EFFICIENCY BCS
Condition major profit driver BY: RUSSELL PRIEST
E
we body condition is the most powerful profit driver in a sheep production system and unlike many objective measurements taken on sheep is cheap to assess, requiring only a farmer's valuable time. That’s the message delivered by former BakerAg consultant and now full-time farmer Sully Alsop at a Beef + Lamb NZ Farming for Profit seminar held in Manawatu recently. It influences the three main profit drivers – kilograms of lamb weaned/ha, weaning weight/lamb and number of lambs weaned/ ha. “If there is one thing that drives sheep production more than anything else it is ewe condition,” Sully said. Affected are ewe fertility, fecundity, mothering and milking ability (colostrum production and milk yield), death rate, weaning weight as well as lamb birth weight, survival, growth rate and weaning weight. All these potentially influence profit
Sully Alsop highlights the finer points of body conditioning scoring.
in a sheep production system. Sully and his wife Katie run two farms in the Wairarapa (one summer-dry and the other more elevated and colder with a higher rainfall). They are strong advocates and users of condition scoring. “There are a million good reasons why you want to get into condition scoring and understanding what it does,” Sully said. BC scoring allows farmers to generate more profit from the same amount of feed or use less feed by allocating it to those ewes that will give the best return. It identifies those lighter ewes that need preferential feeding, those ewes that need maintaining and those that should be culled because they have not responded to better feeding.
“Using an average BCS for a flock can be misleading because it doesn’t give a breakdown of the numbers of ewes within each BCS class hence doesn’t enable a farmer to apportion feed to the class that gives the best economic response,” says Professor Paul Kenyon from Massey University. “For example: Two farmers can have ewe flocks with an average BCS of 3. Farmer 1’s ewes may all have a BCS of 3 and farmer 2 may have 50% of ewes with a BCS of 2 and 50% a BCS of 4. Farmer 1 only needs to feed his ewes maintenance while Farmer 2 has a significantly higher feed requirement if he is to achieve similar results to Farmer 1 because of the extra feed he has to supply to the 50% of his ewes with a BCS of 2 and
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