THE enterprise mix and the management practices of the Egerton-Warburton family's farming enterprise at Frankland and Kojonup may have altered over the years, but one thing that has remained constant is the presence of Merinos in the equation.
The family started farming in the Frankland area in the 1860s and since then Merinos have always grazed the land in some form.
Today the brothers Grant and Jonathan Egerton-Warburton and sister Diana Leitch, who are the sixth generation on the farm, run the enterprise, which comprises 4800 hectares at Frankland and 1200ha at Kojonup, with their partners Daisy, Stevie and Nathan.
Grant Egerton-Warburton said the family had run Merinos for a very long time and they had proven themselves as a breed, time after time.
"I remember dad talking about when the country was being cleared in my grandfather's day and the wool out of the area was known for its blue colour," Mr Egerton-Warburton said.
"It was a result of the sheep brushing against and camping under the burnt trees as the land was cleared.
"The ash caused the wool to turn an amazing blue colour and instead of being docked for it, the wools were chased by buyers and were worth a premium."
As for today Mr Egerton-Warburton said the family continued to run the breed and was looking to up its numbers because of its versatility and dual-purpose nature
"They are a meat and wool package, meaning you can get two incomes from them," he said.
"Also as they have 'plained down' over the years the fertility has also improved which means they are just as good as prime lamb mothers as the first-cross ewe.
"At the end of the day the Merino ewe gives you better returns than the first-cross ewe because the wool off the first-cross ewe is not worth that of the Merino.
"We have certainly lifted our Merino breeding numbers in recent years as we believe in the breed and what it can offer our operation."
Currently the family joins 10,000 ewes (8600 Merinos and 1400 first-cross) ewes over their two properties.
When it comes to their Merino ewe breeding flock, 5000 ewes are joined to Merino sires, 2100 to Suffolk and Poll Dorset rams and 1500 head to Border Leicester rams.
Mr Egerton-Warburton said in the past couple of years they had increased their Merino to Merino matings.
"Last year (2020) we joined 3000 ewes to Merinos and this year in February we mated 5000," he said.
"There was a period between 2005 and 2017 when we were only joining a 1000 ewes to Merinos as we were targeting the prime lamb market because of the returns, but we have definitely swung back to Merinos in the past four to five years as the wool market has picked up.
"We used to purchase in Merino ewes for our prime lamb matings but it is now getting harder and harder to get the ones we want, so we have decided to breed our own."
The Egerton-Warburtons aim to breed a fine woolled, heavy cutting Merino that can handle the wetter Frankland environment and turn off a good Merino or prime lamb as early as possible.
With this in mind when it comes to classing their ewe hoggets each year with the assistance of Nathan King, Elders stud stock, they look for the ewes with top white wools and a good frame for their Merino joining flock.
Mr Egerton-Warburton said the ewes they retained in the Merino breeding flock must have wool quality and quantity - if they don't they are downgraded and are joined to their terminal sires.
When selecting their Merino rams they look for similar traits and like the ewes Grant said wool quality was number one when it came to ram selection.
"We want wools that suit and will stand up to our wetter environment and we also want heavy cutters," he said.
"The rams also have to show early growth plus have a good frame and conformation.
"We definitely go for the bigger sheep but they must have the wool quality to match."
To achieve their goals the bloodlines in the flock have changed over the years.
For the 50 years up until 2005 the flock had a strong influence of Haddon Rig in it as the family sourced its rams from the stud when it was based in WA and also from its New South Wales base.
Then just over 24 years ago in 1997 the family started buying rams from the Willemenup stud at Gnowangerup, something it has been doing ever since.
Mr Egerton-Warburton said they made the move to Willemenup chasing the bigger frames.
"We went to Willemenup to get more frame into our sheep but we knew the stud also had good wools, so we were confident we weren't going to lose anything on our wool quality which was important to us," he said.
Another bloodline was added to the mix this year with the family using rams from the House family's Barloo stud at Gnowangerup in their mating program.
This was due to the fact that the House family purchased Willemenup and the rams from the two studs were sold together.
"We went to the House's ram sale (last year) with the intention of just buying Willemenup rams but when we went through the line-up we were very impressed by the quality with the Barloo rams and ended up buying 20 of each which were mainly all Polls," he said.
With increasing productivity always at the forefront of their minds, the Egerton-Warburtons have made a couple of major changes to their sheep enterprise in the past two years.
The first change is they have shifted their lambing back two months from May to July and they are confinement feeding their ewes prior to lambing to let the pastures get away.
With July now their preferred time of lambing, all the rams go in at the start of February for a five week period.
The Merino rams run with the ewes at a rate of one ram to 65 ewes while the Poll Dorset and Suffolk rams are used at a rate of 1:50.
In the lead up to joining the Egerton-Warburtons make sure their rams are well fed, while the ewes are run on stubbles over summer and usually start on a trail feed of oats and lupins in February.
In terms of the confinement feeding side they have fenced some of their poorer cropping land which had a good water supply into 10 paddocks ranging in size from five to 15ha.
The ewes go into the confinement paddocks in mid-April after they are pregnancy scanned and they stay there until the pastures have got away.
Mr Egerton-Warburton said the amount of time they spent in confinement depended on the season and pasture growth.
"This year I had dad saying to me, what are you doing with those ewes still being locked up and to have a look at how much pasture there was out there," he said.
"As a result of the good season this year we turned them out onto the pastures a month before lambing."
When the ewes are in confinement they are trail fed a 50:50 lupin-barley mix which is coated in calcium and magnesium loose lick every second day at a rate of 1.3 to 1.4 kilograms a day.
"We generally mix up 250 tonnes of the feed mix at the time just to make it easy for me when it comes to feeding," he said.
On the off-feed days the ewes are fed hay just to make sure they have something to chew on and keep the rumen functioning.
Mr Egerton-Warburton said there were a couple of reasons they made the changes but the major one was to be able to increase their productivity and get more lambs on the ground.
"By lambing later we have been able to increase our stocking rate from 10 to 11 dry sheep equivalent (DSE) at lambing to 11.5 to 12 DSE," he said.
"It also means we are not running around trail feeding ewes when they are lambing as they are now lambing down onto well established pastures.
"By locking the ewes up, the pastures get away which means there is plenty of green feed available to them when their feed demands are at their highest levels.
"We think it works really well locking up the ewes and we have had no problems in the past two years doing it.
"Before we decided to do it I was talking about it with our stock agent Clark Skinner, Elders Cranbrook, and he was saying to me everyone he knew who were confinement feeding ewes prior to lambing wished they started doing it earlier and we are now of the same opinion."
The change to their breeding program has shone through in the flock's lamb marking percentages as well.
In the past two lambing markings they have averaged 110pc across everything with their Merino ewes doing up to 120pc and they look like achieving similar results this year.
To ensure they maintain this fertility in the flock, all the ewes are wet and dry pregnancy scanned.
The maidens not in lamb get a second chance and are run 'harder' before their second joining, while any older ewes not in lamb are sold.
While the Egerton-Warburtons have moved their lambing later, they are still able to wean their lambs in October onto better quality pastures.
"They may be a bit younger age wise when we wean now, but they are a similar size because they are getting a much better start as they drop when there is plenty of green feed around for the ewe for milk production," Mr Egerton-Warburton said.
Once it dries out the Merino ewe lambs in summer are run in the confinement paddocks which are resown with a lupin and oat fodder crop when the lambing ewes come out, while the wether lambs are turned out onto the stubbles once they become available.
The other major change the family has made in the past two years to increase productivity is changing from a September shearing to a March shearing, when both mature ewes and ewe lambs are shorn.
Mr Egerton-Warburton said they had shorn in spring for a long time but made the move to a March shearing with the hope of increasing their wool cut.
"We undertook our last spring shearing in 2019, then shore the ewes as prem wools in March 2020," he said.
"This year was the first March clip, which was 12 months growth, and we definitely saw an increase in wool cut.
"We cut an average of five to six kilograms of 19 micron wool across the whole flock.
"It also fits in better given now we have moved lambing back to July, if we were shearing in spring it really wouldn't work, especially when it came to lamb shearing.
"Plus it also means the ewes are only prem wools when they lamb and not nearly full wools which means it is easy on them at lambing."
Marketing of the wool clip occurs in the months after shearing through Nutrien Wool and this year they averaged $1500 a bale sweep the floor for their March shearing.
Mr Egerton-Warburton said it was good to see the wool market was now stronger than what it was compared to 12 months ago.
"Wool prices in general have been good in the past five years except for the dip last year as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic," he said.
"Even the levels they were at last year when they dropped away, were a lot stronger than the late 1990s and early 2000s when I was first back home on the farm.
"When I came back to the farm in 1996 after leaving school, we were still running wethers through for their wool clip but we sold them all (7000 head) in 1997 because the wool prices weren't good.
"We worked out we could make more money from cropping than running wethers through, so we went down the cropping path in a serious way, prior to that we were only planting a bit of crop for sheep feed."
With the operation now focused on just running a breeding flock and getting as many as lambs on the ground as possible, the Egerton-Warburtons aim to turn off their Merino wether lambs and prime lambs as soon as possible.
They run their Merino wether lambs through on lupin stubbles and aim to sell them at more than 45kg liveweight either as stores or to processors and they are helped out in their marketing by Mr Skinner (Elders Cranbrook).
This year they sold their 2020-drop wether lambs unshorn in March at an average of 43kg to a local feedlot for more than 300 cents a kilogram liveweight, but Grant said they had in the past sold their Merino wether lambs off lupin stubbles to processors in March/April.
"We don't have any trouble getting them up for that market but this year the money was in stores," Grant said.
"There would have been some of the lambs in the draft which could have gone to a processor but we decided it was better money overall to sell them as one big draft and not have any hanging over."
In terms of last year's drop of prime lambs Mr Egerton-Warburton said they were all sold (6000 head) straight offer their mothers in November at an average of 47kg for more than 300c/kg liveweight mainly to the Eastern States as stores.
While the family's preference was to run lambs on lupin stubbles to get them up for sale, it also had good success fattening its Merino wether lambs and the tail of its prime lambs on barley stubbles and lick feeders filled with lupins.
Mr Egerton-Warburton said while the wool market had struggled over the past 12 months, in terms of sheep and lamb prices, they couldn't be happier with the returns they were receiving.
"In my time home on the farm I haven't seen sheep prices like they have been in the past couple of years," he said.
"Here's hoping they are the new norm for the industry as they certainly make running sheep worthwhile."
At the end of the day while the farm is more geared towards cropping with the enterprise split being 70pc cropping and 30pc sheep, Mr Egerton-Warburton said the two worked well side by side and they had increased the sheep component in the past five years from 25pc on the back of the better returns they were seeing.
This year the Egerton-Warburtons have planted 3300ha to canola, wheat, barley and lupins and a percentage of the barley and lupins, like in past years, will be retained for sheep feed.
"The sheep and cropping work well together because once harvest is done everything goes on the stubbles so it reduces the need to supplementary feed for most of summer," Mr Egerton-Warburton said.
"Along with this the pastures also benefit the cropping program because of the nitrogen they add at no extra expense.
"We do work on our pasture and manipulate them to ensure the clovers and ryegrasses are the dominant species in them.
Mr Egerton-Warburton said at the end of the day both the sheep and the cropping come out pretty similar in terms of returns per hectare.
"Where the sheep have it is the input costs," he said.
"The costs of production for our sheep enterprise are nowhere near that of the cropping."
Going forward they want to eventually run 15,000 breeding ewes, with their Merino ewe numbers at about 13,000 head, something they will hopefully be able to achieve in the coming few years as they are in the process of purchasing a 1620ha neighbouring property.
