INFORMATION sharing is proving an invaluable tool for mixed enterprise producers like Janelle and Paul South who operate about 3500 hectares and 9000 Merino breeding ewes at Arthur River with their family.
The South family has been farming in the Darkan and Arthur River area for generations, over which time the sheep operation has slowly evolved to constitute 50 per cent of the farm business.
A 50:50 ratio of crop to livestock is what consultants at Icon Agriculture are telling local grower group Compass Agricultural Alliance is the ‘sweet spot’ for mixed farming business profitability in the area, and that is where the Souths are planning to stay.
But the South family is constantly aiming at improvement and say the sharing of benchmarking data, which is collected and collated by Icon Ag consultants for the local grower group, is integral to that effort.
“Our ratio of 50pc sheep is largely due to land use because we have a lot of tree and granite country which there is no point in trying to crop,” Janelle said.
“But through the data and information sharing we have access to through Icon and Compass, we can measure ourselves accurately against other mixed enterprises and that informs our decision making each year.”
Consultants come out to the property each year to do the budget and farm review, at which point the data for benchmarking within the grower group is collected.
“We think that is one of the major benefits of how our group’s data is handled,” Janelle said.
“A lot of other benchmarking projects require the producers to self-submit the data and there’s always a margin of error there, whereas we have one or two people collecting and collating the data, they know our businesses and they check everything to make sure it balances, so we know we’ve got a really accurate representation of not only our own data but what we measure ourselves against when we get the report each year.”
When the results of the Compass group benchmarking are sent out each year, Janelle and Paul look forward to analysing the information.
“It really is a fantastic tool for us to see how we’re performing and in which areas we can improve our business,” they said.
“We can see our data against the group average and against the top performing 25pc of the group so we can compare ourselves.
“The information is all anonymous so we can’t see exactly who is behind the other results but when Andrew Ritchie and Mark Allington from Icon come out and go through the results with us, we can get an idea from them what producers performing better than us are doing differently, because they know where the data comes from.”
The benchmarking data is all measured per hectare which helps producers like Janelle and Paul measure themselves against producers who have a different business structure.
“There are people in the group who have a bigger percentage of their business tied up to crop and others who have more livestock but by measuring production per hectare we can see where we’re at relative to the full range of enterprise set ups,” Janelle said.
“And our key focus is production per hectare, so because the data is presented that way we’re able to analyse the information we receive each year and make decisions to help drive our productivity forward.
“It’s not about running the most sheep, it’s about being as productive as you can per hectare.”
Running a farm business in the Darkan area seems like a community effort.
“Our grower group and the farming community here is really good at sharing their stories, information and ideas with each other,” Janelle said.
“Outside of the facts, figures and financial data, everyone who participates in the benchmarking process sees the value in sharing information and keeping the discussion between peers open.
“One day someone will say in an online chat forum that they’re trying something different on their place, someone else will say they’re interested in it and the next thing you know, we’ll all be standing in that paddock having a field day and discussing what is and isn’t working.”
This generosity of sharing information and ideas among neighbours helps the community of farmers as a whole learn and improve their businesses.
“We have farmers in our group willing to share specific details about things like their feed budget and what they wish they did differently, which is good for everyone in the group,” Janelle said.
“They don’t need to share that sort of information, but when they do, everyone else can learn something from it and I think that willingness to share comes back to data sharing which happens through our benchmarking.”
The South family’s self-replacing Merino flock consists of moderately framed sheep which produce healthy lambs and cut as much wool per hectare as possible.
Most of the flock is joined back to locally bred Merino rams while the culls from the main flock are joined to terminal sires for crossbred lamb production, meaning the Souths spread their risk across markets.
“Our business relies on meat, wool and grain which helps us handle changes or uncertainty in either of those markets,” they said.
“It’s not a good idea to put all your focus on just one of those areas so we grow as much wool as we can, we grow as much pasture as we can to keep the sheep performing and the same goes for the cropping.”
With a dry start to the growing season, the cost of feed has gone up which is affecting many producers across the State.
“In a year like this it’s tough because we’ve just scanned our ewes and we’ve had a really high percentage of twins and one of the lowest dry percentages ever which is a good thing, but we’ll need to keep the feed up to them,” Janelle said.
“Paul’s dad, Roclea was involved in the early work for Lifetime Ewe so we know that keeping feeding rates high makes a big difference.”
But feeding sheep comes at a financial cost.
“As a result we’re trying out a paddock of lupins to see if we can get some of our own feed growing,” Janelle said.
“Another perk of growing those lupins will be that if we manage to get them growing well, we’ll be able to utilise that as a break crop, because at the moment we really keep our crop paddocks and sheep paddocks separate.”
This year, the Souths are also trying more confinement feeding for their single and twin-bearing mobs.
“We’re always fine-tuning our systems and we want to get better at deferred grazing, so we’ll trial this confinement feeding on a larger scale and then assess with our consultants when we review the season in March next year whether we think it’s paid off,” Paul said.
“Ideally we’d like to not have to put any sheep on pastures until they’re reached the 800 FOO stage but that has to depend on the season because we don’t want to be lambing in confinement.
“We know from pastures from space data that in only six years out of the past 13 we have reached 800 FOO by July 1 on our farm, but any deferment will give the pastures the best chance to get away before sheep begin to graze them.”
When Farm Weekly visited last week Janelle and Paul were hoping for a few drops of rain from the front which was expected later in the week.
“Now that we’ve had some rain (30mm) we’ll be able to give the pastures a few weeks of rest before the sheep go onto them in the lead up to July lambing which would be good,” Paul said.
“So getting that to work well is one of our priorities at the moment.”
Continual improvement of pastures is another focus for the South family but Paul said really the philosophy was the same as the wool growing side of the business.
“We think the key is just to grow truck loads of pasture, just like we want to be growing truck loads of wool,” he said.
“If we’re improving the amount and quality of pasture, we’ll improve nutrition, all of which goes back to the basics of looking after the sheep because they’re worth investing in.
“There is sometimes a compromise that has to be made on the cropping side of the business in favour of the sheep but we invest our time and money into the sheep because we know they play a really important role in our business.”
Looking forward, Janelle and Paul are planning for sheep to continue to play that important role in their business.
“We reinvest in the sheep enterprise regularly,” they said.
“For example recently we built a new shed which can house sheep during summer storm events because we shear the majority of our flock in January and February.
“We had a few events where we were rushing to put sheep into every shed we could find before the weather came in and realised they’re worth so much that building a shed would be a good idea.
“It’s hard to tell in exact dollar terms what sort of return you get from that sort of investment but the shed is multi-purpose and we look at it as cheap insurance when those weather events roll in over the summer which seems like it’s becoming more common.”
The strength of the wool market is one of the main factors keeping the South family excited about their sheep enterprise at the moment.
“There seems to be the thought out there that the market for our wool isn’t going anywhere, so hopefully prices will stay at the levels that they’re at,” Janelle said.
“But we don’t budget on that, we have to look at it realistically and the same goes for the live export debate.
“We don’t want to make any drastic decisions yet, so hopefully industry can find a way to work through the current issues.
“All of the markets we’re involved with have crashed over time but those industries have been able to recover.
“Hopefully someone out there is making a plan because we’ll need more genuine market options if anything happens to the live shipping market.
“For the moment though, we think the important thing is for us farmers to be helping to educate others about ourselves and our businesses, working together as a farming community to share positive messages about what we do.”
