Head Shepherd
Mark Ferguson from neXtgen Agri brings you the latest in livestock, genetics, innovation and technology. We focus on sheep and beef farming in Australia and New Zealand and the people doing great things in those industries.
Head Shepherd
Our 200th Episode: Live from Lambex with Dawson Bradford
This week on the podcast we’re celebrating 200 episodes! We thought we’d make a special occasion of it so we recorded our podcast live at Lambex 2024 and who better to have on as a guest than Lambex founder, Dawson Bradford.
Mark and Dawson discuss the origins of Lambex. Dawson came up with the idea to “ … bring producers together with the processors and retailers, and get an understanding through the whole industry.” It’s safe to say Dawson accomplished that with 1,500 delegates attending in 2024.
Mark and Dawson also discuss the Ultrawhite breed's development and the ins and outs of starting a new sheep breed. From facing judgment from others to not knowing quite where the breeding would go in the first few years, it was quite the journey. “It’s taught me a lot. It taught me that I didn’t know very much before. It’s the challenge of bringing together the four breeds and stabilising the type. You think you've got it under control and a wildcard comes in from one of the four breeds,” shares Dawson. “Be aware of what you’re producing. Be aware of the faults that come up and move along quickly.”
This is a great chat between Dawson and Ferg about genetics and sheep breeding, and we couldn’t have picked a better guest to celebrate 200 episodes of Head Shepherd.
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. 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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Welcome to the Head Shepherd podcast. I'm your host, mark Ferguson, ceo here at NextGen Agri International, where we help livestock managers get the best out of their stock Before we get started. Thank you to our two fantastic sponsors for continuing to sponsor this podcast. Msd Animal Health is perhaps better known as Cooper's Animal Health in Australia and for their Allflex range across the world with a comprehensive suite of animal health and management products. Heinegger is a one-stop shop for wool harvesting and animal fiber removal. The Heinegger team have a deep understanding of livestock agriculture, backed by Swiss engineering and a family business dedicated to manufacturing the best. We are grateful to our sponsors for their support, helping us bring Head Shepherd to you each week, and now it's time to get on with this week's episode. Welcome back to Head Shepherd. Not just any episode, our 200th episode. Pretty awesome to get this far on the podcast. Sophie, you've been here most of that way, almost all that way. It's a pretty cool feeling to be getting 200th out there today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's phenomenal. Yeah, I just gosh a reflection on how I feel about it. To be honest, I think, yeah, it's been a wonderful journey and, like, stats wise, we've had over 440,000 downloads. If you listen to our podcast back to back, you'd be entertained for 98 hours straight. And whilst we do have 65% of our listeners are in Australia, we've got listeners in Argentina, bulgaria, zimbabwe, mexico and so many other countries, and I thought I'd just do a quick review of 200 episodes of podcasts really.
Speaker 2:So over the past three years we've featured many different kinds of speakers. Our main objective was to speak to great farmers that we have across Australia and New Zealand. So recently we had Richard Subtil on the podcast and he shared Amarama Station's process of implementing EID in their merino flock. We've had Charlie Wooten in Australia discussing optimizing mating maiden use. And we haven't neglected cattle either, despite myself and Ferg's inclinations. We've had Harry Lawson on talking about breeding Angus cattle for the past 50 years and the changes to the Angus breed, and we've even had Alf Collins of ALC Brahmins discussing Brahmin breeding. We've even had a deer farmer on the podcast.
Speaker 2:Genetics was obviously a huge focus for us here at Head Shepherd. Not too long ago we had Bronwyn Clark on the podcast. We shared a wealth of knowledge about sheep genetics. Another focus for us has always been practical on-farm management advice. So we've had guests like Anne Riddler, who she's actually been on twice Once she discussed other abnormalities post weaning and the second time she discussed new culling decisions and the impacts of those.
Speaker 2:We've had the fantastic Dr Andrew Thompson on a few times, with his most popular podcast being Two Lamblings in 24 Months. We've had Rob Bell discussing animal nutrition, reducing drench usage, and our sponsors MSD. They had some great experts Steve Kelly and Kim Kelly, who talk about diseases and sheep and whatnot. We've also focused heavily on innovative tech, with guests like Bill Mitchell from Optiway or Bronwyn Darlington of Accent. We also had Jock Lawrence, from the creator of Mobble, talking about how technology can improve farm management.
Speaker 2:We've had industry experts such as Pat Mayer, ceo of Atkins Ranch, talking about meeting export market demands, will Barton, CEO of Gundagai Meat Processing, talking about doing things differently in the meat works. And then we obviously can't forget our podcast with Nigel Kerin. Both Making Money from Grass and the Power of Staying Curious are our most listened to podcasts and, having edited and listening to them both multiple times, it's obvious why we also have been chatting to young leaders in the industry. We've had most, if not all, of the Zander McDonald Award winners. We've also chatted to the likes of Jack Devlin, a young livestock manager, and even Ryan McLean, over in Scotland, who's a scanner shearer and a shepherd. So, yeah, when you read all that out and just think about all of the 200 guests that we've had, it's just so incredibly diverse with the people and the topics. But the aim always was and always will be to help farmers become better producers and I think we're achieving that and I'm really proud of the podcast and the information that we put out every week at Monday at 7am.
Speaker 1:And yeah, I can't wait to do 200 more fantastic and, as I say in this show later on, but, yeah, obviously, massive thanks to you for for all that you do to keep this ticking away. It's, it's my voice that's predominantly heard, but that's definitely a big team effort. So so, massive hats off and yeah, that's, uh, it's, it is awesome to get 200 and there will be 200 more. We're not, we're not stopping anytime soon. It's, it's one of the one of the best things I do each each week is interviewing great people and have that conversation, and it's great to bump into people at different events and hear that they're taking something away from a podcast recently. It certainly puts a spring in my steps. It's a great thing for us to do. So, yeah, let's kick in for 200 more.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, this week we did it live. We did it live at Lamex on the side stage. It was the only one we've done that way, but it was fitting that we had Dawson Bradford, who was the founder of Lamex. He's a good friend and colleague of mine and we have the pleasure of working with the team at Hillcroft Farms on their ultra-white sheep and, yeah, it was great to have a chat with Dawson about, I guess, starting a breed, but also starting Lamex. He's one of the grandfathers of the Australian sheep industry and it was fitting that we had him. We had the big painting of him in the backdrop that was painted the night before in about three minutes at the gala dinner. Just a great event all around, really. We'll get underway with this week's show. All right, good morning, all welcome to head shepherd. So 200 episodes, it's uh.
Speaker 1:Back in 2020, we started a podcast because, uh, while we're in coven we couldn't do anything else, so I was out for a run one day and decided I would start a podcast. Sounded like a good idea at the time. We're now 200 episodes deep. So this, uh is a really special occasion for me and great to be sharing with Dawson Bradford, who I've been a long time fan of and mate of, and so it's awesome to be here with Dawson. We've got a few prepared questions. We can do it pretty loosely. If you've got anything from the crowd, shout out a question. We're happy to share that and do it on the fly. I haven't told Dawson that yet, but that's fine, he's used to that from me. But, yeah, it's a great occasion for us and thanks all for being here and thanks for those watching along at home. So, dawson, over 1,500 delegates, I think we heard yesterday here at Lamex you must be pretty proud of what this event has become. I guess what were you hoping for when you started an event in Perth back in?
Speaker 3:2010?. What we were trying to achieve was just a celebration of 10 years at WAMCO, which was the meat cooperative that I chaired at the time, and thinking that maybe we'll have just some of our members celebrating in a shearing shed or something like that. Get a couple of hundred together, anyway. I talked to Esther Jones and she said came up with something better than that. She said no, no, no, why not involve the whole breeders in this state? And she said well, hang on, what about making Australia work? Make it worthwhile, and that's just grown from there. But what I really was trying to do was to bring our producers together with the processors and the retailers and get an understanding through the whole industry as to what each other's problems are and open communication lines, and I think that's what we've got here.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Thanks, mate. Yeah, it's been. You know, it's an absolute testament to look around last night and yesterday and today. It's yeah when we've got so many people coming together, so many people just celebrating a fantastic industry, and it's awesome. Doris, you started a non-war performance sheep, now known as the Ultra White. It was well before most people were thinking of it. I 100% told you you were crazy at the time. I remember that I've been wrong on many things, and that's just another one, and history is the best judge. So why were you so sure that the way back when you started 18 years ago, or so why were you so sure that that was going to be the way of the future?
Speaker 3:Yes, that was back in 2005. We started a little bit earlier than that, but it was something about the breeding of sheep. At the time, I said I was chairman of WAMCO and we had the virus scan which had just been promised to us and the ability to be able to see what we're producing and hopefully. I was interested in the eating quality and intramuscular fat at the time, and so it would be great if we could just make this a breed that's going to concentrate on production of meat of good quality meat, and forget about the wool, which was a problem for us at the time. Nothing changed, but also we had a stud of pole dorsets that was doing fairly well, so really I just wanted to get the wool off them and I thought that's the way we'd probably go.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I guess that's what most people saw was, when you're industry-leading, pod walls, it's not many throw people throw it away when you're at the top of the game. But obviously it was your time for a new challenge. You were pretty young back then and so you had plenty of time left to hook into it. What have been the highs and lows of starting a new sheep breed? It's something that not many people have had the can sort of write on their CVs. So what would you recommend to someone who's going to do it?
Speaker 3:if you did it again, yeah, well, the first thing you've got to have is, if you're starting in something new, is you've got to have a fairly thick skin, because the criticism I got at the time, particularly from neighbours, when they saw our sheep shedding or losing their wool when rubbing on fences you're bringing rice into our country, we've got lice, we've caught lice from here. Well, apparently that's nothing, quite far from the truth, because they don't harbour lice. But also, you know about not doing the right thing by the industry, the wool industry. We're destroying that because of contamination of wool. But they're the sort of things just have a thick skin and it washes over.
Speaker 3:But the highs, when we got crossbreeding and they said we just wanted to get the wool off the sheep, that was at my main aim. But then we found things coming through, like the hardiness of the Dorper came through. It didn't come through on the first cross, but it came through on the second cross, when we had to put another cross of Dorper back in to get the wool up. And we found the hardiness that just stood out, stood out in a drought that we had in 2010. And other things just came to the fore, like small lambs In the Dorsets as you push growth, your birth weights go up and that becomes a real problem. But with these we started with such a low birth weight, but they were so wide I think they were the highs that came on.
Speaker 1:I'm going to go off script because that's what I do, but how important is that in a Mediterranean farming environment and that animal that can kind of carry the spring through into the autumn?
Speaker 3:It's great because we lamb three times a year and certainly at times when they lamb, particularly in March and early April, things are fairly tough, or can be. They were very tough this year. So the survivability is very high on these lambs. So long as you give them a fair go, they'll survive and the will to survive is very high. Now, the thing we like about them because we're running a fair-sized property is the bigger paddocks. The lambs are no while within an hour or so, whereas the whole dorsets which we're used to weren't no while for probably six or seven or eight hours, and that's increased the survival.
Speaker 1:Doris, you're a lifetime learner. Back, I don't know, 10 years ago, I found or came across a gene that I thought would be handy, and I knew you were looking for a fecundity gene, and so the GDF9 variant, which sort of floats around in fin shape at about 15% or so, you introduced that gene into what's now called the H-plus gene. What's bringing a new gene into, or having to get rid of two sheep breeds that came from a Cootworth Texel cross a pretty tough animal to take the wool off. But what's that taught you about sheep breeding?
Speaker 3:Yes, that's taught me a lot. It taught me that I didn't know very much before. Taught me a lot taught me that I didn't know very much before. It's the challenge of bringing together four breeds and stabilising the type. You think you've got it under control and then also a wild card comes in from one of the other four breeds and it disrupts the whole lot again and you've virtually got to keep at it. We're not through it yet, but it's getting quite good. But it just there's so many variables that happen in there that is out of your control.
Speaker 3:The biggest thing you've got to do is just keep your eyes about to be aware of what you're producing, be aware of the faults that are showing up, because they'll show up and get rid of them as quick as you can and you move from that. Every year You're wondering what fault you're going to come against next. But that's the way that breeds are developed. If you go back and think about breeds like the South Down and Suffolk, they must have gone through hell to get those breeds established. They had 200 years to do that. We're trying to do it in 10, 15.
Speaker 1:I thought you had another 200 left in your doors. I wish Maybe we just do talk about the H-plus gene. So it's a variant that we're expecting sort of 20% in a single carrier and 4% increase in a double carrier. Is that what you're seeing at home?
Speaker 3:We're seeing something like that when we did desktop searches I'll go a bit back further and 42% increase in a double carry. Is that what you're seeing at home? We're seeing something like that. When we did desktop searches I'll go a bit back further we tried the Inverdial gene which had a problem. It certainly gave us about 50% increase in lamb.
Speaker 3:With this one copy Unfortunately two copies you had a barren ewe or infertile ewe, so it just wasn't practical. If I was just breeding sheep for myself, you could manage it, but not to breed seed stock. So we didn't think we were going to find this gene that was going to just give us twins, very few triplets and the odd signal. If we want to lift our labing percentages up around 100, probably scanning up around 190, 200 and that's probably a survival around about 160 to 170%, we do about 135, 140 now, so it was a jump of about 40%. We're looking for, well, the little bit of research we've done so far only on small numbers, but it looks as though one coffee is going to give us somewhere between 20 and 25% increase. Two coffees we haven't had even less opportunity to test that, but it looks like that could be around 40 good conditions probably 50%, and now I'm talking about weaned lamb. So it's going to give us some round about that 170% with reasonable management.
Speaker 1:Well, sure your previous predictions of the future have worked out pretty well. I guess we might as well share what you think the most exciting development in the sheep industry is now. How are we going to evolve in the next 10 years? If we're sitting back here in 10 years' time, what are we looking back at?
Speaker 3:Yes, there's a couple of fronts I can see coming up. One was alluded to this morning at the pre-conference session there about the access of more genomics. What we're going to be able to do with that is improve performance by so much that we'll be able to get rid of our lower-grade sheep, be more predictable with what we're using to breed our lamb, strong, the ability to go through our maternal flock and take off the bottom 20%. It's going to be huge. That's exciting. But the other one is heating quality.
Speaker 3:I think if we're going to achieve the prices that were spoken of yesterday $10 a kilo within two years or something it was we've got to be able to justify to our customers that they're getting good value for their dollar. The only way I can say we can do that is we've got to get a handle on the eating quality and be consistent about it. It's often fine to produce a few that are well, they've got high IMF, good shear force. We've got to produce a whole flock that's doing that and that's going to take some doing, but with the new technology that I believe we heard about this morning, that's going to be very possible. And the other one is I think it's the eating quality. It's the nutrient density of the food that we're producing.
Speaker 3:And we heard Annalene say yesterday in her presentation the need for good quality, high-density food to maintain good health to the people that are eating it, and I think that's where we're falling down. I've read and you people probably have too that the nutrient density in a lot of our food is only about 50% of what it was 50 years ago. So that must have played out in our health, and I believe that is happening. So that's one of the challenges, and I think it's something we can master if we put our mind to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, awesome. I'm not sure if you've got the answer to this question yet, Doss, but what is the last thing you changed your mind about?
Speaker 3:Yeah well, after last night I don't know who to trust now. But seriously, I think listening to the presentation this morning I thought I knew a fair bit about genetics and trying to master them. I think I have to change my mind. I don't know very much yet at all, so hopefully that will change in the near future.
Speaker 1:You've got plenty of time left, mate, to learn a few more things. It's awesome. It's been great to have you up here, dawes. Any questions from the crowd? Has anyone got a question? All quiet? Excellent, yeah, no, thanks, dawes, and thanks very much for your time.
Speaker 1:It's awesome to be up here and share the 200th episode of Head Shepherd. I'd be remiss for me not to mention Sophie Barnes, who we're sitting at home wishing she was here. The absolute sheep nerd loves sheep like all in oxygen almost, and has been shoulder to shoulder with me the entire time for Head Shepherd. I think I edited the first five or six and I was really bad at that. Listening to your own voice for three hours is possibly the worst thing you can do. And so Sophie has just taken that role over and she is awesome. She produces this podcast, she sets up the interviews, she runs the whole show. Really. I'm just here to sit up here and ask her a few random questions. But yeah, sophie is the brains and real power behind Head Shepherd, so big hats off to her. She'll be cringing when she listens to this when she gets this audio.
Speaker 1:But thanks very much for your time, doris. Thanks very much to the LAMEX committee for enabling us to run our 200th episode here. It's a real highlight for me. It's a great, great event, great to be here. But thanks very much for our listeners as well. We love hearing from our listeners. We get 3,500 downloads a week. I don't know how we make that 10,000, but that's certainly my aim and it's been a really great thing for me to do personally. And uh, yeah, thanks for all those that listen along and and and we. I love. I love people that come up and shake my hand and say they've got something out of one of the episodes. Um, and yeah, it's a really, really great thing to do.
Speaker 1:but thanks very much and enjoy the rest of lamb x thanks thanks again to heiniger, who are proud world leaders in the manufacturing and supply of professional sheep shearing and clipping equipment. Thank you to MNSD Animal Health and Norflex Livestock Intelligence. They offer an extensive livestock product portfolio focused on animal health management, all backed up by exceptional service. We thank both of these companies for their ongoing support of the Head Shippet podcast.
