📢 Calling all sheep enthusiasts! This week's guest is Mark Mortimer, aka @sheepgeekCP on Twitter. Mark is both a sheep farmer and an innovator with an incredible mind for numbers and technology.
Raised on a merino stud, Mark has been recording sheep data for as long as he can remember. One of his first 'inventions' was voice-to-text software so that he didn’t have to write down the numbers his dad called out to him all day in the yards. He soon realised that talking in dusty sheep yards was equally as tiresome as writing things down all day, but the foundations of innovation were now there to be built upon.
Mark shares his journey of learning to code from a “good old-fashioned book” and how he then created very specific problem-solving technology with that knowledge.
From using some of the first electronic identification tags as part of the sheep CRC, to developing a walk-through pedigree matchmaking set-up, to a whisper-silent modular auto drafter capable of drafting up to 21 ways (which he also tested with his own head, to ensure the front gate closed softly enough on the sheep), Mark's innovations are what many sheep farmers dream about creating. And this is only the tip of the iceberg!
Mark also discusses Centre Plus and his father's approach to breeding merinos in the 1980s. He emphasises the power of collective decision-making to help drive genetic gain across the industry.
We hope that this podcast and Mark's insights into invention inspire you to think a little more creatively about solving your on-farm problems.
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
📢 Calling all sheep enthusiasts! This week's guest is Mark Mortimer, aka @sheepgeekCP on Twitter. Mark is both a sheep farmer and an innovator with an incredible mind for numbers and technology.
Raised on a merino stud, Mark has been recording sheep data for as long as he can remember. One of his first 'inventions' was voice-to-text software so that he didn’t have to write down the numbers his dad called out to him all day in the yards. He soon realised that talking in dusty sheep yards was equally as tiresome as writing things down all day, but the foundations of innovation were now there to be built upon.
Mark shares his journey of learning to code from a “good old-fashioned book” and how he then created very specific problem-solving technology with that knowledge.
From using some of the first electronic identification tags as part of the sheep CRC, to developing a walk-through pedigree matchmaking set-up, to a whisper-silent modular auto drafter capable of drafting up to 21 ways (which he also tested with his own head, to ensure the front gate closed softly enough on the sheep), Mark's innovations are what many sheep farmers dream about creating. And this is only the tip of the iceberg!
Mark also discusses Centre Plus and his father's approach to breeding merinos in the 1980s. He emphasises the power of collective decision-making to help drive genetic gain across the industry.
We hope that this podcast and Mark's insights into invention inspire you to think a little more creatively about solving your on-farm problems.
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, mark Moorler, to Hedgehepard.
Speaker 2:No, that's it. Thank you for good morning.
Speaker 1:Great to have you here, otherwise known as ShapeGeek for anyone who follows along on Twitter. There's a few thousand people watching your movements out on farm there. A fair few sunsets and a fair few innovations.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's one of those nicknames that your mates give you that you can't get away from. So the only option once you get given a nickname is to own it. So I guess that one's pretty appropriate for me, so I'm happy to take it.
Speaker 1:I don't think there's a more apt nickname for Twitter handle anyway for people out there than yours with ShapeGeek. I think Sophie's only upset that she didn't think of it first and steal it.
Speaker 2:I did do a fair bit of searching and there's some 14 year old girl in America who's the actual ShapeGeek, so I had to add a few letters half to get it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, there you go. Someone's got it early, someone went early, so you're out there farming at Talamore on the Bogan Way, which I think people will know where we're talking about If they are we're talking about. Otherwise people have no idea. So it's out. Central central West New South Wales.
Speaker 2:That's correct. Yeah, so along some lovely courts, iron bark, gravel ridges, so perfect ship country.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we'll cover all things today. But obviously your father, robert, was one of the founding members of Centiplast, which is sort of a big party all life. Well, from what I see on social media anyway, it's a big party all life running the Centiplasts nucleus. But obviously you're farming your own right as well. But Robert's been one of those original users of data and information in sheep breeding.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that's. You know we talk about tradition in sheep breeding. You know the data side of it is my tradition. So you know dad was doing that before I came home from school. So I've never not fleece, wade or body weight a sheep, so that's been like that my whole farming career. So I'm just a product of intergenerational farming, I guess. But you know we have added a few technologies along the way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think anyone that knows you or knows of you knows that. Yeah, really innovative. I reckon we might just go back to you or that. I guess the how you ended up back home farming I think there's a, I think there's a chat we had over a beer once that you sort of ended up going away to study, because I don't know was some sort of dare with your mate or some sort of some sort of deal you did with a mate, that going off and doing something different.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is sort of happened a little bit by accident. So you know, I wasn't that focused at school. So I was home on the farm as a 16 year old and you know, a good mate of mine went back to school to do year 11 and 12 and then found out that I snatched it and was home on the farm and he lobbied his parents very vigorously that he didn't want to be at school either and they came up with a deal for him which was if you come home now, you have to go back to our college and we're out as young fellas. One night and there was a third chap there and he spent six months at our college before he was politely asked to leave and the stories he had from those six months were pretty impressive and my mates said I've got to go to college when I'm 21. I just instantly said I'll come.
Speaker 2:And you know that was five years later it turns up with the enrollment forms and said remember when you said you come to college. So I filled him out and I went and it was. You know, by then I was a bit older and mature and I was ready for learning. So it was ended up being, you know really insightful academic experience, if you like, and then three years at our college and then back home on the farm. So I guess that's where some of the computer skills and you know budgeting and financial analysis and even some of the sheep stuff really came from. You know and that and obviously you know the sheep data from dad.
Speaker 1:Yeah, obviously, but I guess lots of people go to college and not many of them come home and start writing their own code. So where did, where did the head of that come? And obviously you're very, very good at self teaching, or you tubing or something to learn arranger skills.
Speaker 2:Yes, although it certainly wasn't the internet, because back in the mid 90s that really wasn't. You know it existed, but it wasn't the powerhouse it is today and certainly searching to find things that well. It just started in Excel and you know, it was just a little hobby, you play with Excel, and then one day I realized you could only write a formula that was 10 lines long in Excel. And you know, another fellow I knew said no, you need to learn to program. You know he's a, he's a software package and here are the manuals and I just sat down and read the manuals like a novel. It was pretty dry, but you know it just, it just sort of started and coincided with a project with the sheep CRC, so that's in the you know, doing a little bit of programming.
Speaker 2:But in the early 2000s I think it was 2003, we were part of the sheep CRC for using electronic tags and they sent a research route and they helped us put in electronic tags and they left us with some equipment and we had a, an RFID tag reader, and we hooked it, hooked it up and you could read the sheep's tag and it just went being and it didn't send it anywhere. There was no connection to the computer, no software, nothing to make it work. And it was just up to us Well, up to me, to write the software and get something going, because it was new enough that nobody had anything that would work at the time. So you know I shudder at the quality of some of those early programs, but you know that's, that's where it started. You know it's one thing to have a hobby but it's another thing to have that hobby have a practical outcome. And that's sort of where the drive came from to make it better and better.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that quote that perfect is the enemy of done is important. I don't think it's probably not much perfect code getting around, that's. There's lots of functional code getting around. The that became. Yes, absolutely. I'm assuming that code became pedigree matchmaker, or is that what the original project was or?
Speaker 2:No, I mean it was part of it, so that came, I don't know. Some point like that was another project after the electronic tags. So the sheep's can and I said, mark, we've got these different tags than the current tags for us and they were more like the ones you would encounter in a big charity run. You know everyone's got them on their shoelaces and you could drive your truck through the reader and it would read every sheep in the truck.
Speaker 2:And they said we want you to use these tags instead, Mark, just to see whether they're better than the other tags. And I put to them that if the new tags were going to get a foothold, they had to be able to do something that our current tags can't do. And that's where we came up with the pedigree matchmaker idea.
Speaker 2:And the idea was that you'd have a portal reader about the size of a gate and the sheep could just mosey in and out. But it's like all projects, a few things went wrong and we ended up not having access to those tags. But we plowed on with the project with the current technology and the path into water wasn't a whole gateway. Then we had to make it about the size of a body lane crate, which we thought might make it. So the milling at that point we thought would disturb the flow and make it not work. But history says that it probably actually helped forcing the men to do a single file and the project still got really, really good pedigree matchmakers from that. So that's how that process evolved. And then the sheep's AIC then put us on the ABC new inventors and did a few things like that and we won an episode of that on Telly. So it was really quite an industry experience for me. I'm going to say young farmer, probably middle-aged in most other industries, but a farmer and a sheep, I was only a young chap.
Speaker 1:So they shouldn't have a UHF tag, as those original ones were they all.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I struggle with the technology, but I know they use them in running races and things like that. So if you know 15, I just remember we had a handful of tags and we threw them through a body lane crate and you go over the computer and it wasn't. Did it read every tag? It was how many times it read each tag, like you could throw 10 tags through and get 15 reads off from each.
Speaker 2:But you know, that's where the technology we have now, which is probably strengths and weaknesses in both sides- yeah for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, been watching along for a while. You've invented lots of stuff. One of them is your own auto drafter. I don't know what you think your coolest project is. Have you got a favorite that you've sort of developed over the time?
Speaker 2:I do quite like the auto drafter, but yeah, I have a play with lots of different things. There's certainly plenty of projects in the workshop that never make it out the door. Half building ideas that didn't work.
Speaker 1:I learned recently that PhD stands for project half done, so you got a few of them.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, you know I used to have to sit in the yards when Dad was doing all the class and I'd have to type in. You know he'd yell at the numbers and I'd sit there and type them in. There was pretty mind-bombing, boring work and it'd be 38 to 42 degrees and I'm going to write some code that you just put on a headset and you talk all the data in. You know, and I did that, it worked great, it worked in the office, it even worked in the yards with the noise. This is awesome, but it turns out talking for eight hours a day in the sheep yards and the dust and the flies is actually really, really hard work. You know I spent quite a long time developing voice activated software, because this is back in the early days.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know. So I was the developer, the client. You know every aspect of it, and I still couldn't work out that the project I was developing wasn't going to work until we took it and used it. So you know again. You know I'll take my hat off to people that take an idea through to a product that sells into the market when you know each one of those people is a different mind. You know, you can. There's so many points that an idea can fall over even though it's a good idea.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, exactly, and there's having developed well, trying to develop a few innovations myself understand that linear process seems like some sort of spiderweb of insanity, but I think so. The order draft is pretty cool in the sense that, as different to most order drafters, it's there's sort of I'm going to say, drones, but separate gateways in separate spots, so you can sort of and they remember which sheep's gone? Well, they can. Anyway, you end up you can draft in a very unique way with your order drafter.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I did set myself a few key requirements that I had to fulfill when I started to build it, and the first one was you know, nobody's sheep yards and that day and age were built for five-way auto drafts, so the sheep yards weren't conducive to it. So I wanted the system to be modular. So you had the body main crate and then your three-way drafting gates for separate Units that spoke wirelessly and you could connect them up through races or different areas. So the unit will cater for seven three-way drafting units, even though I've only ever built two and a half of them. So technically I can get a four-way draft, but that's not practical. It turns out five ways is. You know, you can put your sheep through twice and you've got 25 different mobs and that's typically what I join each year. So you know all the dues go through twice.
Speaker 2:The other requirement was that it had to be reasonably quiet. So the early auto drafters that you know shop bought ones that we'd had had a lot of moving parts and were quite noisy and I don't use dogs in the yards. Everything's calm and quiet. So the noisiest thing in the yards was the auto draft and I wanted to eliminate that.
Speaker 2:And the last requirement was that the back door had to be a guillotine door that fit in the race, so I didn't want it taking up too much space on the side and you had to be willing to put your own head in the door when it closed. But the door had to be strong enough to stop 120 kilogram charging sheep. Now, I played a fair bit of rugby in my time so maybe my threshold of what's appropriate in the back door is not the same as everyone's, but I certainly did test it on myself. That was part of the design requirement Because I didn't want it hitting hard on the sheep. Like to get the sheep to flow nicely, it had to be a reasonably good experience If they stood in the middle of the door. The door closes and it's got sensors on it and it just hits them and pauses and as well as on it as they go through.
Speaker 2:It follows the curve of the sheep in.
Speaker 1:But once it's shut, it's shut.
Speaker 2:So yeah, she roughed up ears in the design process, but we got there in the end.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I'm sure that they can scale from a plenty of head knocks has helped a bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Along with that there's I remember saying once, a sheep feeder that closed at night. There's all sorts of stuff that is. The brain ever stopped ticking. Is there always something on the go?
Speaker 2:There's always something on the go, yes, although most of us are aware that as we age, our bodies slow down and, unfortunately, our minds do exactly the same thing. So I've noticed a slow down, maybe, or a change in the motivation for new ideas. Most Nobel laureates do their groundbreaking work in their early 30s, and it takes them 50 or 60 to get recognized, but they're not making their groundbreaking ideas later in life.
Speaker 2:There's always exceptions, yeah, but I guess you need the right environment for the mine to wander. So for me that was behind a mob of sheep on a motorbike, so you didn't need a lot of cognitive power to ride the bike and move the sheep, so you'd have the two hour block where you were free for the mine to wander.
Speaker 2:And so long as I don't put headphones in and listen to an audio book. While I'm doing it, I come up with ideas. I put the audio book in and the brain stops. So maybe there's a lesson there for people too.
Speaker 1:Stop listening to podcasts, man.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, that's not how I have listening to these while chasing sheep. You've got to set your priorities.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I do. I reckon that's 100% agree. I've done a bit of running in 2024 and 2023. And I did a fair bit of it listening to either music or to a podcast, and yeah, you certainly when you forget your headphones or whatever you actually do, end up in some nice deep thinking spots, and so maybe part of 2024 should be to leave the earbuds out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah, the human body is designed for the brain to work really well while you're doing kind of like or recreditive exercise. So that kind of half meditative brain wandering state that you would be in whilst you're running would be really good for idea generation.
Speaker 1:Partially oxygen starved. I'm not sure that's best for a brain. No, maybe you're looking too fast for it. That's never been an accusation of her. But if we move on to Santa Claus, so maybe just run through sort of how that came about and sort of where it is today, and then we'll get through to get into more detail about the breeding program.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess. So I'll just try, I guess, a brief history. So Santa Claus started as a group breeding scheme in 1980. So I guess there's a bit of a build up in the mid-70s. So Dad was a farmer on his own farm at that stage, part of a family partnership, and the Tullamore area, I guess, doesn't have any large dormant parent studs. So if people want to ramps they have to go quite a ways and out of our local environment.
Speaker 2:And Dad was looking for a new ramp source and he had a department of Ag Shippo that offered some advice and the advice was come to this stud. We've got an experiment going, half the studs being selected traditionally and the other half of the studs being selected on measured performance. Sorry. And Dad said I selected, we selected 10 ramps, five from each side. He said we'd been through rural youth, we'd all been taught to class. They were 10 very even ramps. He bought them home and the Shippo turned up and drafted his use randomly and they made it five ramps to one group, five to the other and the Shippo was going to come back in 12 months time and help Dad measure the project to see what the difference had been. And Dad said they were halfway through the season and you could tell just looking at the sheep that there was something different about the five ramps that had been measured. And Dad he's with himself what a great tool. All I have to do is do this same test across the range of studs. I'll find the best stud in Australia and I'll just buy their ramps.
Speaker 2:And that's where it started. So he wasn't breeding for his own outcome, he was just testing studs ramps. And then he heard of a group called the Australian Reena Society which was at the time a very large group breeding scheme and they'd been doing a lot of this work. And Dad thought well, if I just test their ramps, then I can tick off all the ramps that they have outside tested. So he was trying to leverage off their existing work and he rang them up and said can I buy some ramps? And they said no, we don't sell ramps outside the system. The only way you can get ramps is to join the group.
Speaker 2:And he was out with his mates after this phone call and he was having a winch to his mates that he couldn't get older these ramps because you had to join the system. And one of his mates turned around and looked at him and said oh well, all those guys here in the rest didn't shoot breeding. You ring them up and tell them we've formed a group, get the Rams, you test them and when you've got the answer, quit. So they joined the Australian Marina Society, got the Rams out, but of course everyone had access to the genetics. They performed that well that there was no desire to quit and this group had formed.
Speaker 2:So it sort of happened a little bit by accident. But then they joined at its peak. So I think the AMS at that stage had a base locker of 3 million years. So that was 104 Rambreeding Cooperatives across Australia and each Rambreeding Cooperative had, you know, eight or 10 or a dozen commercial breeders. So it was a large group and we were part of that system throughout the 80s. And then it ran into, I guess, people problems, not sheep problems as large groups or properties can do, and by the end of the 80s we were, I guess, out on our own but none of those original members wanted to stop what they were doing.
Speaker 2:So you know, centre Plus became a group breeding scheme you know I guess in its own right or not, part of another organisation. And then we've been breeding sheep, or I've been breeding sheep and dad for Centre Plus and it's members ever since.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I guess, if we look today, it's had a massive influence on the Australian industry through well, obviously through those members taking rams, but on really through Seaman sales and I don't know, for a number of years, I don't know probably still the fact that one of the highest Seaman sellers in the country is Centre Plus and that's, I guess, testament to those original decisions. But now it's the rate of genetic gain that continues by using all the tools. As what makes or why Centre Plus remains appealing, I suppose, is because the rams 10 years ago are nothing like the rams today and it's always improving.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's always a lot of change.
Speaker 2:I think you know a lot of the power is because it's a group. You know the advantages of group decision making, of a well-formed group can be quite powerful as opposed to an individual, you know. So you give an example. I guess when we had the reserve price crash and we're completely devalued, there was a really strong pressure in the industry was get fine or get out.
Speaker 2:And you know the group of people like if we were just a stud breeder, you know it'd be very hard to ignore that message, whereas because we had all of our clients, we'd be sitting around a social barbecue, typically with a few drinks, when they were making these decisions. You know they all just said oh, but we like our big Western sheep. So their directive was without any understanding of genetics and how hard it'd be. They just said get fine, but we still want our big sheep, we don't want those traditional fine wool. So there we were with a breeding objective that had to be a big, fertile sheep and fine. You know, 10 years later of breeding like that, it turned out to be a product that people actually really wanted. And they all, you know they said go pole early on. So you know, all of a sudden we're a large-framed pole reno with fine wool. I don't think we would achieve that if it was just me and Dad breeding in a traditional stud situation without that really strong group decision-making.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's an interesting point that that combination of minds is.
Speaker 1:I guess, yeah, no one's as smart as whatever it is, what's the there's a quote there no one's smarter than, anyway, no one's as smart as the group of us or the team of us or whatever.
Speaker 1:And I think that in a way that can be group think, can be dangerous, but it can also that sort of natural conservatism that happens when you've got to appease more than one person means that you, yeah, you think through those decisions a bit more carefully than what you might have if it was just one or two making those decisions. And I think, yeah, that's. I think if we think about the other group breeding scram that spun out of AMS, which is Mernotech, the same thing can probably be said that again, they've got a. The index they use has to be approved by the board and has to be in line with members, and it's the same sort of concept that stops you from saying, right, we're going to drop to 16 micron because it's the only way to go, and means that if someone doesn't agree with that, you got to find a compromise, like any good marriage. So, yeah, I think that's a really good point that the power in that team yeah, sometimes it can be hard to get consensus, I know.
Speaker 2:So we're all here in the sheep yards at home and we're going to have a discussion about mulesing and brick sprinkle. So if you just, you know, let out ask people at that stage, you know, should we stop mulesing? The? You know that was 50% of the members had already stopped. The other 50%, some had stopped and some had started again and would probably be the last ones to stop because they went too early.
Speaker 2:So real division and becoming quite a heated debate. So it's about managing that. You know the tactic for me at that time was to reframe the question instead of you know they're all busy arguing about how crazy the idea was I reframe the question who's worried that they're going to be forced to stop mulesing? And everyone paused and had a think and then every hand went up. So the moment you've got consensus on something like that, you can then say right, from a genetic perspective, do we want to do some risk mitigation in case we've been asked to stop? Do we have some targets? And the moment we had that consensus, then all of a sudden we can set some hard targets on those kind of welfare traits and away we go again.
Speaker 2:So sometimes the debates aren't seamless or, you know, stressless. But you know, I think it's. Those kinds of discussions do really help and for me as the breeder, once I've got a clear consensus, it makes life pretty easy. It's just, you know, it's just down to the mass and you have some talks about how quickly you want to get there, what sacrifices you want to make, and away you go yeah exactly, and, yeah, I'm sure there's been some.
Speaker 1:Any group of people, there's always going to be lots of different opinions, and particularly ones that tend to be more emotion charged, like mulesing and others that we've faced. But yeah, so you. So the decision was made by the group to say smuelsing at the nucleus level a number of years ago.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, so because we reframed the question away from do we stop mulesing or not, to setting genetic targets. So we actually set the genetic targets quite a few years ago. But the actual stopping and mulesing, you know, became it was relevant once we set the genetic targets. So we have stopped, but it wasn't. That wasn't the decision that was made. The decision was made to hit key genetic targets.
Speaker 2:At that stage there was work done by AWI that showed that if you were in a low flow risk environment which we are, we don't get too many flies that you could have a breed shrink of minus 0.2 and be fine. If you're in a medium, well, minus 0.4,. A medium risk environment was minus 0.6 and a high risk environment was minus 0.8. So we had a discussion around that information and we chose halfway between the low and the medium high risk environment. So we hit a target of minus 0.5 and we set that up as a hard target.
Speaker 2:So at that stage, you know, I think we're a minus 0.2 and a half or something like that. So we had to make incremental improvements each year until we hit that goal. And now that we've got there, the members you know we're happy with that progress. We could go a bit further if you wanted, but it's been set up as a soft target. So the idea is to get a bit more playing. But if we can't manage incremental improvements each year, that's okay, so long as it's still part of the overall goal. So it's now moved to a soft target.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right now we don't have too many hard targets.
Speaker 2:Normally they're soft targets, but you know like a hard target would be. You know there's got to be an economic gain every year of you know whatever traits make that up. But you know, as for the rest of the individual traits, they're normally soft targets. So we try and wander towards in a manageable, you know, combination of traits, if you like.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's the important thing, that a year or two not going forward doesn't mean you're not, doesn't mean the breeding objective towards that target is not going forward. It just means that there's been something else. Well, some sawers don't do what they were told or don't breed like that, or sometimes you've yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:And sometimes you know you can choose a trait that you simply don't have any diversity in.
Speaker 2:If you don't have any diversity, it's very hard to make genetic gain. So you might spend a couple of years building some variation in the trait you're after before you can then start to move that trait onto animals that have all the other desired traits. So you can you know you can be a party of your breeding objective and not be moving forward. You're just building a platform that you're getting ready to move forward on. So it is a slow game I do. I do have a little mental model that I try and keep in my mind when I'm working out a breeding objective for the members of those. And I actually came out of a lot of a reading I did from learning to code and I stumbled across an article that was looking at university exam results in computer science and these group of people noticed there was a double bell curve in the results and they hypothesized that there was one group of people that found coding easy and another group of people that found it more challenging, but they weren't separated on IQ, it was something else that was giving us difference. All they wanted to do was come up with an exam that you could sit before you started the course. That could help predict which side of the belt, which group you would be in. So you could sit down and do this computer exam and you can answer every single question wrong but still be in the group that found learning to code easy. And what they? What they discovered in that was that if you answered questions wrong but answered them consistently wrong in the same way, it showed that you had this mental landscape of how you thought what you were answering worked. So you had this overarching model of how computer coding worked. And then you, you know you made your decisions based on that, so you weren't contradicting an answer in this question from the one before. You know you were keeping track of how you're going and you know I got me thinking. Now I know they did have replication problems, so it's probably not a valid outcome for computer science, but it got me thinking. So sheep breeding is a pretty complicated thing and we'd be happy to have a nice mental model in your head of you know what do I run decisions straight? Let's say, you know, if we want to increase fleece weight, what, what, what are the consequences of doing that?
Speaker 2:So whilst out on the motorbike behind a mobile sheep one day, my simple mental model for sheep breeding is there's only two kinds of traits on sheep. There's traits that have a nutritional requirement and traits that don't. Traits that don't have a nutritional requirement say, you know, wall style or some confirmation traits you can select for them and that's the end of the story. All you do is you lose some selection pressure on other traits. It's not too detrimental to everything else. The traits that have a nutritional requirement. There's only two things you can do, and that's to pinch that nutritional requirement from another trait or make the sheep more efficient. And for me I do it in that order If nature will just pinch the nutritional requirement from another trait first before they make the sheep more efficient. So that's my little mental model. It's only two traits and we're one traits, the end of the road, and the other trait you don't. There's only two outcomes. So if you wanted to push fleece like it's clearly a trait with a nutritional requirement. So the first question is where would that nutritional requirement be pinched from if I just select on fleece way? So we know that single trait selection is not a really good outcome. So it's just going to be pinched from somewhere else.
Speaker 2:Ultimately, everyone wants to make the sheep or animals more efficient. So how do we ensure that we're not just taking nutritional requirements from some other part of the animal to put it into our desired trait? That's not always bad. Obviously, nutritional traits don't all have the same economic benefits, so there could be a case made that that trait's not very economically beneficial. Let's pull that one back and put the nutrition into a trait that is. But I think ultimately people are looking to make sheep more efficient. So for me that's a little mental model that I can carry in my mind. It's pretty simple and we can have a discussion about traits and what to do. I've sort of got that floating above in my mind and then think about the implications of it while I'm going forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think the additional complexity is that animals run in mobs, not in individuals. So it's about making that whole mob more efficient, not necessary any individual animal. We'll make that whole production system more efficient, not necessary any individual. So that's the. I guess. I've been watching, been at home and I've decided to become a beekeeper in his retirement years and just really been thinking hard about how you ended up with worker bees that are all female and do what they're told and the drone males just cruise out and wait for a queen to turn up, and how that organism has evolved as a group of individuals rather than any one individual animal competing for its own cause, I suppose. So it's an obviously insect's art mammals, but it's intriguing and I think that's we have to continue to think about the hive rather than the individual bee.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I wouldn't be able to quote it, but I know Richard Dawkins talks about a bit of that stuff in his 1970 book, the Selfish Gene, and he does highlight how the model of genes promoting themselves still works in the insect world when you get your head around. So yeah, you're fascinated by all of that stuff I am. So a lot of do have books on genetics on the bedside table, a whole concept of genetics whether it's not just she, but you never know where good ideas come from.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the more we get out. Yeah, there's obviously lots of different industries doing lots of industry interesting things and lots to learn and we'll always. I think the beauty of the organism that we focus on, both sheep and beef, is that, yeah, I don't think we'll ever know everything and so we'll never know what. Like, there's always up regulation, down regulation and, by accident or by design, we've got correlations occurring and I think I guess the beauty of the approach that you've taken and others like you have taken is not be not to say well, you can't have. If you want to have fine sheep, they have to be small sheep. So therefore, we can't have fine sheep.
Speaker 1:It's sort of almost not ignoring the correlations. Obviously you have to respect them, but it's almost same. Well, yeah, there's correlations that will slow us down, but we'll work towards not being ruled by those correlations. I think that's almost. I often wonder whether we would have been better off not even understanding those correlations out there and just accepting. There's this blue sky out in front and I think sometimes people think those correlations are locked in stone and you can't fight them and they will always win. But I guess history has told us not true. But yeah, it's an intriguing space to play, and that's for sure.
Speaker 2:It is. I mean, for me that's what makes it fun, you know that's. You know, obviously been a brino sheep where I've got that fleece on it and it's not just the carcass and reproduction throws in a massive amount more correlations and say you make breeds, or your beef cattle probably more a kind of dairy If the dairy guys were turning off steaks as well as meat. You know, it's that kind of correlations that you're battling against. To me that's the challenge. Yes, it slows you down. You know there's a lot of modern tools that we can use to speed you up. So it's, you know, a constant battle.
Speaker 2:So the correlation that I'm finding the most challenging at moments of three way one so that's bridge, wrinkle, fleece weight and micron. So I can find you plenty of sheep that have any two of those traits. The sheep that do well in all three is much harder. So obviously you've got micron and wrinkle, both correlating against fleece weight. So you can, you know you can have a quite a plain animal cuts, a lot of wool, but you know you typically got a much stronger micron. So that's that's my exciting correlation at the moment. So it's a three way one that I would like to really smash open and with you know the idea is see how far we get Obviously the with breeding.
Speaker 2:Our only limiting factor is time. So all of these problems with correlations only eventually because somebody says I need that sheep next year, whereas if you had an unlimited amount of time, genetics can do amazing things. So I was reading once that you know, we could breed a mouse to be the size of an elephant and if we had 60,000 years the humans on the ground wouldn't notice the change, but in 60,000 years' time we'd have a mouse the size of an elephant. There is no genetic limitation for mice not being as big as elephants. The limitation is time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I guess 100%, and then running into problems through trying to be fast, I suppose, is what it is. It's the rush that slows it down, it's a rush that results in inbreeding, and it's a rush that results in a whole other thing, because you end up yes, yeah, whereas if you just quite quiet it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah in that situation. Yeah, and for most of my breeding career that amount of time I've had seemed unlimited. Now that I'm still under the average age of a sheep farmer but not quite much the amount of time left to a sheep those goals doesn't seem so unlimited anymore. And I know I've seen work of yours that says you've only got so many breeding decisions. You don't want to waste any of them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I think that's so true for all of us. Yeah, I mean, I guess for you and I, who are obviously passionate about what you can achieve, it's the worst thing you can possibly do is waste a breeding year. There's no worst thing that can be achieved.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, and sometimes outcomes just don't work the way you want and you go oh, that's a whole year wasted and those genes are in the flock for the next four or five years you know that's the wisest decision, or sometimes there's some outsourge of control.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, another tough correlation is the group announced in their wisdom that said we don't need any more fetuses in the sheep market, but we do want more lifelands. So we want our winning rate to go up. But we'd like you to drive that through conception and you raring ability, not through litter size. And obviously there's a. If you just ask nature or revolution to give you more lambs, evolution says we're just going to give you more fetuses on the ground, more ovulation. It's the easy one to achieve it with.
Speaker 2:So that's another one that we're working on at the moment is, you know, as to cap? Well, not to, yeah, to hold litter size and drive winning rate through your raring ability and conception, but because the variation in those traits is much smaller, the gains you can make in winning rate slow down once you've made that decision. But you know it's still an exciting thing to be working on now that we actually have the tools to do that, whereas it wasn't that long ago we didn't have the separate tools to enable us to do that very easily. Yeah, and 100%.
Speaker 1:And I think I mean once you see those size that are sort of plus 0.1 and even beyond that for ERA, and see how their daughters behave, it does get pretty exciting.
Speaker 1:And but you're right, and I think we often take it for granted that how far we've come in the last couple of decades in terms of the tools we have available to us, but there's so many I know that most of the people we work with haters for coming up with new traits, but there's so many. We have a lot more power now. There's a lot of like you can make a lot of mistakes when you only got if you only got knobs or dials for half of the traits, whereas now we've most of the traits, have a dial that we can work with in the form of a breeding baby. There's a few to come, but I feel like we there's lots of dials that aren't just left freewheeling like there would have been 10, 15 years ago or 25 years ago when it was a fleece weight, 5-bit-omda pretty much and that was it Obviously easy to make or easier to make game when you forget about everything else. But we're now got such power to really be careful and have positive effects.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I totally agree with that. I guess that comes back to my mental model of you know, nature will pinch nutrition from other traits to give you the trait you're after and if you're not looking at those other traits, those freewheeling knobs will just, you know, spin backwards in the alarming rate. You know it's like that eurareability. I knew that I had great variation for it because I had all the historical data of real lambing outcomes for different sire lines of use. What I didn't have was a convenient tool that could take that historical data and present it to me on a newborn lamb, you know I could follow sire lines but you know it wasn't the same level of accuracy that I have with a breeding baby now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I think the power of I mean you could stand at the class inbox and look through pedigrees and work out that you is rare, like, yeah, there was a way to do it, but there's probably not a time in the world to actually analyze all that information compared to a breeding baby and we find that a lot where you've had, I mean things like foot structure and stuff that we're looking at now and foot rot and those sort of things that, yes, you can color it with lamb sheep or cowler color sheep or foot rot or whatever.
Speaker 1:But once you've got a breeding baby, then you're then that half-sib or the daughter or the son or whatever that you're looking at also carries that knowledge that that animal got foot rot or whatever. So it's one of its relative somewhere in the flock did. So, yeah, the power of that breeding baby compared to trying to find that information or know that it exists. But just, I mean, unfortunately, the reality is we don't have unlimited time to make those selection decisions, as hundreds and thousands of sheep and so every the reality is the brain has to make a decision about what you're doing with that animal, whether it's on a computer or whether it's in the classing race, and so the breeding way that tells you what the most likely outcome of its genes are is just insanely more powerful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the fact that it's founded on a real test.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So those animals with breeding ways for foot rot can be traced back to animals that were actually exposed to foot rot in a real test.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So that's it. I think for me that the traditional paradigm for sheep breeding is very powerful and hard for people to get away with. So if we go back to traditional breeding, you know, let's say I want to improve fleece weight, I'll go and find a bunch of visual traits that I think are correlated to it, like wrinkle and density and staple length, and I'll breed for those instead. And then you know, we do a lot of the SRS fleece scoring the visual scoring system here to. You know Dan started doing it to test whether the system worked. But then he actually liked the wool produced, separate from the performance that it was purporting to deliver. But for me it was exactly the same system. They had an economic outcome they wanted. They had a set of visual traits that they said should give it. We'll breed for those instead.
Speaker 2:You just mentioned the foot rot. You know people. You know we know the sheep get feet problems that can get foot rot. Let's have a think about what types of feet might cause that and we'll visually select for that instead. But it's not a real test. You know we can't know all the chains that might go into being resistant. We don't need to know, we just need to do a real test.
Speaker 2:And that's the power of the breeding value it takes the information from those real tests and then propagates it through our pet degrees into our new animals. Yeah, 100%.
Speaker 1:I guess you've seen a lot of change and, not patting into be any older than you are We've both seen a lot of change in the industry at the time. What are you? We're now? The last 12 months 24 months has arguably been the well. We're now in the era of AI and technology change at a rate that none of us have experienced before, whether it's a new trait or combination of traits or technology. What do you think the next most exciting thing in sheep breeding is going to be?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, it's crystal ball stuff, always hard to work at, obviously because I write code. I'm interested in AI. I've read about neural networks. I've written code for very small ones. You know I'm not going to develop an AI at all, but you know, I've got into it a little bit so I can understand how it works. And then I'm on some industry meetings with a lot of our scientists that develop our breeding values and I'll ask you know, what are you going to do if somebody develops an AI that can do all this stuff that you do? And you know, I know they're starting to think about it, but it was only three or four years ago.
Speaker 2:you could ask that question, you just got blank faces I think computing power currently would be a limit on replacing breeding values with an AI, unless you were Google and had access to that All of their you know big data centers. But at some point in the future that will change.
Speaker 1:For me as a breeder.
Speaker 2:I've got to work really hard to keep the mindset that how I get the information to make good decisions doesn't matter, I've just got to keep making good genetic decisions. So and that's you know. Where does CRISPR come into it? You know, design a sheep.
Speaker 2:I work very hard to set up a pedigree. So when meiosis and the splitting of the two DNA strains happens, I try to increase the probability that that random process chops the DNA up in just the right spots. That will end up with animals that can break these correlations. You know, if somebody gave me a tool that can do that without the randomness, I know I did watch a talk from a geneticist that got up and it was based on dairy cattle and they said you know, we've done a lot of genomic works with in the dairy industry If we could get these particular segments of DNA in one animal, this is our potential yield and it was massively further than we are now. But the probability of getting to that animal through our traditional random chopping up of DNA in the natural breeding season just means it takes a long time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's the 60,000 years to breed an elephant from a mouse.
Speaker 2:Yes, well, that's it With CRISPR. You know they probably do it fairly quickly, do it in a generation. So there's a risk that a technology like that that's so powerful comes along but has a price tag that your average breeder is out of the game. So for me I would find that devastating, given that I think that's part of a like about my industry. There isn't a right or wrong way to breed an animal to me. You know, that's the beauty of it. If you, if you're passionate about beef, cattle or dairy or sheep or whatever, you can get in and breed them and if you do a good enough job, people will want your products. But if the tools that enable us to do that are priced out of the industry, that that would really change the landscape. Yeah, we'd open it up to tremendous gains, but close it down to tremendous versatility, I guess, or access to you know. Now all you need is a passion.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Recently on Twitter, you said something along the lines of if a technology is taking talking about EID and if technology is taking 24 years to get taken up or 25 years to get taken up, has it solved the problem, which is a really good point and in one way it hasn't. In one way it hasn't because the real obvious need for it. On farmers is clearly not very clear, because otherwise every farmer, every sheep farmer, would have EID tags, and I guess the same goes for all technology we often get when they put in a basket, that sheep farmers, or farmers in generally, are slow to uptake technology, which I don't think is real. I think we're just humans who are naturally cautious about stuff.
Speaker 2:Technology is not distributed equally. The technology is not distributed equally. So you know I'm a mixed farmer. I've got GPS and yield maps. The thought of driving my tractor without a GPS and the tractor steering itself down the paddock would be horrifying. I don't want to go back. But the technology in my cropping each new thing I develop cuts down labour, makes the job easier, saves me time.
Speaker 2:The technology in sheep with the IDs to make it pay I've got to do extra work, more labour, less time available to me. So to give an example, when Genomics first came out, we had an extension multiplier flock as part of Centre Plus and one of the other guys in the group was managing that flock, doing full pedigree and most of the work that I was doing. And Genomics came along and I proposed an idea that we could go Genomics only in that flock, so long as we kept feeding it with animals of really good phenotype and genotype and you could stop doing all the measurement and work. And I said but because of the cost of the tests, the money you save from not doing the measurement doesn't offset the full cost of the Genomic test. So across the 400 years you'd still have to put in $6,000 extra which wasn't too much in measurement costs, and I put to the group you know, did we want to do this? And the fellow doing the work put his hand up and said I'll pay it myself.
Speaker 2:So he was willing to put in that six grand so long as he didn't have to do all the work with the sheep. And it was kind of an eye-opening moment for me because I liked all that work. That's what I get up for. But the technology in the sheep game is that's what he's experiencing. So to compare it to cropping is not fair because and you know, there's some pretty sound economic principles. There's the Bowel Mall effects, b-o-u-m-a-l I think.
Speaker 2:So this economist has worked out that some things get cheaper over time. So we know computers and you know our auto steering and tractors any of those kind of technologies are getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. Some jobs get more expensive over time and the difference is where technologies enable economy or scale in your labor. So you know I've got much bigger tractors, much bigger headers. I can pay workers in those jobs more. I can pay a guy to drive my header much more than I could in the past, but that header is now stripping 50 ton an hour instead of 20. So the cost of labor per ton of grains actually gone down, even though I can pay more. If we switch over to a sheep, we haven't seen, say, an economy or scale improvement in shearing in 120 years. So there's, you know, medicine and education and there's a few other professions like that where it's on the wrong side of that, you know, economy or scale ledger and the further 100% right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's so. That's you know. And the further cropping gets away in economy or scale of labor from sheep, the more people that will switch over. And it doesn't have to be you know, a little example I gave a vow guy. It doesn't have to be a full economic sense. People will pay a bit extra money not to have to do the work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, no, you've said it well, and that's if I had a vaccine not fumbled through that question. That's the kind of question I was asking. I think it is. We haven't. Technology has to be a serious painkiller or or a big labor server to take that pain away to, to be naturally taken up rapidly, and so that's. That's something we're always on look at, I suppose in the sheep industry, because that is our struggle. It's hard to corporate scant coming out of farm 100,000 sheep a few try. But it's very hard to find those economies of scale.
Speaker 2:Yes, it is. There's very few things where your data in the sheet game is a byproduct of management, whereas just about all data and cropping you get as a byproduct of doing the job that you need to make money.
Speaker 2:So, if you're a sheep farmer and you are already scanning for twins and singles, employing a sheep scanner that has an AID reader, and when they leave, they just give you, they email you, the data. There's an example of data as a byproduct of doing your job. You've got to convince people that they need to be scanning in the first place for that to happen, and that's not widespread itself. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:All good charts, we better wrap it up. We're about to clock into the 60 minutes, which might set a new record. I don't know if I've ever gone over an hour, but this will be up there anyway.
Speaker 2:I'm sure you'll be able to fix that.
Speaker 1:Take a few, take a few arms out, but no, we'll be all good. It's been awesome to have a chat. I hope all goes well out there in 2024 and tell them all and look forward to seeing the next round of Centre Plus genetics rolling out into the industry and catching up out there one day.
Speaker 2:That's right, ferg. It was a pleasure to talk, although I was hoping we could do it in person over a bottle of red, but maybe next time.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, that certainly can be high on their dinner. Yeah, Awesome. Thanks, mate.
Speaker 2:Cheers mate.