Victorian sheep producer Ricky Luhrs is facing his second drought lambing in a row, but refining his flock’s genetics for 15 years has left him confident in a quick recovery.
After almost a decade of working towards his current breeding objective – focusing on carcase, growth and wool quality traits – Ricky established his own Merino stud.
Ricky runs a Merino ewe base, where classed-out ewes are joined to terminal sires, as well as a composite maternal stud utilising maternal sires. The flexibility of different breed types has given him more options to survive dry periods. Here, Ricky explains how he manages his operation with genetics front-of-mind.
Have your breeding objectives evolved since the beginning?
We’ve maintained the same broad breeding objectives over the years, which focus on fleece quality, growth and carcase traits.Winning the AMPC LambEx Feedlot Carcase Competition last year was a nice little icing on the cake to show we’ve found that balance and it’s working.
More recently, we’ve added welfare traits – particularly worm resistance and feet health – to our breeding objective.
How are you ensuring you reach your breeding goals?
In-house, we’re doing normal stud measurements and submitting them to Sheep Genetics to get ASBVs on our stud animals. We also use processor feedback for
intra-muscular fat (IMF) and lean meat yield (LMY) to keep track of our progress in those traits.
How has the tough season impacted your flock?
We’re really happy with how our carcase traits have coped with the drought in the past two years. The ewes have responded well to supplementary feeding.
We reduced numbers and went through this year with no replacement ewes, knowing our reproduction will get us back to where we need to be. Investing in genetics in a tight season is tough because every dollar really needs to be spent
running them, but it also proves the value of having invested in genetics for the past 15 years.
What management practices have you changed because of your genetics?
We’ve genetically increased our reproduction rate to a point where we now join an extra 15% of ewes to a terminal ram, as we require less replacement ewes. This gives us additional terminal wethers to sell.
Our Merino wethers have added a real stability to our cash flow because their growth and carcases are just as good as a prime lamb – and we get additional wool income.
Having a higher reproduction rate gives us more animals to select from, allowing us to be harsher when refining our self-replacing ewes, so we can breed better animals.
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Contact: Ricky Luhrs Moorallamerino.com.au E: info@moorallamerino.com.au |
MLA's Genetics Hub: genetics.mla.com.au Sheep Genetics: sheepgenetics.org.au |