MERINOS are the breed of choice and have been for nearly 100 years for the Smith family on their 6000 hectare property at Dongolocking, north east of Dumbleyung.
And with the recent investment in a new shearing shed and sheep yards, as well as the belief that a sheep flock forms an important part of any cropping program, the Merinos won't be moving on anytime soon.
The Smith family's original family farm was established in 1922 by Horace Bernard (Dick) Smith and since then it has seen three more generations work the land.
Today it is operated by Dick's grandson Michael, who farms with wife Jane, son Mark and full-time employee Graeme Jose.
Michael returned to the family operation in 1978 and firstly worked alongside his father Rob and mother Betty before taking over from his parents full-time in the late 1980s after a gradual transition.
While the management and ownership of the property may have changed over the years, one constant through the generations is the Merino flock.
Michael said Merinos have been the main breed on the property since day dot and they have always been rewarding.
"I have always really enjoyed running a sheep flock and Mark is no different, which is great to see," Michael said.
"Mark has a real interest in the sheep and is keen on them," Michael said.
"Unlike most of his generation he hasn't got diesel pumping through his veins.
"He likes the sheep and has some ideas he wants to implement, so I can't see us changing our operation drastically in the years to come."
The Smith's run a pure Merino flock to take advantage of the breed's dual-purpose traits, with Michael saying the breed had changed a lot over the years.
"Initially the Merino was a more wool-focused type animal but now it is also very good on the meat side," Michael said.
"There has certainly been a lot more emphasis on the meat aspect of the Merino in the past 15 years.
"This change and focus on the carcase (meat) traits in the Merino has been a good thing when you look at sheep prices now as we are certainly being rewarded for the meat at the moment when you look at it."
The Smiths are running 12,000 to 12,500 Merinos, which includes a breeding flock of 5000 ewes, but Michael said their numbers were back slightly on years gone by due to the drier seasons.
He said seasons like this and the past few years meant they had reduce numbers quicker than they normally did.
"We are looking at reducing our numbers a bit more because of what the seasons have thrown up at us of late, so we can make sure we can look after what we have well," Michael said.
"We have got a little bit gun shy with the past couple of dry years and the late breaks.
"So just for an ease of management point of view and the feeding expenses, we will probably drop our numbers back slightly."
However it hasn't always been just Merino rams used on the property - in the past the family used to join their ewe hoggets, which were surplus to requirements, to Texel and South Suffolk sires.
Michael said they didn't use the South Suffolk and Texel rams in a big way and in the end moved away from them to simplify their operation.
"We stopped doing it because we found it was just as easy to run a pure Merino flock and mate everything to Merino sires and do it well."
The aims of the breeding program were simple.
"We are aiming for a dual-purpose animal but we do still have a bit more of a focus on the wool side," Michael said.
"We want to breed a quality woolled animal and we focus more on the wool side as you get four to five wool clips off a mature sheep before you sell them, so it is important to get the wool right," Michael said.
"We don't view the meat side as being as important (to wool) as you only sell your sheep once."
The Smiths flock is based on bloodlines from the East Mundalla stud, Tarin Rock and the Kingussie stud, Dumbleyung.
Michael said when selecting new sires each year from the two studs they had no preference for either horned or polled rams and they selected rams that suited their enterprise.
"We try to buy something with a bit of grease (in the wool) as we want to reduce the amount of dust in our wool to keep our yields up," Michael said.
"Grease is not the flavour of the month because the sheep with more grease and wax in their wool are generally a higher maintenance sheep, but that doesn't really bother us, as we get the benefits of a better wool cut and higher yields.
"At the end of the day we want rams with a good balance of wool and carcase, that are going to breed a good productive commercial sheep."
Lambing starts at the end of May/beginning of June to coincide hopefully with the end of seeding.
"We don't want to lamb when we are seeding as it puts a huge demand on our labour," Michael said.
The rams are put out with the ewes in early January at 2-2.5 per cent for about one and a half cycles, but that depends on when shearing occurs as they take the rams out at shearing to avoid double handling the mobs.
To ensure they are looking after and managing their lambing ewes in the best way possible, the Smiths have again started pregnancy testing their mobs after giving it away for a period of time.
Michael said they have started doing it again since Mark has come home and it was his "baby".
"I think it is going to become a really important management tool in our program going forward," Michael said.
"It gives you information that you can use for your management practices.
"We just don't scan for dry ewes, but we also scan for single and twins, which means we can run and manage them as separate mobs."
At scanning they mark out any dry ewes which get a disc on their tag and they are given a second chance, but if they come through the next year and are dry again at scanning they are culled, so they can maintain flock fertility.
Along with running a substantial ewe flock, the Smiths also run their wethers through to four-tooths and get two wool clips off them - a lamb and a hogget clip.
"We run the wethers on a block away from the main farm, while all the ewes are run on the home block so they are easier to manage and we can keep an eye on them at lambing," Michael said.
With a passion for the wool, shearing is a much-anticipated time on the property and it usually takes place in February/March to fit in with other activities.
The Smiths aim to shear the majority of their wethers in February and their ewes in March.
Michael said they switched to an autumn shearing 40 years ago, when it really wasn't the norm.
"Dad made the switch and his reasoning was you could monitor the ewes better leading into lambing without their wool and if you lost a ewe at lambing you didn't lose the fleece as well," Michael said.
"Also when we changed not many people were shearing then so it was easier to get shearers and there was a bit of a spike in the wool market as there was less wool available in the sales, but that is not the case now."
However they do undertake a small shearing in spring of their dry ewes, ewe hoggets which are surplus to requirements after classing and any wethers they have culled out.
The main shearing earlier this year was even more exciting than usual as the family used its new shearing shed and Commander Ag-Quip sheep yards, which now stand in the middle of their property.
The shed was still being finished when the hum of the shearing heads kicked in and clippers went over the first sheep.
Michael said the new shed and sheep yards had been something they had talked about building for at least five years.
"Our old shearing shed had run its race and we had just stretched it too far," he said.
"The old shed started as a three-stand and it got stretched to a six-stand which meant we had cut into our wool room area.
"But not only was it too small, it was hard work penning up as well."
After deciding it was time to build a new shed the Smiths did a fair amount of homework on the type of shed they wanted.
"We went and looked at a few sheds to see what worked and what didn't," Michael said.
"We had a rough idea of what we wanted to do and liked the Proway system and then someone suggested we look at a new shed Wes Hall had recently built at Newdegate.
"We had a look at that shed and as soon as we opened the doors we knew that was what we wanted, so we spoke to Jon Price, Price's Fabrication & Steel, Williams who built that shed and engaged him to do ours with a few alterations."
The new six-stand shed is 36 metres by 18m and took several weeks to build.
The shed has the capacity to hold 800 mature sheep inside out of the weather while the shearing section of the shed has a raised staggered board and was designed with a straight drag out of sloping catching pens.
Price's Fabrications & Steel, which is also a distributor for Pioneer Water Tanks, also connected a 135,000 litre Pioneer tank to it for water collection.
Michael said there weren't any major problems shearing in the new shed and their shearing team which they have had from Katanning in past years thought it worked well.
"The way things are with OH&S these days it is pretty important to get things right in shearing sheds and make things user-friendly and I think we have achieved that with this shed," Michael said.
"I think by providing a good workplace the shearers are happy and they do a better job."
When it comes to marketing their wool the Smiths usually sell their clip, which averages about the 20-21 micron mark in April through Nutrien Wool with the advice of Nutrien representative Warren Holt, who they have used for more than 10 years.
Michael said they tried to sell their clip in one go but that depended on what was happening in the market.
"The prices we have received in the past couple of years have been very good and well up on the prices we were receiving when I first came home to the farm," he said.
"When the market reached its peak 12 months ago the prices were definitely the best I have seen but I am not sure if you take into account CPI and our buying power, our profits would be as good as they were in the 1980s."
In terms of the current wool prices, Michael said they were worrying but the family was still happy to have a strong wool focus in their Merino enterprise.
When it comes to meat (sheep) markets, he said the prices were great and were making up for the drop away in the wool market.
"Sheep prices are really good currently and when wool was at its peak 12 months ago it was great," he said.
"The prices we are receiving for old mutton are hard to believe, I never thought we would get to these price levels 10 years ago.
"I can remember when I left school farmers were shooting sheep and you would hear stories of people getting invoices for carting sheep away, so it is really good we are in the position we are in today."
In previous years the Smiths had been holding onto their dry ewes and shearing them in the spring before selling them as mutton but because of the dry season this year they offloaded some in July.
"We thought we might as well take advantage of the prices and also reduce the amount of mouths we had to feed," Michael said.
In terms of the ewe hoggets surplus to their requirements, the Smiths have sold them in the Katanning October Special Ewe sale through Nutrien Livestock and have seen good returns.
The Smiths don't only run a Merino flock for the income it produces from both wool and sheep sales but also because it is essential to balancing the cropping side of their business.
The family annually crops 2800-2900ha to cereal crops - oats, barley and wheat.
Michael said they aimed to have a reasonable clover base in their paddocks, believing it helped their cropping program.
"Part of growing a good crop is having a break in the rotation and a legume in the system and the legume in our system is clover," Michael said.
"Merinos are a cog in the wheel in the way we farm, they not only provide us a break in the cropping program but they also help spread our risk.
"It would be easy to go all cropping as two thirds of our work on the farm revolves around the sheep, but at the end of the day our grain enterprise would suffer.
"The sheep fit in well to our cropping program and are certainly advantageous to it.
"Clover is a great nitrogen fix and a good break crop, so we manipulate our pastures most seasons so we can get as much clover as we can in the paddocks."
The Smiths keep a percentage of the oats and barley they grow for sheep feed and they have needed a lot of in the past 12 months.
When it comes to supplementary feeding, they are strong believers in it, as they know if they look after their sheep they will reward them.
But after a dry season in 2019 and late break this year when Farm Weekly visited in July, they had been feeding for more than seven months.
With such a long feeding period the Smiths have run out of their own grain so they have also had to buy in additional feed sources, including lupins and additional pellets.
"The ewes started off once a week and went onto lick feeders in mid-April but we also trail feed them as well to ensure the shy feeders aren't missing out," Michael said.
"Some mobs which are on the heavier country which hasn't got as much feed are being trail fed every second day while the rest are trail fed twice a week."
To further enhance the performance of their ewes during the final stages of pregnancy, the Smiths feed their ewes pellets in the last trimester as pellets are a more complete meal package compared to a grain ration.
As for future plans for their Merino flock, one thing is for sure - the Smiths won't be changing the system anytime soon - given there is another generation on the farm which is keen on sheep, they have just built a new shearing shed and sheep play an important role in their cropping enterprise.
