Life on Roseville Park Sheep Stud

Speaker 1 0:00

Welcome to Head Shepherd Matthew Coddington.

Speaker 2 0:02

Thank you, Mark.

Speaker 1 0:04

Awesome, mark, great to have you along. Obviously there at Roseville Park or Roseville Park, marina Stud, near Dubbo. We might start, as we do, with a bit of background. So life at home, on the farm, the property, the sheep, the family operation, how all that goes together.

Speaker 2 0:19

Yeah, okay, the farms. There's sort of six farms here, all in the general sort of adjoining area and they cover around 4,400 hectares. Farms are located 35 south K of Dubbo and you know the beauty of being in Dubbo is we usually find it pretty easy to get staff. You know you've got a good town there with 45,000 people of all the schools and facilities that you need, so our location is very good for that reason. And we're close there with 45 000 people of all the schools and facilities that you need, um, so that that our location is very good for that reason. And we're close to the dubbo sale yards and then obviously fletcher abattoirs as well, only all being 35 k's away. So it's very good being near that big hub and that big selling center. And and then from dubbo out west, you know, we service around 150 000 people um all coming in from, you know, out towards Bourke and all that way. So there's a lot of people move in to educate their families and things like that and look for jobs and work on farms because that's what they know. So we find it very good that way. The other beauty of where we are is the rainfall is evenly distributed through the year, so every month is around 50 to 60 mil of rainfall, so we end up with 650 mil rainfall through the year and that means, you know, in a perfect situation you can have green feed all year round. Although the farms are all together and adjoining, they're sort of all varying soil types. No two farms are the same here. You go into other areas and for hundreds of kilometres, the soil types, no two farms are the same here. Like you go into other areas and for hundreds of kilometers the soil type's the same, but our soil ranges from sort of basalt, real acidic, 4.2 ph acidic, uh, granite, sorry to basalt, which is your 5.6 ph, and you know we can grow loosen on the creek flats and things like that.

Speaker 2 2:05

And the livestock operation principally runs around, obviously, the sheep enterprises. We run around 11,000 sheep, the main sheep enterprise being the Merino stud, obviously, and the Merino sheep we run. In conjunction with that we supply around 700 rams and up to around 4, 000 doses of semen to over 470 clients throughout australia and overseas every year. We also run a charolais sheep stud. Uh, we've got about 400 charolais stud sheep not cows, and my eldest son, charlie, he's got a whole dorset stud and my 15 year old son timmy. He's the youngest kid to ever register a merino stud, actually at the age of 11. He's 15 now and he's got his own little merino stud. It runs around 50 to 100 ewes on that as well.

Speaker 2 2:56

So it's, you know, a full family affair on the farm. Everyone's got a little enterprise and a bit of incentive to come home and do a bit of work on school holidays when they were younger, or come back from their jobs and and help out in the busy times and um, with our seasons here they're very variable, so our pressure valve is actually cattle trading. The sheep numbers always stay the same. So in very good years we can trade up to 1400 head of cattle that we just buy in, sell, buy pre-tested cows, carbon down, sell them out, try to do quick three months turnovers and, um, there's no emotion with cattle. So when we had the drought in 2017, 18 and 19, we had no cattle. We just ran our core sheep, people started going and our secure enterprise that we got and then, when the drought broke, started trading cattle again. Uh, currently running around I think, around 800 head of cattle at the moment and then around the livestock enterprise we crop around a thousand hectares, uh, using dual purpose grazing crops and cereals to fill silos for supplementary feeding, mainly barley, some oats and some lupins. And then we put in around this year we put in around 700 acres of new lucerne, chicories, clovers and pastures, just to keep our new pastures rolling through as well.

Speaker 2 4:24

And I guess the way this all fits together is we've got five very good staff within our business and even though we've got lots of different enterprises, all our staff have particular specialised roles and responsibilities and we try to have a well-planned out management plan and calendar trying to follow, you know, just one major operation happening at a time, although this week we've got a few different operations going on, with harvest happening and embryo transfer program starting and putting seeders in for 1600 AI.

Speaker 2 5:02

But most of the time you you know, we've got one major operation happening and they're not all on the top of each other, so the year's pretty well evenly spread out with different parts of the operation happening at one time. So, um, the other thing is with with our staff here they're jacks of all trades and master of none. You know doing cattle work, cropping, sheep work, artificial breeding, field days, marketing. We put up to 15 kilometres of fence a year. We're pretty self-sufficient. The only outsider contractors we bring in are our harvesters and our shearing team. Pretty well, my team do everything else we need to do on the farm.

Speaker 1 5:47

Excellent, pretty lucky to have that crew. Yeah Well, some people claim luck. It's obviously got to build them, just pick them off the tree. Yeah, obviously heaps going on there If we sort of start on the start and we'll wander through the business as we go. But your father, graham, was known for having a really clear vision of the type of sheep he wanted to breed. How does your own philosophy sort of evolved over that time as as you've taken the reins and and made it your own?

Speaker 2 6:14

yeah, so yeah, my mother and father were pretty hard acts to follow. You know they. You know even this. Even though the stud was established in 1938, it went from a very little-known stud selling probably 50 rams to a few neighbours and things like that, to one of the major studs in Australia and influential parent studs in the industry and they were really hard workers. Talking about staff, dad had casual staff doing 110 hour weeks. He's 78, he's still farming, he still can't keep stuff because no one can keep. They had a massive work ethic, that generation that we'll never see again. We won't get staff that'll do those hours for a start. But what allowed him to do?

Speaker 2 7:04

My parents did a lot of empire building they. They were buying um as much country as they could put together um at a time they were putting everything back into paying off those farms and building up the business as quick as they could. Where we initially lived we were on an irrigation farm near Narra Mine actually, but we were landlocked and they couldn't expand. And then we moved out to where we were in the early 80s and pretty much every 18 months for a while they were buying a farm and building the business up. That way, built up to around 15,000 acres where we are and other farms in between, like my father's, very renowned for buying, selling farms, and one of the last farms he's just sold was 45 000 acres out at rawarna station out there and um he's trying to sell his farm near giri at the moment. Um just to take it a little bit easier at 78 and slow down a bit, sounds like a good idea, yeah but you know they to do that marketing and build the business up.

Speaker 2 8:08

They ended up selling around 1,100 rams a year and they actually used to auction around 600 rams a year, but they did it everywhere. We took rams to Albury and we'd have 100 rams auctioned there, then 100 to Hamilton and auctioned them. Then we went to Narrow Court auctioned there. We had 100 rams auctioned there, then 100 to hamilton and auctioned them. Then we went to narrow court auction there. We had 150 rams. We'd auction on farm every year.

Speaker 2 8:31

And then for a while, for about 10 years, we had a stud depot in western australia near katanning, and we had a stud depot over there and we'd sell around, I think, around 100 to 120 rams at auction over there. So, and then there was all your multi-vendor sales. We were never home, we were always on the road, always travelling, and that's what it was like back then. You know we didn't have internet, we didn't have mobile phones. All the business had to be done on the landline. Pretty well, after work they had to be on the phone until 10 o'clock at night and back on at 6 o'clock in the morning to ring people, and you know they were among one of the first people to get into measurement as well. They were the first founding members of some of the original SAR evaluation programs in 1989 when they started and they've always been sort of involved in sorry evaluation. And then when artificial insemination, laparoscopic, ai, started in 1982, they were the first people into that. Embryo transfer followed in 1989. I think they're in the first two or three studs that started embryo transfer. So they're early adopters of, you know, new technology and trying to build the start-up, as you know, in the best way that they could. And then you know they became the first people then that bought the Dooney sheep into the eastern states of Australia. They bought them in with our vet at the time, greg McCann, and we were running something like 1,500 recipient ET programs to build the doonies up. We were doing 14-day programs and rolling through just building those numbers up. I think the first year he spent around $500,000 just on embryo transfer and then we had a ram sale out the end of it and sold $600,000 worth of dunis at the first ram sale.

Speaker 2 10:29

The other thing about the duni was they're the first breed of sheep to come into Australia and had to be all fully pedigreed, all had to have full data and measurement on them and in doing that they actually struggled with the breeders to keep that system going in Australia. So then my mother ended up chairing the Juniors Association and developing all the bylaws and the constitution for the Breed Society, and then they actually also had to bring in assessors. Independent assessors would come to your farm and grade the dunies up and they could only use a ram that had the right amount of data, a certain index, and then above that he had to have what they called double A rating, so he had to be physically correct and meet the breed criteria to be used in the studs. So that sort of opened their eyes to. You know, that type of genetic selection and data measurement that was able to be done within sheep and that only happened around the year 2000 really, so only 24 years ago this sort of information came to hand. Before that any data we did was the old. It's like the old ram power type index where you'd run your rams through and you'd fleece weigh them and your body weigh them and you get a micron test and it'd be all within flock and half your rams would be high for fleece weight, half would be be low, half would be high for body weight, half would be low, half would be above the micron and half would be below. So when you're trying to sell 1,100 rams, 550 of them were below average and people would be wanting to see your data and it'd be 130 for fleece weight, 130%, say, for fleece weight, another one would be 80, and they'd always want to pick the 130. Obviously, yeah, but you know, you and I know a lot more about genetic evaluation.

Speaker 2 12:34

Now we were picking the singles. The system didn't pick twins out of made and used or anything like that. So we were just picking the biggest single lambs with the biggest body weights and the biggest body weights, and the industry was sort of, in a way, pushed that way because it was all we had at hand if we wanted to use measurement. And so, apart from sire evaluation and that ram power index, the only benchmark tool we used then was to promote the stud, was to do a lot of showing. So again back on the road. No sport on weekends. Go to the local show or go to victoria, 15 hours away, and do a show, and and um, show the sheep, and again, you know the biggest, um, wooliest, finest ram, one in a ribbon, and and that was it. But you know it built our reputation up and our name up and got us out there and got Ramsey onto farms and things like that that we could get going forward with to promote the stud and grow it. And that was all we had, you know, at that time to utilise it, the information that we had. So the vision and the had.

Speaker 2 13:45

So the vision, the vision and the type in the merino stud, I guess did always revolve around you know why we've always been influential stud and my father always, even though he was doing the things he did, he always had this innate ability to predict where markets would be in five to ten years' time and I guess that's why I could see the Dooney had an influence coming into Australia. But in the end the Dooney made a big impact at the time. It hit the right situation because we hit that millennium drought. Wool prices were depressed, meat prices went up. But what it did? It opened all the merino breeders to what you could actually develop a pole merino sheep to look like and it actually kicked us all into gear and made us develop the pole merino in Australia a lot quicker with the introduction of that doonie and the system that they introduced when they did it and I guess within all that type, within our merino stud, we've got what our clients call the rosable park type wool.

Speaker 2 14:53

You know it's waterproof, it's bright, it's white, it's around 18 micron and a fine medium and being fine medium we've got clients from basically long system to long reach. We sit in that real niche where we try to sell our rams into all different you know environments and regions of australia. The other, the other thing about when I first came home, um in the early 90s, was we had a sheep class of there and through the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s they wouldn't use a ram unless it cut the old 40 pound now 40 pounds, 18, 18.2 kilos of wool. So every sire we had was cutting 18.2 kilos of wool and they were doing between sort of 18 and 21 micron. They were weighing around 130, 40 kilos as well.

Speaker 2 15:48

But I think the other thing that was different back then we didn't have this extreme climate we've got now. We had 30 pretty reliable seasons where we could go and put a crop in when we wanted to, we could graze it when we wanted to. We didn't think about we could. We could stock our farms up, run to the hill fertilizer was 100 to 180 a ton. So even when it didn't rain, I remember my father was putting fertilizer out three years in a row and I could see the fertilizer on the ground from the year before and we went through a dry spell through to 1998 and it rained and by six weeks later we had barley grass over the handlebars of the motorbike because he had four years of fur sitting there. That was the thing. Like we could run stock, we could feed stock.

Speaker 2 16:40

Our fertility in the sheep was never an issue. It didn't matter. If they cut 40 pound of wool, we we throw a ram out and these you get 120 percent lambs. I remember he sold a ram once and the guy said I, I don't need him too much. And dad goes oh, can I, can I use him? And the bloke goes yeah, yeah, you can use him, this ram. He cut 18.2 kilos of 18.2 micron wool and we'd sold him for $22,000. He threw him in 400 ewes and that ram got 260-something lambs. And that's just because the seasons, the pasture production, the fertiliser regimes, imports cost nothing back then. So you know we were able to manage a lot of problems in sheep just from sheer nutrition and feed and imports.

Speaker 2 17:31

The whole game's changed. Now you know, you know and then eventually you know things change. You get mobile phones, you get computers, we get different systems in place and slowly through time, my wife and I bought the Moreno stud and half the farms off our family in 2005. And I'm going. This is a bloody, pretty hard act to follow. Actually, some clients were going you're going to stuff this up, you're going to mess this up, you're going to send this stuff backwards. So I just came in at actually a very good time in the industry where, yeah, I'd been involved in sorry about the relation, but the sheep CRC was starting up. So I was able to get on some of the advisory groups in the sheep CRC. We were able to get on some of the advisory groups in the sheep CRC. We were able to get rams into the information nucleus flock that started developing the genomics information. Remember that thing they had in the late 90s the Moreno Validation Project.

Speaker 1 18:38

We had the.

Speaker 2 18:38

Moreno Validation Project starting out. So I got involved in that. We were doing worm egg counts, we were doing eye muscle scanning, fat scanning, um, doing some early body weights and things like that and that was that was the merino validation project. I'm sure was running for about six years before the introduction of sheep genetics. So it was all the merino Validation. The Sheep CRC were all the workings behind what then became Our Sheep Genetics, which was launched in 2008,.

Speaker 1 19:15

I think it was roughly I think that's about right, yeah.

Speaker 2 19:18

Yeah. So you know, we've only really had that technology since 2008, which is not a long time. So before that we did what we could with what we had to get information out to people that they wanted. And you know, since then we've got this mobile phone, a tablet, all this information at the fingertips of what we can do. Now we didn't have it then. I remember having a bag phone. The old Motorola bag phone used to ring people's first mobile phone about 1992 or something.

Speaker 2 19:49

And then, yeah, so all these developments came in the start of sheep genetics and actually at the time sheep genetics were interviewing for grower representatives to go on to their advisory group. Anyway, they wanted a couple of merino breeders, a couple of terminal ones, maternal and some different breeders from across the industry. So actually back then you had to go for an interview, went down to Sydney to the MLA headquarters and went for an interview for this position on the Sheep Genetics Advisory Group. So it must have been around 2006, 2007, before it was launched, ended up doing two terms on that Sheep Genetics Advisory Group and what was amazing about that was we actually got to help develop the business plan, the extension rollout, the marketing rollout all in sheep genetics and behind that, our committee got to talk to all the best researchers and geneticists in the industry and I spent probably five years in sheep genetics just before the launch and then after the launch and what that enabled me to do was to be able to do what my father was able to do.

Speaker 2 21:09

By talking to those researchers and geneticists, I was able to see five to ten years into the future. We were seeing new technology was about to come on board and some of the new traits they were going to measure and we could get in early and do some of that trial work and that kept us current with the industry and evolved with the industry as it changed. And yeah, it was a pretty good experience, pretty good learning thing for me, because I'd never actually done uni or anything.

Speaker 2 21:42

I basically back to Too busy working.

Speaker 1 21:45

Well said about that mate.

Speaker 2 21:46

Yeah, too busy working, no sport Basically did the HSC, finished year 12, went jackerooning for two years on a station on another marina stud and had a great time.

Speaker 2 21:57

Met my wife there, met a lot of good mates there, had two years to party and then that was it back to work Never again. So it was good to get out into this whole new sort of atmosphere of people thinking outside the box, really, things we'd never heard of or seen and information. Because you know the thing, the biggest difference since my father was breeding sheep is that, to be honest, 8% of the most important traits in breeding sheep we can't see. That's a good yeah, and we never really, um, have bred a sheep until recently. That existed before, because it doesn't look like the traditional marina I used to, because it's not anymore and that's because of genomics and the massive develops in sheep breeding values and the genetic parameters, like now we know it's a twin, we know the genetic parameters, the heritability is behind it, like the predicted breeding values now, so more accurate. We've got rams there with 96% accuracy on traits and things like that now.

Speaker 1 23:08

Yeah, that's a great point around the value of volunteering into some of those committees and getting access to. I mean, obviously it's time off farm and a lot of people would view that as a kind of lost time, but there's so many positives from getting involved in research for sure. You've talked about sheep breeding like training for the Olympics. What does that mindset mean in practice, day to day?

Farm Development Principles and Decision-Making

Speaker 2 23:29

I guess it's what we all do. It's about the one percenters, isn't it? You know you've got to get the mating decisions right, the management plan right to avoid bad weather events, joining or lambing. Getting the nutrition is right. It's very important because, you know, 75% of a sheep's condition score is attributed to nutrition and 25% of that's attributed to the genetics. So it doesn't matter how good your genetics are if you don't manage your stock properly, and that's why we do push what we do as much as we do with our pastures and our stocking rates and things like that. It's also about measuring and marketing our product for our clients and keeping our genetics current to the market, as we've discussed. And I'm a very structured and planned thinker the more time I have to plan and manage decisions the better. But unfortunately farming doesn't always give you that liberty, you know. But we've got procedures and protocols in place on the farm for our joining, for our lambing, for our weaning, for measuring data, you know, for shearing and fleece weaning and muscle scanning and doing genomic samples, dag scores, worm egg counts, you name it. We we actually were able to bring in standard operating procedures and protocols for those things when we did bring in some outside help. So they're all there and it's again. It all helps with that succession stuff.

Speaker 2 25:02

I'm ever not here, or from away those meetings which are very important to our business. The show goes on. You know, I'm not a micro manager in my business. I give my staff a lot of autonomy to make decisions and they you get good buying from doing that. You're there every day watching how they do every little thing and picking them to bits. You don't have staff there very long. You know.

Speaker 2 25:25

I've got staff that have been here 15 years now. They just know I can. And then we actually have a policy if I go away or if they go away, I could be gone for two weeks. They don't ring me and I don't ring them. We have a very good communication plan of what's to happen while I'm away and we actually enjoy the fact that we can all go away and not have to talk to anyone for two weeks on the farm. We've got that trust and they've got that autonomy to be fluid and make decisions on their own account and they've got enough experience and we've got that. It's because we've got that procedures and we've got that management plan in place that they're able to do it comfortably.

Speaker 1 26:13

That's awesome to hear. Does that take a while to evolve, or is that like I? Guess it takes some strong leadership. That's one of the things as well.

Speaker 2 26:23

But we've got our management calendar in place where they know this happens at this time of year and that happens at that time of year. And when we do this job we so when we're doing a genomic sample, we're doing a DAG score and a brain trinkle score, yeah, we're doing some other things coupled with some different measurements. Or when we're weaning, we have to do that body weight, and then we're doing the six. You know, we've just got things.

Speaker 1 26:51

they have to do at certain times and everyone just knows it. Yeah, perfect. Your accountant once said you're very good at quitting. What did he mean by that?

Speaker 2 26:57

Yeah, he said it to me and I nearly sort of told him to You're calling me a quitter?

Speaker 1 27:06

Yeah, that's not so.

Speaker 2 27:08

One thing that will wind up in Australian mail yeah, I wasn't sure myself at first and it was a bit sort of offended and I went you're calling me a quitter. And he goes yeah, I'm calling you a quitter in a good sense. I go, what do you mean? And he said, well, we, what we do, we we have a management accountant so we go in quarterly and we spend half a day with our accountant and it's also more like him being also a business coach. We talk about, we do talk about the farm, the staff. Uh, people scores how everyone's feeling at different times. You know, in the last quarter how are people's stress levels? People scores how do we feel about the financials for that quarter and things like that. So you know, as we're doing all that, and he didn't go into marketing, communication stuff and things he'd pick up off other people. So we found a real valuable thing to do, this business accounting service with him and he dealt mainly with farmers so he knew our industry quite well.

Speaker 2 28:09

But you know, as we're going through sort of some things, we bought and sold. We bought a sheep handler and we didn't like it. We bought an air seater we didn't like it, so we resold it. We bought a side-by-side side and in the drought it sucked dust in and you're in this cloud of dust and couldn't see where you're going, so I flipped it. And that's what he meant about being good quitter. He just read this story.

Speaker 2 28:34

I think came out of Harvard University and this how top entrepreneurs, rather than buy something that they're not happy with and then spend money on it trying to get it right or spending hours trying to fix it and make it so it works, to just justify the purchase was right. If you're not happy with it, flip it, piss it off and buy something that does suit your operation. And we do a lot of things like that because when we are trying to be early adopters of technology, you know there's not many people you can get advice off. So you go and buy the new shiny toy and you find it takes 40 times as long to push sheep through it. Some sheep handlers like pushing sheep into a wheelie bin. To be honest, you know I'll get those little buggers in there.

Speaker 2 29:30

So if it doesn't work, don't try to cut the sides off it or change your lead up race or do this and do that and get a better dog and electric prodder, get rid of it and buy the next thing and until you find something that works. So even with our um sheep management software, we we tried every brand of sheep software until we got stuck on our bread elite stuff that we're using now with our sheep software systems for all our measurement. So yeah, that's what he meant about being a quitter in a nice way basically.

Speaker 2 30:07

If you don't like it, flip it, move to the next one. Don't spend countless hours and money trying to get something to work if it's not going to work ever 100% for you.

Speaker 1 30:17

I reckon that's number two insight from this interview. So everyone listening should really write that one down move on, accept the failure and get on with it because you can. We make a make decisions with our emotional brain and then then our rational brain has to try and make sense of it. But the uh, but you can just move on.

Speaker 2 30:31

It's not going to work. Nearly bit of ego there, isn't it, yeah?

Speaker 1 30:34

or barbecue talk, you know everyone said this new shiny toy was going to work and you can't get it to work yeah, yeah, obviously you mentioned a lot of fencing and I'm assuming you'll be always chasing efficiency, laneways and whatever what sort of principles guide your decisions around farm development as you're continuing to evolve the business.

Speaker 2 30:54

Yeah, I guess I love fences and we do have pretty good fences. I love dividing paddocks up and love laneways, fencing off waterways. And I was at a client's place not long ago driving around with him and you know the fences got pretty ran down. He goes I don't know what to do. We've got to, you know, do 50 kilometres of fencing and this and that. And I said, look, we budget on anywhere in a bad year where we're trying to cut budgets, We'll do only five kilometres of fencing a year. But the last couple of years we've been doing 15 kilometres of fencing a year. Now you put that over 10 years, suddenly you've got 150 kilometres of fence done on your farm and it happens pretty quick. So just start on your laneways, start on you know your boundaries and things like that, and just start. You know it adds up very quickly. So I guess that's fencing. I love that part of our farm development. But the principles that we're guided by is does it have economic viability? Will it help the businessability? Will it help? Will it help the business? Will it help? So, for instance for instance we were talking about our position so will it help us gain market access? You know we've got good supply chains, access to local markets and that ensures you know financial success. Will it allow us to increase our stocking rate? Will it help us increase daily weight gains and turn stock off faster? Will it improve our grazing systems, where we could rotate through more paddocks and take some longer to get back to that paddock for worm management? The other thing as I mentioned, we do a lot of enterprises and I actually find that a strength to our business. So another decision around farm development is does it give us diversification?

Speaker 2 32:56

My son goes away to school and he goes to a different school to where the other kids went before they grew up. But I was down there talking to all the fathers. You know I'd never I didn't know one one father at this school, all farmers, but thought I'd definitely have to know a farmer. But when I went into this room they were nearly all croppers actually and, um, in very good cropping, reliable cropping areas, canolas and and good cereal crops and things like that. And I said, oh, what do you do, mate? I said, oh, I do sheep, cattle cropping, a bit of this and a bit of that. I said, oh, I don't know how you can do all that. We just do one thing and do it well. I said that scares the crap out of me, Like you've got all your eggs in one basket. Yeah, I do cropping, I do cattle trading, I do sheep commercial sheep.

Speaker 2 33:51

We try to do a bit of everything to diversify income streams. And you know, in 2022, cattle were through the roof, Wool was very good in 22, 23, and then it went off and then the sheep and meat prices prices went down, so the cropping's come up. So so you actually can keep a reasonably secure um income stream coming through if you're very diversified. So, yeah, our farm development is very driven around. Can it help us diversify what we are and help us run all the different enterprise we've got?

Speaker 2 34:21

And obviously, beyond that, with the stock, we do animal welfare. You know we've got to ensure that livestock are raised in a humane way that promotes their health and wellbeing and our on-farm infrastructure. We've just done a massive, big sheep and cattle yard complex on the farm costing around half a million dollars. We haven't put the shed up over it yet, so that will add a fair bit more to it. But you know, it's about building that state-of-the-art sheet and cattle yard facility that keeps our staff and animal welfare really good, but we can couple that with new technology for data collection, labour-saving devices to make our staff more efficient. Because this is the other thing staff aren't getting any cheaper. So as we expand or ramp our stocking rate up, I actually need my staff to become more efficient. We can't have that leisure of just throwing more staff on because, like back in my dad's day, he just threw another jackaroo on or something.

Speaker 1 35:25

Another 100 hours a week for a jackaroo.

Speaker 2 35:27

So you know, another 100 hours a week, you can get some 15 grand a year. You can be pretty efficient there. But now you know, instead of buying putting on enough staff, remember, we buy a bigger air set or a big boom spray, better sheep yard facilities, better shearing sheds, better infrastructure, and they're there for a long time. So you know, the payback's very good on that. And then also our crop selection um, in farm development we choose crops that are well suited to, you know, our climate, soil conditions, and we choose crops and pastures that'll fill our feed gaps so we can always have feed in front of our stock for the.

Speaker 2 36:08

You know, when we're weaning, we want rocket fuel. When we're cattle trading, we want rocket fuel. There's a lot of times now, actually, we've got to put our ewes into Jenny Craig paddocks we need, otherwise coming into joining holy, our years were fat. We actually had to lock them up, um, otherwise we actually struggled. We we'd have conception troubles because our 4.5 condition score. So, yeah, we're trying to even work that. And then, obviously, technology we embrace advancements like your precision agriculture, drones, automated equipment to boost the productivity and efficiency rates across the different farms that we run.

Speaker 1 36:49

Cool, we'll swing. I think this will be the last question around the stud stuff, but it is a massive breeding program and you already mentioned your 1600 AI, us and ETs and lots of stuff going on. How do you obviously you're chief in charge of selecting who gets to stay, who gets to go how do you sort of filter out what's important when it comes to the selection amongst all that data and decision-making you need to do and all those different client, I guess geographies that you're working with?

Speaker 2 37:19

Yeah, I guess this is what I try to discuss with sheep breeds and genesis a lot as well. I think a lot of people get too carried away with low genetically heritable traits that don't make a massive difference to their bottom lines, and it doesn't. So I saw Rams out to Burke and he's not worried about dag or worm out there, but someone in Western District of Victoria. That's nearly their number one criteria. Yet the bloke at Burke sees a guy in Western District worried about dag and worm and he's going. Oh, I've got to watch the dag in my rams. I'm going.

Speaker 2 37:59

Really Burke Shouldn't he be really worried about some other things like, um, you know, can they walk seven kilometers to water and carry that fleece to the shed, you know? So I think the first thing we need to do is just realize what are our key profit drivers in our environment we live in. And then the second thing well, probably the first thing we do before that is, let's develop a long-term breeding objective, let's sort out all those little irrelevant things and let's get down to what's really going to drive your turnover and your flock to be at its best performance in your environment. So let's set a breeding objective and let's apply that to what we need to achieve to get that desired outcome that we're going to need for our sheep and our clients, I guess and then build, you know, the other thing within that. The genomic flock profile has been a game changer for a lot of our clients as well, because there is a lot of new information always out there.

Speaker 2 39:12

And you know, I was working with a guy in Victoria and had a massive mob of sheep, had 5,000 new hoggers to class every year. For that he needed around 100 120 replacement rams a year. So he decided to breed his rams himself, so to pick the size. One year he wanted fleece weight, you know. One year he wanted fertility. One year he wanted muscle. One year he wanted fat. One year he wanted wet, and sometimes find the traits he wanted. I was actually going to other studs to find rams to do the job he wanted, but it was frustrating because we were going all over the place, higgledy, piggledy.

Speaker 2 39:52

So what, what we did? Luckily, his wife came from a dairy background and was used to data and a bit of, you know, single trait focused stuff. So first thing we did was got a genomic profile, work out the strengths, work out your weaknesses. Then let's work out a long-term breeding objective and you know what? It just gave them a formula, a plan every year.

Speaker 2 40:16

We knew, right, these are our strengths, we we don't have to worry so much about these. We might need to work on some of these traits. Let's focus on them and in another five years, do another genomic profile and see if we're heading that way. That's been a massive thing for clients and it's been able to simplify the whole process and formulate, which I love. I love structure and planning, as I said. So it was doing my head in the way we were doing it before and, yeah, just streamline something and we've moved in a direction. We can track and quantify that direction and it's the same as what we try to do in our flock on the farm, obviously. But the beauty for us, we've got that tool now, um called mate cell, and I I guess for people out there that there are people out there that don't know mate cell, because I was talking to some people the other day who hadn't heard of it.

Speaker 1 41:12

But there'll be plenty that don't know yeah, so mate, cell beauty of it.

Speaker 2 41:16

We went through around 5 000 years. I picked out 1600 years. We're going to artificially inseminate. Those ewes had to fit our type. You know our vision, our type, our wool type, all that. Then we went through the 1,600 ewes and we scanned each ewe and sent all its data to Henry Hickson NextGen app and then I told Henry these are the seven size that I want to use over these 1600 sheep. Puts it all into the system and we can actually, with my breeding objective, predict the progeny, I guess, breeding value and the outcome of that joining. So that's, that's next level things that we can now do as stud breeders. So before I've even joined, I can nearly predict what my 25 drop lambs data is going to average out and you can move your whole start very rapidly in into a very good direction if you, you know, again got that structure, that long-term breeding objective yeah, 100 if we move sort of on to.

Speaker 1 42:24

I guess maybe a bit about your interest personally and you seem to be running a fair few workshops, field days. I see you're teaching young judges days, that sort of stuff, the you seem to enjoy that aspect of agriculture. Where does that interest come from?

Speaker 2 42:41

Yeah, I guess you've heard a bit about my little childhood. We're in the middle of a harvest at the moment and it's 37, 38 degrees. Yesterday my 23-year-old son he's been working away on different farms for five years and he's came home to help us this year on the farm back in the business, which is great. But, um, you know, we've got two headers going. One header had gone up the road and started harvesting in a little paddock and then we've got a uh, you know, really big second biggest john deer header there. It had finished off another paddock and was being needed an escort to the paddock where this other header was working. So the header driver goes oh, can I borrow your son? He's going to drive my ute. Well, this ute is one of those old Ford Falcon BNS Bandit type utes that we used to drive when we were 18, you know the big bull bar of 50 aerials off the front, the Bundy rum, made flaps, perfect. The V8, low set, black ute with an oversized sign of flashing lights. And I went Charlie, you reckon you can drive this big girl? He goes oh, yeah, I'll get into that. Anyway, I said you've got to escort this bloke, so talk to him on the two-way and you know, let him know if any trucks are coming or anything. Yeah, yeah, no worries. And I said and the chaser bin is behind you and I'm behind all of them, so I'll just follow and then I can bring everyone back to get more vehicles. Yep, yep, no worries.

Speaker 2 44:18

Driving up the road, drives into the paddock, drives this v8 it's only about 10 centimeters off the ground drives it all the way into the paddock, onto the stubble, and he's parked this v8 thing on the stubble and everyone's just ran at him screaming. The bloke with the fire cart's gone towards him. He goes, what's going on? And they're all yelling at him. Mate, you cannot drive a bloody ute like that. In the bubble it's got a catalytic converter, you're gonna start it on fire. And we're all just screaming and yelling at him. He's freaking out, he's trying to get this thing off there and the wheels are spinning. And then it's got cooked and stalled and we couldn't start it. The john the head driver's cracking it. Oh me bloody pride and joy. Anyway, I'm thinking you know what. This is how people used to treat us when we were young. You actually never got taught anything. People just ran at you, yelling, and you learn from trial and error.

Speaker 2 45:18

I remember my first day of Jackaroooning. We drenched 1,200 sheep in a 7,000-acre paddock and I walked up and down beside the race screaming at me and the other guy whose first day it was, go faster, drench those sheep faster. That one spat it out, you useless bugger Drink it again. And he was just screaming. I was like we're in boot camp or something. And that's how we were brought up. And when I saw everyone running at my son yesterday I'm thinking that's the first time he's experienced that. And then I went we've all got to take a step back and a deep breath and go hey, charlie, you can't drive on stubble with that sort of you will light the paddock on fire and he goes. And this is a typical Jan Z he goes. I don't know why the hell he's bought a vintage car to a bloody harvest job. Why isn't he driving a diesel Toyota like every other normal boat? And I yeah, righto, we wouldn't have answered it like that when we were that age. We'd probably got the clip under the ear or something. But you know, I was bought up by. You're just expected to know. No one taught you. So I wanted to change that cycle and I've been trying to pay it forward, you know.

Speaker 2 46:45

So when I was young and involved in sci evaluation, there was a guy called Alan Casey who was with New South Wales DPI and he saw what I was doing with sci evaluation and the industry and trying to get into that technical and scientific. You know, I'd always just quiz my mind. I was just trying to learn as much as I could. I was just hungry for information and a real sponge when I was young. I just couldn't do enough. Even though I didn't go to uni, I couldn't do enough courses, read enough books, learn enough about our industry, get involved with everything I could. Anyway, alan Casey saw how keen I was and I was only, let's say, early 20s and he's grabbed me to help the DPI develop a ram breeding and selection manual using visual measured data in the early 90s. So DPI wanted to basically put out big modules. You could fill them in with different shape, selection things and that. But what we did with those modules when we developed it? He got us to run a heap of events called Train the Trainers.

Speaker 2 47:54

And suddenly here I am, a 20-year-old kid who'd never been to uni, standing up teaching university lecturers TAFE teachers. Uni standing up teaching university lecturers, tafe teachers, secondary teachers on how to teach their students about modern, what was modern sheep breeding and selection back then. But to try and bring the real scientific jargon out of it, to bring it back down to students terms so they could understand it. And I was glad I was given that opportunity to teach people land. I loved it and thrived on it and then through that I was then given opportunities to represent the wool industry and leadership programs and they taught me a lot about communication leadership. I did one with New South Wales farmers. That taught us about him lobbying governments and and making change and even taught us a lot about marketing. But you're with other industry, so we'd be there with oyster farmers, banana farmers, you name it across the whole industry. And that were great experiences when I was young, which I don't do enough of now.

Speaker 2 49:02

And then, obviously, in 1996, I learned to laparoscopic AI and the same thing happened. The vet didn't want to teach me, but I was adamant, I was dogged. I said when you're at home you're going to teach me how to AI, because it's not illegal. You can teach me that I don't have to be a vet, I can ai my own sheet on the farm. So basically it's right. So I went and bought all the gear. You know he said it was going to cost 20 000, I think I got the gear for about seven and a half.

Speaker 2 49:31

Back then got all the gear, got in the workshop, welded up some ai trolleys um designed them actually that they were so good that the other vets ended up copying them. But what? What he did on the first sheet. He goes look down here. And he's got me looking into the laparoscope inside the sheet. You go see that. And I go, oh what, that little thing that looks like a raw prawn. He goes, yeah, that's it, that's where you you've got to AI the sheep. And I went right. He goes, you're on your own. And that first day I AI'd 30 sheep, not knowing if I was putting it into the small intestine. Thank God he hadn't moved a lot of them. I actually was looking at where I was putting it to the uterine horns of AI. Anyway, I thought, bugger this In the next two years, for every AI embryo transfer program I did, I got a different vet to come and actually learnt how to AI off seven different vets.

Speaker 2 50:35

Because the other thing about vets, they all learnt to AI around 1982. We've got this generation of vets now. They're all 60, 70 years old, but they were secretive and they wouldn't show the other vets their technique. So even though they were sort of putting it in the same spot, they all used slightly different techniques of getting in and doing the system. So I actually learnt how to AI off seven different vets and ended up tweaking this system that I could AI a sheep in 25 seconds so it was sedated in and out back in the paddock 30 seconds later.

Speaker 2 51:14

Basically, and since then, basically you need 1,000 sheep to be proficient at AI. Where does a vet get someone that's going to lend them 1,000 sheep to learn on? So since then I've gone you know what. So every year, even this year, I'm going to have three vet students that will be teaching how to AI. I've got the cameras so we can see on a camera. We've got a TV screen with a camera there we go through all of the semen collection, semen assessment, diluting and all of that stuff. So since then, pretty well every vet in eastern Australia under the age of 45 has learned to AI sheet or get their numbers up at Roseville Park. That's great, set up next to us, get your numbers up at Roseville.

Speaker 1 52:01

Park.

Speaker 2 52:01

That's great. Set up next to us, get your numbers up, just go for it, and it's just paying it forward. You know, yeah, and I do all that junior judging stuff just because I guess when I was young there was a guy who taught us that system and that system is just very again structured and it's a system that you use when you're judging. To be honest, a lot of judges these days don't know that system and we're just trying to, I guess, keep that legacy alive, that you know if you're going to do it, there is an etiquette or just a way you can do it quickly, efficiently and neatly and look like you know what you're doing. So, yeah, I love teaching young kids and my kids' friends and vets and AI. When we do start that in a couple of weeks, just a big party, we just have a ball yeah.

On-Farm Research and Tax Incentives

Speaker 1 52:53

Yeah, Excellent On the similar theme. But you're doing a bit of on-farm research that you carried out at Roseville Park through the RDN Tax and Tenant. What does that look like?

Speaker 2 53:04

Yeah, so again, trying to separate yourself from other studs, we all breed rams, we all say they're the best, we all you know, what I'm trying to do is trying to find a unique selling point and I guess for us, what it was was farmers doing research for farmers, and every year we we put out a newsletter and it's about a 50 page newsletter with all the newest information we can find in the industry. So we make it make it more than an educational magazine rather than a spruik magazine, I guess, and that's how, how I try to separate ourselves from other studs. But within that, you know, we've done some really good collaborations with Sydney University, the University of Western Sydney, the MLA Donut Company. First thing we did was we did a bit of drone mapping pasture mapping, which predicted feed-on offer and biomass from flying a drone over paddocks. And then, probably the biggest project that we did was the walk-over weighing using remote technology with a PhD student called Greg Sawyer from Sydney Uni. We did that in conjunction. He was overseen by Luciano Gonzalez, who's the main sort of technical guy within Sydney Uni doing on-farm tech. But what we were doing through the drought in 2018, we were doing walkover weighing so we could track weight gain, daily weight gains, on the ewes in real time and that information was being sent by the internet back to Sydney Uni. So as a sheep walked over a crate at Dubbo, the real-time weight was being sent back to Sydney Uni and then they could apply their algorithms to work out daily weight gains, feed intake, actually the amount of methane. They had an algorithm there that would have been able to predict roughly what methane that sheep released that day as well, and behind that we could sort of track.

Speaker 2 55:11

We did a lot of. We did it with ewe lambs that we joined as well. So we were trying to do minimal monitoring at lambing. So we would have a ewe, say, weighing 68 kilos leading up at lambing. So we would have a ewe, say, weighing 68 kilos leading up to lambing and then she wouldn't present for two days and next time she presented she'd be 60 kilos. So so we could predict that that ewe lambed on that day. Um, so we could put a birth date in against the ewe with a lamb and then then within that we'd bring the lambs in, mark them, put an eid tag in them and then we we'd run them through a pedigree matchmaker type system with it as well. And then we looked at because we've been doing six months shearing for 10 years we looked at metabolism effects on that as they were walking over and how, and that that was a great management tool in the drought. Actually, six months shearing sheep just stayed fatter for longer, can see more lambs, read more lambs, um, things like that.

Speaker 2 56:11

But then my really exciting thing that we really wanted to push out of that information was the epigenetics. Again, I don't know if we've got to explain that to listeners, but we could do another podcast. Yeah, no, we could, but I wanted to see the impact of a lamb born out of a ewe lamb in a drought. So my principle behind that was I would assume that a lamb born out of a ewe lamb in a drought would actually be a better feed converter for the rest of its life. And if you look at EpigenX's history coming out of the Dutch famine, I think, wasn't it, bert? Yeah, yeah, I don't know if you want to talk about that. Have some air time here.

Speaker 1 57:00

No, we're running out of time so we better not.

Speaker 2 57:01

Yeah, so we looked not, but yeah, yeah so we looked in the epigen and expect so yeah, we've done some really cool research. And then we've done the semen predictors work tied. So basically, when we're doing AI we're doing a uterine tone score it's like your visual scores on sheet one to five for uterine tone, an internal condition score. So when we're on site we're looking at the internal condition score a score of one to five and then we're looking at semen timing, semen quality and all of those things and then applying that to research with the Sydney Faculty of Veterinary Science that we're doing, faculty of Veterinary Science that we're doing. Now, within all of that research there's a way, I guess, what we've done.

Speaker 2 57:51

We've employed a specialist tax accountant and he advises us on research and development tax advisory and there's a government incentive called the Government R&D Tax Incentive. Basically that allows a legitimate business with legitimate R&D projects that run to be they can be eligible for a tax offset of up to 43.5% or 18.5% above the company tax rate. So basically, in our reported projects, we have reported in our newsletter, we've got all the documentation from the phd students and that. So we legitimize it and we can quantify it and they're all novel, unique pieces of research that we're doing that aren't being done across industry. We can attribute um some of our expenses. So some of our ar costs, some of our shearing costs because six months shearing some of our scales, some of our labor, some of our AR costs, some of our shearing costs because of six-month shearing some of our scale, some of our labour. We're actually currently running a barber's pole research project here because Dubbo is quite a unique area for barber's pole. Basically, I think it's the worst one in the world.

Speaker 1 58:54

It's a very happy barber's pole country.

Speaker 2 58:56

Yeah, it's hot humid, wet consistently for 12 months of the year. So we're actually doing a barber's pole, so we're getting drenched barber vacs. We're doing genomics testing because we're trying to genetically improve worm resistance. So we can attribute up to $300,000 of our on-farm costs to these research projects and then get the tax refund back from that using this R&D tax incentive. Fantastic, yeah, so it's a win-win.

Speaker 1 59:28

Yeah, it is and yeah, obviously, industry gets because it's all reported. Everyone gets the value out of it and they can find. People can go onto your website and find your newsletters.

Speaker 2 59:36

Yeah, or just Google R&D tax incentive and if anyone does want a really good specialist tax agent I can forward on the guy that we use that's in Bristol.

Speaker 1 59:47

Yeah, yeah, cool, he's a guru. Righto, we better wrap it up. But the last question we ask everyone is what's the last thing you changed your mind about? And you've already told us you're not afraid to change your mind, so it probably wasn't that hard to think of this.

Speaker 2 1:00:00

Yeah, again, I'll make it shorter than needs to be, but we were frustrated with commodity prices on farm in 23, 24, and we were thinking what other commodities are there on this farm that we could sell? There's a wind project going on in the area so we put up a wind detector. We actually probably are the only farm in australia that does not have enough wind for a wind farm, which is probably probably a good thing. Why land survival so high and things like that. But then we're looking at greening australia. We're doing, um, tree plantings around our. We can double fence our boundaries and subdivide up paddocks using the greening austral Australia stuff and sell the carbon credits from that.

Speaker 2 1:00:45

And then we started down the soil carbon project path and to be honest, I thought we were late to the party there getting into the soil carbon sort of sphere. We did spend about $10,000 just doing due diligence and testing on that, and then we've gone out to a few different companies. But to be honest, I've changed my mind. On a soil carbon project at the moment, um, the risk for reward is too great. There's about 1500 different companies that do soil carbon at the moment, but all of them have got something tacked onto the side of it. You know, if you use our company, you've got to use our seed dressing. If you use our company, you've got to use our grazing app. If you use our company, you've got to use our agronomy service. You know, if they're all such good projects, why didn't we tack something on the side? Yeah, some of them.

Speaker 2 1:01:44

They own the the accus and you you don't own the accus all the carbon credits out of it, federal, uh, others, you own 80 and they keep 20. Um, look, we got into it. We paid a lot of money to get in it and we were just about to do baselines, and estimated estimates were about $1.7 million worth of return over 25 years, but you would have to spend $400,000 on wire and water and agronomy, which we're doing anyway. So I think what we're doing on farm is benefiting our soil carbon. We're doing it on our own terms, though. We're doing it on our own terms, though, and we will either go forward or back, which we would do in a project, but we're not locked into a project. But, seriously, if you you divide 1.7 million over 25 years, it's really one labor year. It's not. It's not a lot of money returned annually. You can do it from one cattle trade or something like that, but yeah I've changed my mind on the soil carbon space just at the moment.

Speaker 2 1:02:46

I'm not saying don't do it to anyone, just there's a lot of homework and a lot of research needs to be done if you're going to enter into it, and you know, I might have just chose a couple of companies that weren't a right fit for us, and there's companies out there but, yeah, we started going down that path very fast in June and we put the brakes on. So I've changed my mind at the moment on locking into a soil carbon project.

Speaker 1 1:03:11

Excellent, good time to be acquitted by the sound of it, even though you're in, you've already invested. Putting good money after bad doesn't make a lot of sense.

Speaker 2 1:03:18

No. So who knows, who knows what decision is right or wrong there, but I had to do some solid thinking on what it was, and that's the most current thing I've changed my mind on.

Effective Staff Management in Business

Speaker 1 1:03:30

Yeah, yeah, but it's actually a hard question. People often bounce it back at me and I can't answer it very easily. Yeah, anyway, we better wrap it up there. Matthew, thank you very much for your time. There's been some great insights in there for those listening. And, yeah, it's been. I'm sure there'll be a lot of people who can get out of that and lots of message around managing staff and how to get on and run big businesses and run them efficiently. But, yeah, I really appreciate you coming along and look forward to catching up in person.

Speaker 2 1:03:58

No worries, it was a pleasure, thank you.

Speaker 1 1:04:00

Cheers.