Head Shepherd

What limits ewe productivity in current sheep systems? Our guest this week, Tara Dwyer is breeding manager at Headwaters Genetics and a farm manager within the Lone Star Farms group. Her work covers stud breeding, commercial supply chains, and large-scale sheep systems, and in amongst all of that, she found time to do a Kellogg report, "A New Fleece on Life: How the Sheep Farming Sector in Aotearoa Can Halt Terminal Decline to Secure a Sustainable and More Secure Future" Starting with her "da...

Gus Rose shares the recent results from the 'Genetics of foot health in Merinos' project, which is looking at footrot and foot structure in sheep in Australia. Gus shares what the data shows on the heritability of foot shape and its relationship with footrot, as well as other foot structure traits. Gus Rose explains how the dataset is being built, which traits are proving to be correlated, and where the current limits sit. Gus and Mark discuss the project's future and the significance o...

On this week's episode, Tim Gole shares how sheep farmers can increase their profits by shifting from responding to problems to preventing them in the first place. Tim runs ForFlocksSake, a vet-based sheep consultancy company. After a lightbulb moment during the drought, Tim became a self-confessed sheep fanatic. With both Tim and Mark clearly in their element, they spend nearly an hour talking all things sheep. They discuss lifetime ewe programs, scanning strategies, the use of genetics to m...

What do the genetics of tail length and the genetics of semen quality have in common? Not much, except that our guest, Marnie Hodge, Sheep Genetics Senior Development Officer, has researched them both. Tail length is moderately to highly heritable, but in her research, Marnie found that measuring tail length in centimetres versus a scored system gives you far more accuracy and picks up significantly more genetic variation, which means faster rates of genetic gain if you're selecting for it. B...

How simple rotations and tight feed management lift whole farm performance. Mark chats with Bevan Ravenhill, WA General Manager for Lawson Angus WA, to talk about what really drives a productive grazing business. Bevan grew up on a dairy farm, and that early training in grass, rotation, and pressure has shaped the way he now runs sheep and beef across a mixed enterprise. Bevan explains how a simple rotation, tight feed management and a focus on leaf stage have transformed grass utilisat...