Proactive Livestock Management with Jillian Kelly

Are you proactive when it comes to your livestock's health? This week on the podcast, we have vet and “animal agronomist”, Jillian Kelly, on the show talking about forward planning when it comes to livestock health and husbandry. 

After working as a practising vet around the world, Jillian decided she wanted to approach her job a little differently. She didn’t want to just help calve a cow, for example, she wanted to help make sure that problem never occurred in the first place.

“I thought, ​​I'd love to attack this from the other end," she shares. “If we can feed them properly and look after them and set up their animal health programme properly, they probably don't need to do the postmortems. And so that's where my business, Animal Health & Nutrition Consulting came from.”

Jillian now works with multiple clients offering a proactive annual approach to managing livestock. “We look at their farm calendar and their management activities and how that aligns with their feed base and where the excesses and the gaps are and how we can best address that,” she explains. In her business, she also covers animal health treatments and rising issues such as drench resistance. 

Her business, AHN Consulting, also offers a fortnightly newsletter that Jillian writes herself, which has “...​​practical, in-the-paddock advice that might just save your stock”. 

Not content with improving the lives of just animals, Jillian also spends her evenings watercolour painting, providing beautiful artwork to improve our lives, too! 

If you’d like to find out more about AHN Consulting, visit this link:
https://www.ahnconsulting.com.au/.

If you’d like to see Jillian's artwork, visit her website here:
https://www.missvet.com.au/.

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.

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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.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome Gillian Kelly to Head Sheppard.

Speaker 2: 0:03

Thanks very much for having me, Mark. I'm a big fan of the podcast, so I'm very honored to be here.

Speaker 1: 0:11

Fantastic, it's great to have you on and someone who's having a big influence there in northern New South Wales and beyond. So we might just start with your background Obviously a vet by training, but done lots of things around the place and yeah, it'd be good to hear the history tool to today, and then we'll go from there.

Speaker 2: 0:29

Yeah, well, I'm a cannibal girl by birth, so I grew up here and really had no great intentions of coming back, but that's the way it's ended up. So I grew up here and I mean I probably was an off-a-sheep place. I mean, dad was a shearer and Mum worked at the stock and station agents and actually when I was born, in the drought of 82. And so during that period we leased a country, or Mum and Dad leased a place, and we had sheep and it was really dry. We ran out of feed, so Mum took our sheep on the road and I went driving as a baby and I also spent quite a bit of time with my grandparents on a place at Gullar and then, yeah, so I suppose I've always had a bit to do with sheep, even though I didn't spend my early years on a farm and then I grew up in town in Cannambal, but always loved livestock.

Speaker 2: 1:25

I also loved lots of other things as well, like, for example, I wanted to be a hairdresser at one point. So yeah, it wasn't all about vet and animals, but luckily I did pretty well at school and managed to get into vet science Through the back door. I didn't quite get the marks, but I got in and did vet science at Sydney Uni. Yeah. After graduation, yeah, worked in lots of different jobs and that sort of led me to where I am today.

Speaker 1: 1:50

Yeah, excellent Lots of leads to go with from there. Driving as a baby is yeah, I'm sure there's a few babies who have done that trip without knowing it. But I guess we should start by explaining where Cannambal is and probably explaining the stock roots and that sort of stuff. It is a unique part of the world where there's like it was kind of designed well on the roadside. It was designed for driving Big, wide areas and opportunities for people to do just that. So Cannambal's Northwest New South Wales.

Speaker 2: 2:17

Yeah, cannambal's a little town, I think it's a population of about 2,500 people. Yeah, 160 kilometres north of Dubbo, so Northwest New South Wales, and yeah, it's a great part of the world. And yeah, the stock routes are a network of unfenced, or usually unfenced. They've become more and more fenced over the years, but particularly back then. There are a way of moving stock, long distances walking each day and just accessing feed, and they're a network that sort of stretched right throughout New South Wales and went right up through Queensland and use less and less these days, particularly for sheep, used quite infrequently. But yeah, they still exist and they're a big part of Cannambal's culture. Actually there's, you know, yeah, there's a lot of, particularly when it gets dry. There's a lot of local farmers that'll put animals out onto the stock route and utilise the feed and make use of the walking.

Speaker 1: 3:09

Yeah, and I guess there's plenty of fortunes being made and plenty of hearts being broken on those particular routes, depending on how the season turned out, and obviously there's a lot to famous stories about people who would use them really effectively to manage what grew into empires. But equally there's seen some pretty dire situations when people are out on the road with stock. But anyway, we won't dwell on that, but it's a pretty cool part of Australia's history, I reckon. And yeah, and also when you're driving around that area to sort of think about back in the day what it would have been like to for that to be the real lifeblood that it was.

Speaker 2: 3:44

Yeah, absolutely, and I think to just. I mean, we talk more and more about climate variability and you know the unpredictability of the climate. But I think with this area has always been one of those really unpredictable areas where you get the big drys and then the big wets, and then the big drys and then the big wets. So that's something I don't know, I think I've been exposed to over my whole life and it certainly gives me a good footing into my career, because now I've put the science around that and we manage the stock through those dips and highs and lows and all those sorts of things. So, yeah, it all plays it all. It all comes together.

Speaker 1: 4:18

Yeah, exactly, and it's interesting, you mentioned 1982. That was, it's well, I don't know whether I remember it or remember it through the photos, but it was certainly. I was five and 82 and I well, I got up in Northwest Victoria. Our channels all drifted in with sand and so they all disappeared and that was one of those horrific years, like it's sort of yeah again, I don't know if I'm remembering it through the photos that were taken over the time or in reality, but yeah, extreme dry period in Australia's history. And then 83 was amazing for us in Victoria anyway, where it all changed around. But anyway, we won't dwell on that. But one thing before we get right into animal health and nutrition consulting is is you're also a bit of an avid artist as well. We should, we should cover that off before we get too far further. So you're into your watercolor paintings.

Speaker 2: 5:04

Yeah, so I never. I wasn't terribly artistic throughout my, I suppose, childhood and and high school and things like that. But I think when you want to be a vet or you want to do anything science, I was always good at science and maths, and so you're kind of skewed and limited by the subject choices you can make. So I never really had any room for art it was never, and it was certainly never encouraged or anything that my family did, and so I never. I never got involved with that. But I just randomly started painting in 2015 and loved it and particularly love watercolors.

Speaker 2: 5:38

And, yeah, I just started painting and my friend owned a gift shop and she came around for a wine one night and said, what are all those paintings? And I said, oh, that's just what I've been doing in my spare time. And she said, put a few in the gift shop. And so I sold six in the first week and I thought, geez, this is better than being a vet. This is awesome. And so it just sort of took off from there and then, yeah, I've called my Instagram page Miss Vets, so that's become a bit of a thing. And a friend another friend a bit later on, called Grace Brennan started Buy From the Bush, which was a pretty big initiative here to boost rural communities in the midst of a drought, and yeah, that helped my little side hustle business along and along with lots of other small businesses in rural communities up this way and right across Australia, and it, yeah, it's just something that I continue to dabble in in my spare time, so I've got like a alter ego, a moonlight, as Miss Fett.

Speaker 1: 6:35

Yeah, cool. So yeah, on Instagram and there's a web page Miss Fettcomau is there is, if people want to find you, yeah, yeah, missvet, on Instagram, facebook and, yeah, there's a website as well.

Speaker 1: 6:51

Yeah, cool. So I'm sure people will be checking that out as they're cruising around in their harvests. They're all doing this into this, but I hope they're all done by listening to this, if all goes well. But yeah, if we get into the day job, I guess large animal vets, particularly those who are willing to be rural leaf-based pretty much rare as hand-to-teeth there's certainly not heaps of vets around. I don't know what it's like. Well, I do know what it's like in Australia. There's a shortage and there's definitely a shortage in New Zealand. So I guess you're in a fairly unique category, but an awesome opportunity to help people with their nutrition and animal health across a wide geographic area there.

Speaker 2: 7:33

Yeah, so when I got into uni it was well. I started uni in 2001. And back then Sydney in New South Wales was at Wagga and Townsville and those places didn't quite exist just yet. So I went to Sydney Uni and Sydney Uni really didn't graduate many rural vets at that point. So yeah, I was definitely a bit of a unicorn and was always interested in large animals and mixed practice. And after graduation I worked at Roma Vet Clinic in Southern Queensland and I just loved it, like it was the best job and the best clinic and it was really, really great.

Speaker 2: 8:05

After that I went overseas and worked in England and locombed and had a ball, saw the world, travelled Europe, which is one of the great things that you can do with a vet degree. And then I came back and did the same thing around Australia. I locombed around Australia and went up north and had a good look around Australia and then ended up back in another mixed practice and I just in that mixed practice back down south, I just always felt the time pressure, like you'd get caught out to say, carving and you'd pull a calf out or whatever you'd have to do. And then I just always think, well, I reckon I could actually help this fella have less calves that he needs to pull, but like he's paying me and he doesn't want to be paying me. So you know it's about the dollars. I can't spend too long here and I've also got a clinic full of dogs back at the clinic that I need to go and deal with as well.

Speaker 2: 8:48

You know, but I always wanted to get more on farm and help with that proactive sort of side of it, and that opportunity wasn't really available in private practice at that point.

Speaker 2: 8:57

So I took a job with local land services in New South Wales, which is the New South Wales state government, and it's an awesome system, like it's really great because the client or the landholder pays rates and then it funds the veterinary service and the primary role of that veterinary service is surveillance for disease. But you also get to spend a lot of time on farm looking at stock and looking at normal stock as well as disease stock. So it gives you a really great skill set and I did that for 11 years and loved it and then but again, could just really, rather than just chop up the dead ones, I thought well, especially around Canambal, a lot of the reason they die is because I haven't been fed properly, and so I thought, oh geez, I'd love to attack this from the other end. If we can feed them, probably and look after them and set up their animal health program properly, they probably don't need to do the post mortems. And so that's where my business, animal health and nutrition consulting, came from.

Speaker 1: 10:00

Yeah, excellent and yeah, 100%. Like acting from the top of the cliff is something we often talk about, rather than sort of often when you, when I guess vets have old or still currently people, when people are calling the vet, they've already cows already been carving for a fair few hours, or or that mob of sheep or whatever is already in fairly dire circumstance and trying to put the band-aids on, whereas, yeah, a bit of preemptive work would have, would have saved a lot of that effort and expense. So, yeah, I can 100% agree or see how that business opportunity is there and that real need is there. I think we talk a bit about vitamin G or vitamin grass being something that if animals have got nutrition and sufficient nutrition, then a lot of the diseases we end up having to worry about are either less or non-existent. So I guess what are we in your time that was recently, is that 22 that you started AHN, or has it been going with longer than that?

Speaker 2: 10:56

Yeah, I started about 18 months ago, so the middle of 2022. So it's 18 months old now and I think it's really settled in it's. I've got a really, really great client base across North, north West, new South Wales and Southern Queensland and I work with them proactively across the calendar year. Livestock consultants aren't a thing up here, so what I did was quite novel. It was quite new and people were quite confused by it and I explained that I'm like their livestock agronomist, so that's probably the easiest way that people can find a comparable example.

Speaker 2: 11:31

And just, they wouldn't plan a crop without an agronomist. And now my clients don't do a lot with their sheep and cattle without talking to me about it first. So we just set their animal health and nutrition program up. We look at their farm calendar and their management activities and how that aligns with their feed base and where the excesses and the gaps are and how we can best address that. And then, of course, nothing goes to plan because we never get an average season. And so then we just, yeah, we just like, look, we look for the valve, you know, like we just work out, we just, I suppose, roll with the season as best we can and make adjustments in the animal health and the nutrition program as best we can to meet the demands, which this year it's been really tricky because we had a big wet season, some like spring summer last year was really wet and then it just stopped raining at Christmas and it didn't rain again until October. So yeah, very challenging to manage those sorts of events.

Speaker 1: 12:31

And, like you say, I guess the further north you go in Australia, the more likely that scenario plays out. It's only predictable by its unpredictability. Really, there's no real rhyme or reason when things are going to turn up, when you're going to have grass, when you're not going to have grass. So the strategic plan or the strategy is important, but that tactical response is obviously pretty critical as well. What are the actions you've been helping people take in this over the last 18 months? Have you ever had kind of every version of the weather in that time? I guess, when you sit down and write a plan, what are the key things that probably people aren't doing when you turn up but are doing after they work with you?

Speaker 2: 13:11

Well, the first thing they've got to do is ring me and engage me. I think that's a big step because it means they want to work proactively and they want to look intensively at their business and their production and they want to improve. So they're halfway there by the time they've done that. And I think once we start to get into, let's say, drought but it could be any adverse climatic event that occurs floods or whatever, or even price crashes or whatever that sort of stress on a business I just think you've got to make really tough decisions early, and that gets easier the more you do it. So it's like a muscle the more you flex it, the better it gets. And so part of what I do is, when the seasons are good and things are going really well, we go like the clappers and we try and make as much profit and as much production out of the places we can. And we try and make those really tactical decisions early, be really proactive and on the front foot to take advantage of rain or season or price or whatever it might be. But we try and really amp up our production during those periods and that is actually drought resilience, because we're using all those skills and all those decision making and tactical decision making skills so that when the pressure's on, we're better at it. So that's probably the first thing is to run a really good productive business in the first place and then, when the pressure's on, I know that there's a lot of systems and ways of doing things out there that suggest that you shouldn't feed animals, but I just think in our environment, where we get these enormous unpredictable fluctuations in variability, you can either well, you can sell animals, but the problem is that the places that I work with are mostly set up around a breeder base and they're genetics that that person's curated over many years, particularly with their sheep.

Speaker 2: 14:58

People are very in love with their genetics and so you can choose to go and sell them, but then you've got to buy them back in, and the biosecurity risk and the cost associated with that when you're trying to do it when everyone else is buying in, is tricky, plus trying to get the right type of article back in is tricky.

Speaker 2: 15:14

So if just selling large numbers of animals is not practical, locking them up in confinement and feeding them, or like trying to reduce your stocking rate by shifting animals off country, is a good way of doing it and having, like some, we're also a grain growing area, which is fortunate. So having some commodities on hand and knowing how to use them and putting the science behind how much to feed and when to feed to get the right result and not waste bucket loads of money and doing the sums on whether it's worth feeding particularly, say, young stock or fattening stock to slaughter weights and things like that is important as well. So, yeah, just decisions like that and just always just planning ahead and having a plan and, if it, you know, planning that it doesn't rain, and if it does rain, that's a nice bonus.

Speaker 1: 16:03

Yeah, for sure, and I guess we always talk about kind of little on, little on often, rather than a lot later or little and early. I suppose like the value of preemptive nutrition is enormous. Like the cost of losing conditions score and then trying to feed it back on generally doesn't pay. But if you're monitoring and unaware you can kind of hold that condition on with a much more cost efficient manner. Obviously it gets to a point where if the drought holds on then it gets tough to continue that. But yeah, I guess making all those decisions and making them openly rather than kind of crossing your fingers and putting your head in the sand and hope that it rains one day, is the more planning and thinking you do, the better, the better off you go generally.

Speaker 2: 16:47

Yeah, absolutely, and I'm lucky in that a lot of my clients are pretty happy to share. So some of the work I do is with groups and my client base. We have like a group chat and they're so happy to share their experiences and all talk about what's going on, and I think we fostered that through the last drought. And, yeah, everybody's pretty open and I don't know it, just talking to somebody and making those decisions with other people, whether it's just me individually or a group or other producers or whatever it might be around you, just gives you some sort of faith in your decision, I guess, and you feel a bit more buoyant about it, even if it's a tough decision.

Speaker 1: 17:29

Yeah for sure. When people think nutrition, I don't know whether their minds go straight to energy and protein or whether it goes to a heap of trace elements and stuff. Am I right in saying that most of your work would be just getting the macros right, getting energy and protein right, and then when sometimes you run into my go album issues, but most of what of the lift you can get is just through managing protein and energy, or are you seeing lots of deficiencies and stuff out there?

Speaker 2: 18:00

No, we're really fortunate. Besides moisture, we're not but deficient in March. We don't have a lot of trace element problems, thank goodness. So this country is great it grows heaps of feed when it rains. So, yeah, it really is centered around energy and protein, and particularly energy. I find I don't know as an industry in Australia, we get a little tangled up on protein and we all get really fluffed up about protein, but, yeah, energy is a really big driver of production and so, yeah, feeding that and also, yeah, just sensible direction of your resources, I guess, like when to feed, when not to feed, and when to go and buy sensible trace element supplements and when not to, I guess. And really focusing on what we need to spend the money on is where I pitch it.

Speaker 1: 18:49

Yeah, I guess there's any number of companies that want to sell you a public block or a vitamin supplement or something or other, and sometimes that's great to see and sometimes it's not, and so I'm sure helping people navigate those discussions would be useful as well.

Speaker 2: 19:04

Yeah, absolutely. There's so much on the market just trying to sort out what's important and what's not as part of the challenge.

Speaker 1: 19:13

One thing I wanted to explore was you've got a newsletter so people can sign up for a fairly modest fee, can sign up to get regular information, so that would be a that sounds like a good thing to do for those that want to hear more. And also, I guess, yeah, the opportunity to engage vets, rural vets that are passionate about large stock, like you are from afar. I guess, yeah, there seems to be a big opportunity there as well, that sort of phone a vet or virtual vet or whatever. Whatever we call it. The reality is is most regions don't have a passionate vet in their area, so there must be a huge opportunity for people outside your region to explore that as well.

Speaker 2: 19:55

Yeah, absolutely. I do a fortnightly newsletter and I don't know. People say how do you? You know that's a lot of work, how do you come up with that? And I do have. I do work with a wonderful girl called Gemma that helps me. But that really, the newsletter came out of the drought. I started that, yeah, years ago in the drought and was sending it to clients a long time ago, but it just it flows so easily now. It's so easy to put together because it's actually real stuff of what I'm saying in the paddock that fortnight and it's just really topical. I'm sure if you're thinking it, it's going to be in the newsletter because it's what everybody else is thinking or what I'm saying in the paddock, and so it really means something. You know it's really topical, it's not generic. So, yeah, it's not a lot of money but it might save you stock. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1: 20:46

It's a good thing, and have you got many people that you consult to from afar, like if, in terms of that, take a photo of a crook animal and do something about it?

Speaker 2: 20:56

Yeah, well, like I said, IHN really tries to drive it that proactive approach. So I'd much rather say healthy animal than a crook animal. But I do a lot of Zoom consults, particularly with my clients up through Southern Queensland and further afield than that. Yeah, I do a lot of Zoom catch-ups with them. Like, if they're thinking about, I don't know, trading some lambs and locking them in a feedlot, we might do some just some figures on what that might cost or what they might make out of that. We might formulate their rations and talk about what commodities they've got that they could use and those sorts of things. Yeah, so virtual consultations are definitely something I do, just because of the vast area that I cover and the distance involved. And it's just, we've got that technology available now to us and so it's just why not make use of it? So, yeah, and absolutely I don't mind the old crook or dead stock photo, but I'm probably going to give you a lecture about how we should do something a little more proactive.

Speaker 1: 21:56

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I agree 100 per cent there. I guess there were many negatives of COVID but a few positives and now, relatively well, we feel pretty native now just using Zoom and having these conversations as if we're there and I think, yeah, it's been big for our business and I'm sure for yours. We don't need to be. There are days where it's awesome to be on farm, but there's also days when it's awesome not to be in a plane or a car or whatever making the. I'm sure for you that's pretty easy to be driving 10 or 12 hours to see a client, which is, yeah, it's a big part of the world out there and lots, of, lots of case between clients. What do you say? Yeah, I guess that shortage of people, like you do, and I guess, yeah, the drivers, are obvious, but we seem like to have more vet schools than we've had before and more vet grads that we've ever had yet. Vet burnout yeah, people leaving the profession as quickly as they're coming into the profession seems to be a massive issue in the industry.

Speaker 2: 22:59

Yeah, it is, and it's something the veterinary industry as a whole is grappling with and trying to work out. I think it's. I don't have all the answers here today, but I think it's. You know, even when I graduated which is, oh yeah, 20, 18 years ago actually 18 years ago, you know you very much just, you didn't get paid much.

Speaker 2: 23:21

I think I came out. I was on $37,000. That was my wage when I graduated after five years of uni and a big hex bill and I worked really hard, like the days were long and after hours was you know something you just had to deal with. You didn't get to say no, that was just something that was part of the deal and you had to go at everything and sometimes it didn't work out, sometimes things died or sometimes things didn't go well and you had to front the client and have that conversation and I don't know.

Speaker 2: 23:49

That was hard to deal with and I think, I don't know, we just had to grit our teeth and put up with it. That was sort of the attitude back then. But now I think there's more and more realisation that you don't have to put up with you know things, life can be easier, and so people don't want to do it, and I suppose it's a clashing of the generations, younger people coming up that are more empowered, and just the veterinary industry and just the reality of what we have to do. So it's just those two things clashing, I suppose, in the middle and we've got to come to terms with it, I guess, and the veterinary industry is working really hard on doing that. But I think if you can stick it out past those first few years where it is tough and you're in that real learning and growth phase, it's a great career and I certainly love what I do.

Speaker 1: 24:36

Yeah, I guess I don't know putting words into your mouth, but I imagine sailing your own boat these days and being at that top of the cliff rather than the bottom of the cliff. That's got to be a much more fulfilling experience than kind of always fronting up for those half crook animals and half angry owners.

Speaker 2: 24:54

Yeah, absolutely. But I wouldn't have got to where I wouldn't have the skills that I've got today if I hadn't done all that for years and years beforehand. So, yeah, you re-bought yourself, I guess, and that's just, yeah, how my career went. I'm pretty pleased with it and I take on vet students as well and I like working with them Like I just someone did that for me so I try and do it for them. And yeah, I really hope that they all succeed and go on and I hope that their experience with me and other rural vets like me can show them how good it can be and the options that are out there.

Speaker 1: 25:29

Yeah, fantastic. So you look out the window today and you're going to write a newsletter in the summertime, the next 10 days. What's the topic at the moment? What are the big things people are facing without stealing your content?

Speaker 2: 25:41

Yeah, well, we've had anywhere between 100 and well. I've had 160mls of rain here just outside Canambal, up to 200mls across the district. So it's pretty wet and we've got rapidly growing green feed which is excellent. I suppose the things that I've been saying to my clients is these are summer grasses, they're C4 grasses and you know they're not out. We get bulk now, we get a lot of it, but we get our best quality medic feed in winter. So just we've.

Speaker 2: 26:08

You know we went through a pretty tough winter and a lot of people early weaned lambs and calves, so they've got light weaners running around and just you know, is the green feed. It looks great, but is it good enough for those little weaners? Probably not. So I've been doing a few feed tests and just looking at what the expected growth rates are off the feed that we're growing and whether it's worth putting some supplement with those younger stalk. So that's probably front of mind.

Speaker 2: 26:31

We've got a lot of pink eye and cattle, which is a multifaceted problem and tricky to deal with, but that's something that's plaguing Stock, just with the humidity and the rain and the black flies, and on the sheep front, of course, the blow fly just loves these conditions. So we've yeah, that's what I've been doing. I've been out today on a property just going through some parasite plans. So I've been doing a lot of worm egg counts for people and just I mean, I find it really hard to just write a blanket worm plan or fly plan for the season, given that we just don't know exactly what the weather's going to do. But I think a worm egg count now and then make a educated decision on a drenching choice based off that worm egg counts are really good idea to start with. And yeah, we'll be looking at doing some drench resistance trials as well in the next couple of months if we can find weiner sheep that are wormy enough. So, yeah, that's probably what's on the agenda at the moment.

Speaker 1: 27:35

Yeah, we have a good summary of what's happening out there. I guess you've got Barber's Poll on the march. Those sort of conditions would be just awesome for Hamonkers.

Speaker 2: 27:45

Yeah, and God, aren't they a great parasite, like, considering their whole aim in life is to suck the blood out of their host and kill their host. It's quite amazing that they've continued to populate. But yeah, we've been through like I don't know eight or 10 months of completely dry weather and you know, we get a little bit of rain and here come the worms. It's 41 degrees here today, so the Blackscale worms don't like it very much at the moment. But the Barber's Poll are certainly. Yeah, the Barber's Poll are. I can hear them hatching, I reckon, as I walk through the paddock.

Speaker 1: 28:24

We need to keep an eye on them, yeah, between them and the maggots moving. I'm sure that's plenty of things for the frogs to eat up there.

Speaker 2: 28:32

Yeah, and when I started working with sheep as a vet, I stupidly thought this year's ago I thought, you know, we're so far out west we wouldn't have any drench resistance. But when you think about it, we've got the harshest environment which kills all the larvae, and then you go and you know, put an ineffective drench down a sheep's throat. The only ones left on that property are the ones that survived the drench to repopulate. So we've got enormous amounts of drench resistance here. That's fairly under-recognised. So yeah, I do a lot of work with drench resistance and just choosing appropriate drenches and protecting particularly, say, our long-acting drenches so that we can use them when we really need them and they still work for us.

Speaker 1: 29:16

Yeah, it's intriguing stuff, isn't it? Yeah, almost the harshest of the climate, the more likely you are to drive worm or resistance of the worms to chemicals up, whereas places like where I am in canabrothers people will be drenching I don't know hundreds of times more than your area. You haven't built up drench resistance because there's a lot of larvae out in the pasture when you're drenching and whereas for those areas all the larvae are all in the sheep or all the worms are in the sheep when the drench hits them. So, yeah, it's one of those many counterintuitive things in running livestock.

Speaker 2: 29:48

Absolutely. Anyway, we've learned a lot.

Speaker 1: 29:50

We went much better at it now than we ever were, so yeah, that's true, yeah, and I think most people are waking up to the reality that we don't have lots of new drench families turning up, or at least can't see any, and capsules are gone. So really it's really holistic management of parasites is the only way to go, and I'll get my two bobs worth on genetics in, but just that rotation drench is all the standard stuff is really important to manage those parasites because it's pretty hard to have a productive, profitable farm when something's trying to suck their blood all the time.

Speaker 2: 30:24

Yeah, absolutely yeah, sheep-wise, we'll join soon. And so, yeah, a lot of producers are doing pre-joining assessments of rams and condition scoring of use and just setting them up properly so that we can join successfully this summer.

Speaker 1: 30:41

Excellent, and I guess you could easily be staring down the barrel of some decent conception rates with using maybe lower than average condition on going forward on a green pick. That's probably that's almost textbook for a big flush and a big scanning. So then the next challenge is how to keep all those fetuses alive, obviously.

Speaker 2: 30:59

Yeah, that's the key in this environment is, yeah, the fetal survival. We generally get quite good conception rates. It's just, yeah, keeping them alive to marking. It's a constant work in progress.

Speaker 1: 31:09

Where are we at with four-legged parasites? That's the idea of wild dogs marching in, or not so much.

Speaker 2: 31:17

We might get the odd one every now and then, but generally speaking, no, we do have a little bit of exclusion fencing more and more, but, like mostly speaking, these properties aren't behind exclusion fences. But the more time I spend with clients in Southern Queensland, the more I cannot see why they're not down here, because there's not a lot of difference in the landscape or the vegetation type and there's certainly no big barrier that stops them coming, and I mean Southern Queensland's plagued by wild dogs. So I think it's only matter of time probably before they end up here, and that's quite worrying considering the damage that they do to sheep flocks in that environment. It's pretty, yeah, it's pretty concerning.

Speaker 1: 32:00

Yeah, excellent, well, not excellent, but yeah. No, it is a big worry, but it's good that they're not there. Anyway, we might wrap it up. It's been awesome to have a chat and hear your story and, yeah, definitely We'll put all of your various links into the show notes so people can track it down, get hold of that newsletter and, as importantly, get hold of your art and have a look at what's been recently painted. But yeah, all the best out there.

Speaker 2: 32:27

Thank you. It's a bit weird to play in sheep poo during the day and paint pictures at night, but anyway, it's a nice blend, yeah.

Speaker 1: 32:37

I'm sure. Well, everyone needs their out. And, yeah, you probably can't get there. We need to take up some classical music or something to get the whole triangle fixed. But, yeah, fantastic to have those hobbies and lots of things that we do that people wouldn't expect, I suppose. So, yeah, that's great and I'll have a quick look, but I'll have a better look and see what we can find. But, yeah, thanks very much for your time today. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your thoughts, sharing your story and what's happening out there in that pretty cool, unique part of the world that you live. And, yeah, look forward to meeting in person one day.

Speaker 2: 33:14

Sounds good. Thanks for the opportunity, Mark. Great to chat.

Speaker 1: 33:18

Thanks, Julian.