Seasonal conditions a test

“We’re struggling for sheep feed at the moment,” Michael Spark said on a visit last week to Primaries of WA’s woolstore.

He, wife Kelly and children Charlie, 3, and Olivia, 18 months, along with Peter and the brothers’ nephew Zach Sinclair who works on their farm, also toured the Australian Wool Testing Authority and the Western Wool Centre (WWC) at Bibra Lake to see part of the family’s Happy Valley wool clip sold.

“We’re still hand feeding, there’s no (green) feed there, it’s shocking,” Michael said.

“The crops are looking good, (after rains last month) they’ve come back quickly, but the feed never got a chance to get ahead.”

Seasonal conditions had caught them out, carrying more stock than usual after last year.

Michael said they mated 3000 ewes this year and their total flock numbers about 5000 “with some orange tags”.

“Normally we can get away with it with agistment but we couldn’t this year because of the conditions.

“We looked as far away as Esperance (to agist part of the flock) and thought we might be able to get something there, but no.

“We’ve been as far as Kojonup with them before.”

Michael said they would probably harvest their first canola crop in more than 10 years before the end of the month.

“It was probably a bad year to decide to do canola again – it’s not the worst crop in the district but it’s pretty ordinary,” Michael said.

“Where it’s good, its good, but where it’s bad, it’s bad.”

But they were pretty happy with wheat and barley crops on a neighbouring property bought during the year.

Those crops would also probably be harvested at the end of the month.

Crops on leased properties 140 kilometres north had failed.

“There’s nothing on the lease blocks – that’s sheep feed.”

Sheep brought back recently from the lease blocks for shearing had also struggled this year, while another flock had thrived there for the two previous years.

The rain which had revived crops disrupted shearing of the Spark’s ewes and hoggets in the middle of last month.

“We got caught up in that little bit of wet weather and had to give it (shearing) a break for a couple of weeks then got stuck into it again,” Michael said.

“It was a pretty good year in general, mid 60s yield but the cut was probably a bit down on last year.

“Our top price was 1406 cents a kilogram (greasy), but we did see some wool make over 1600c/kg while we were there (WWC) which is really good, I wouldn’t have minded a bit of that.”

The Spark brothers sold four lines of fleece wool, a line of pieces and a line of bellies totalling 54 bales for a sweep-the-floor average price of 1113c/kg.

Their fleece ranged from 16.8 to 20.8 micron with some of the hogget wool 75 to 78 millimetres staple length from a 10-month shearing.

Their ewe fleece ranged from 93-97mm from a longer interval between shearings.