 We're here today at Francis and Jack England's property, Shepherd's Hill, and Jack's going to talk to us today about his autodraft, the EID and his sheep and the management decisions he's using them for, and he'll also show his bulk sheep handler and how that makes life easier when handling sheep in the yards. So today we're just going to just show you the ropes on how we use a Murray sheep handler. It's a bulk sheep handler. It makes your life a lot easier just for lifting the sheep up off the ground. Once their feet are off the ground, they're very pliable. We can do what you want with them. It's very useful. Stress-free on the stalks, stress-free on us, stress-free on the dogs. We're putting some neck tags on just so we can mother up lambs with each of the mums and then we can get that information through to sheep genetics along with the sire that we've artificially inseminated into each of them. Then we're going to show you the use of a Gallagher sheep autodraft there. It's an old chestnut. It's probably about 15 years old and it's still going. It's an old scale head. It works well just because I'm using it in conjunction with an Excel database and just copying the file straight through that. We've had the autodrafter, I think probably about 12 or 15 years now and gone are the days where we used to have Grant Woods from JBS Border Town come on out and he'd take the drafter and they'd wear any penalties for any of the sheep that are underweight or didn't make their target specs. So since then it necessitated us to use an autodrafter because JBS they took over from there and they stick to their grids. So essentially what we can do is just make sure that we hit that grid and not get any losses. This here is the component tree that scans the EID tag and from there it talks back to the monitor that I've got here and tells me which way that I've already got predefined which drafting gate that I want them to go out to. Generally when we're doing most commercial stuff we want to capture the data weights relative to the EID tag on each of the animals so I can go back to the computer afterwards compile that information to help me generate my my ranking indexes for all my sheep. If you're not confident in doing that yourself you can capture the data. There are plenty of software providers or independent consultants that help you develop this information. So again as each of the sheep come along here and it scans the RFID tag number on the year and then the software program is choosing which way they need to go whether they're each of the different sidelines. So this one here doesn't actually have a tag so I have to do a manual override because at the moment it's set to scan the EIDs and you don't actually have to do this you can turn the EID function off and just draft based on your weight parameters alone so you can put your heavies, mediings and lights. This is only a three-way auto drafter you can either choose the drafter or they can run straight ahead. So commercially speaking when we're weighing by ourselves like some crossbred lambs when they're coming around through here and doing the way in a three-way auto drafter one person we're expecting around about that 450 sometimes 500 an hour just because we don't have someone really feeding them into the crate and almost filling out the pens. When you've got two or three people here really pushing them in you can do that six, seven hundred an hour by our reports only some of the pre-away guys, the Pratley Scales they can really get up to that eight hundred, nine hundred when they're weighing and drafting that we chose to go with the Gallagher because I knew a few people hadn't seen that in action and it worked really well and it serves our purposes. What we've done we've come back in from the shape yards we've got the auto drafter now I'm about to change my draft lists so I can swap that over using the animal performance software and most of the stuff all the data that we collect is all through spreadsheets I'll put it on Excel and do all the data sorting from there. This is some of the data that we collect on for each of the individual animals so here we've scanned her electronic ID and she was born from a red tag that was a four-year-old and a single birth type so this this was a born a single so I can only going to compare each of these single shape with other single shape when I go through my index that I developed for each of them some of the other information we've got we've got your fiber diameter your standard deviation of your fiber diameter coefficient of variation your comfort factor curvature of the fiber your spinning fineness your greasy fleece weight you yield and then a calculated clean fleece weight and a body weight for each of these animals and at crutching time and a yielding age whenever we go through we give them a DAG score as well for all the animals that comes through so anything that's got a DAG score of three well that's going to get joined to a pole dorsal because we don't want to keep breeding those traits so once we've got the actual index of all the animals it's easy for me to copy all of those RFID tag numbers but after I've readjusted them sorted them from the highest index all the way down we'll scroll to the bottom so we've gone from an index of 120 down to around about your 71 so these animals here they're far inferior I still retain them from them I heard or I can sell them if I want to and join them to a pole dorsal so I'm culling 25% of the animals that were born as a single and I'm retaining culling 15% only of the animals that are born as a twin I'm doing that because twins obviously more desirable to have more limbs on the ground when you come into your spring so you get better use of your of your pasture growth curve when your feed is cheap in the spring might be 20 or 30 dollars a ton of your feed relative to a supplementary feed of 400 dollars a ton I much prefer to have more mouths born on the ground when my I'm growing the most amount of feed to get the best pasture utilization so now that we've discussed the commercial herd let's get back into the stud side of things with the auto-drafter that we're using at the moment so we've drafted in the the initial draft into singles twins and and the use that didn't conceive our artificial insemination and so we call them into the backup profile we've sent them through the drafter they've been split up and now I've just deleted the draft list off the the monitor the Gallagher monitor and now I want to put in the second draft which split each of them into the individual sirens these are each of the animals relative to the the EID information and just go back over to the the the device and we'll just see what's on there we'll go into the draft list and I've called this one draft number two and there's 128 animals so we click on this in this here and we we put it copy it over to the to the way scale head and then once that's done we can disconnect it and go and plug it straight in and run the animals through the auto-drafter and it'll do the job for us this way scale by Gallagher is quite a cheap and simple basic unit the strength of it is is using it with Excel databases the new TSI units they're really good you can actually go through if you want to draft by Si or any of these different parameters it's easy just to plug it into your auto-drafter choose that way or over at the way scale and off you go but as I'm reasonably competent and confident with what I do with spreadsheets I just get this information I put it into a draft list on my computer plug it into the the way scale head and then I go and put it into the auto-drafter and off we go once you've had it go and they've shown you once you like wow this is actually not that hard it's quite easy to do can really help you pick up your bottom line performance while you might not get a return of value like doing what I'm doing for the first year because it costs you let's just say a dollar fifty or two dollars to put the tags in four dollars to capture that the fleece data by the time you collect it pull it off that includes the labor and the processing costs then when you send that information away you come back so you've got that data in that first year it's the second and third and fourth and fifth year of the animals when you actually retaining your better producing use selling off the ones that perform performing or joining them to a pole dorset and and also that information doesn't really take into the effect that the overall benefits from year in year out because it's progressively going to get better and better and conservatively after about five or six years are used here it should return me around about thirty dollars per head for each of the animal I collect this this data information for so it's quite worthwhile we've been using RFID now for about sort of five or six years and our sheep herd and and probably around about oh everyone's compulsory for about 15 years in in cattle and we just got to make use of this this information gathering source that that's in there is yeah for the benefit rather than just for animal trace ability I'd like to thank Jack and Francis England for sharing their farm business today and how they're using technology within their sheep enterprise