacteria to get into, to start the abscess.
Speaker 1:So if we go back to, yeah, like we've got bulletproof feed or cast iron feed on them, so if there's no, if they're not getting OID or scald over on individual dermatitis or scald or clavus scald or whatever you want to call it, if they haven't got that lesion, if they haven't got an open wound, and then you haven't got bacteria or haven't got this. So so I guess that's where at Maybe the immune I guess what we're seeing, what we think we're seeing at least in in our foot rot selection, is a change in the, in the immune sort of response, or the feet, if it was blood flow or what it is, or the immune system is better. However that works, it would make sense that that's.
Speaker 2:Is you wider than?
Speaker 1:Not correlated, no, so, no, no, well, fantastically probably is, but genetically not for people. I don't even know if it's fantastically. So, yeah, no, we've done all that work, so, yeah, but I think we're, yeah, we're sort of I don't know, we've. We've kind of in terms of climbing the mountain to understand feet. We've probably walked across the flat, we've had a good look at the top and we're starting to starting to go up this slope a bit. But there's a lot to learn. And, yeah, I think there's, yeah, there's several, several things that we need to do for an industry point of view, and then there's an whole another set of information that we need, just from a scientific point of view, to understand the biology. If we, if we want to get to that level, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Seems like more important to me than seeing what's happening on Mars, but we probably won't get the same level of investment. Yeah Right, we'll wrap it up there. But, yeah, yeah, thanks very much for for all your support and and and help over the years and we will continue our great relationship. But, yeah, thanks for coming on to Hitchhep and having a year on and and this will be a great chat for those out there having I think it'll be out there early in the year people all will be having a beer on the beach and catching a fish or two, hopefully and and listening to us clowns rattle on.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. There's a good luck that all the staff as well at Next Gen Agri got a great team.
Speaker 1:Thanks, mate. Thanks again to our mates at Heinegaard, who are proud world leaders in the manufacturing and supply professional sheep shearing and clipping equipment. They understand that their customers rely on the quality and performance of their products each and every day. Also, thanks to our friends at MSD Animal Health in Orflix, they offer an extensive livestock portfolio focused on animal health and management, all backed up by exceptional service. Both of these companies are wonderful supporters of the Australian and New Zealand livestock industries and we thank them for sponsoring the Hitchhep and Polka.