SUPPORT and interest from industry figures was as strong as ever at the fifth annual Merino Lifetime Productivity (MLP) annual field day held at The University of Western Australia (UWA) Ridgefield project site property, West Pingelly, last month.
The event gave people the chance to inspect the individual sire's ewe progeny groups from both the 2016 and 2017 drops.
The project began in 2015, but the Pingelly site wasn't started until 2016, with the artificial insemination (AI) of 15 sires to foundation ewes, which created the 2016-drop progeny.
It is a $13 million funded project over 10 years and is one of the biggest and longest Merino genetics trials ever undertaken.
The aim of the project is to increase the understanding of genetics and create a database which producers will be able to use to better predict how a Merino ewe will perform over their lifetime, to ultimately increase profitability.
The project is conducted across five different sites including Pingelly (WA), Balmoral (Harrow, Victoria), Merinolink (Temora, New South Wales), New England (Armidale, NSW) and Macquarie (Trangie, NSW), where sire evaluation trials operate for the first two years and from then on the performance of the ewe progeny is tracked.
With the trial running for several years, it means that the people involved can only speculate and provide updates on the progress of the trial, with no conclusive results being available until its end in 2023.
Next year's field day is set to be the final of the project updates.
Once again, in addition to the MLP results and presentations, Meat & Livestock Australia's (MLA) Caris Jones ran a free Australian Sheep Breeding Values (ASBV) workshop in the morning to provide those who were interested with a better understanding of ASBVs and how they can be used.
The afternoon sessions were slightly different this year with three concurrent sessions.
This meant that attendees had the choice to listen to two out of the three talks before viewing the sire progeny towards the end of the day.
The speakers included Bronwyn Clarke who gave a brief overview of the trial before delving into the presentation.
Ms Clarke said that across all five sites, there are 134 genetically linked sires that have had their progeny compared and 5700 ewes being examined across the country.
She said that across all of the sites they have collected around two million records of data.
"With one year to go we are starting to build up a picture of how these ewes are performing across their lifetime," Ms Clarke said.
The talk focused on answering the question "Can we have it all? What are the trade-offs?".
She also spoke about some of the lessons and observations from Pingelly's cumulative production data.
"Do we have ewes that can produce both a lot of wool and good quality wool and a lot of lambs?," Ms Clarke said.
She compared the ewe performance over the years by how many lambs they have had to date and looked at the average clean fleece weight they have produced and also presented a gross margin analysis.
Ms Clarke said that ultimately the data did not take into account wool quality and there were other factors that needed to be considered for an accurate correlation to be found.
"We can't just account for numbers of lambs weaned and clean fleece weight, there's quite a few other things to take into account with the whole lifetime productivity equation," she said.
The floor was then opened up to those who had any questions about the project and the findings.
Nathan King, Elders stud stock, ran a session on classing, how it's done and what has happened over time.
He walked onlookers through the ewes, which he has classed each year for the trial.
Mr King explained his reasoning for the individual ewes score and the changes in condition/scoring of the ewes over the course of the project.
Murdoch University's Andrew Thompson and Sarah Blumer spoke on selection for dollars per hectare not dollars per head - how it can be measured and what does it mean?
The first part of his speech was to answer the above question.
Mr Thompson spoke first with the aim of answering the question.
"Can we quantify the potential differences in profitability per hectare between animals as opposed to productivity or profitability per head and ultimately could we select animals that would make more money per hectare?"
An experiment was conducted to help answer this question.
"We started with the theory that fatter animals could potentially be run at a higher stocking rate and would require less supplement feeding and therefore potentially be more profitable," Mr Thompson said.
The experiment involved taking the wethers of the ewes - 320 from the 2016 drop and 320 from the 2017 drop - and they were all put through a shed in Katanning where they could measure individual feed intake, wool growth rate responses and whole body composition index over a 70-80 day period.
Mr Thompson then handed over to Ms Blumer to explain some of the findings and how the information could be used.
Once all of the sessions were done it was over to site chairman Brett Jones who gave an in-depth description of each of the 30 sire's ewe progeny groups and the results to date.
Ridgefield site manager Bronwyn Clarke said with the trial coming to an end it was good to see such strong interest from the industry.
"There was a great crowd which was pleasing to see," Ms Clarke said.
"We are starting to see some trends and get some good information and data from the project."
