 I'd like to thank Nuffield and AEWI. AEWI is one of the sponsors of this session but I'm not obligated to do this. I did Nuffield about eight or ten years ago now, eight years ago and I was actually sponsored by AEWI so I'm thinking maybe they still might be getting a bit of their money back eight years on. It just gave me an opportunity to go away, get out of my farming business for 16 weeks and rejig and it really was a U-turn in how I approached breeding and managing sheep and things. My topic's innovation to ensure the Marino's long-term viability. I would certainly not a crisis zone or anything like that yet but we saw with those trends, with those Marino used that Jason put up there that we're certainly losing market share and it's a bit of a concern and she's a great product and she's a great risk management tool so we just need to probably redesign her a little bit to make her better. Now before I go into the nitty-gritty, Jason just alluded to it. I really like this visual here and I use it in a lot of the talks that I do. We've got four pillars. We've got the journal type, the furniture type, the management and the environment. That's them. It's not one of them. You try and make that nice big profit route up there on one or two of them. Jason talked about backing their ass into corners or something, not very eloquently, but having that sort of blue. I guarantee this is not about the geneticists and you'll put the genetics and I used to be one of these 10 years ago. I'd say it's all about the genes. It's all about this measurement stuff. Then I go to the show ring and I'd say it's all about the phenotype. It's exactly the way it looks. Forget about all that stuff. That's what it's about and then you talk to an agent or half the blokes at the pub and say it's nothing to do with any of that. It's just what goes down their throats. So there's all this thing. It's a combination of all these things and it's four pillars of equal values. I don't even have this debate in industry any more about what's it about. They need to be strong. They need to work on each of them to have that good profit thing and the better you work on them and the more you rejig them, the bigger profit they can support. Now the other end of the deal is a bit of a foundation, production versus fitness. This is a concept, I guess, and I like to put it across there because it's the foundation for just about everything that we do in our brooding programs and things and it's just a matter of sort of understanding. It's the foundation of a house or in this case, you know, that whole profit sort of system there. And that foundation, unless you've got an understanding about that, unless you do, it's like building a house. You can build the builders of the most unbelievable two or three bed, storied house and things, but if that slab's wrong, you're in a world of pain. So I'm just going to spend a little bit of time on this concept of production versus fitness. If you want a definition of fitness, nothing like the Oxford Dictionary, there's no debate in it then, so that's good. So Oxford Dictionary, fitness, the ability to survive, grow and reproduce in a particular environment, particularly that reproduced part of that's pretty important. But obviously to live, to grow, to do these things, it's a lot of the stuff that Josh talked on. This was old, this is a, I probably shouldn't have updated this slide, it seems extremes of production where you could take out its seams because I'm just convinced it's a fact. Extremes of production impact negative with fitness, it's across all species. This is not something that's unique to merino or something. It's across all species and it's just a fact of life. You look at meat boards, I've touched on a couple of them. You can make them grow like you wouldn't believe, but their legs will collapse. There's hundreds of examples. With merino shoot, the problem seems to be we'll cut the head. It's obviously a big profit driver. It's something that we've focused on for 150 years. There's no criticism that that's the way we've gone because that's a profit drive. It makes more sense if that's what you're selling, that's your product. Let's try and get more on the animal. There's, once again, we love a bit of science and things in the sense that when I did Nuffield, I went to South Africa and spoke to geneticists there. In all their database, there was a bit of a negative correlation between those two things, number of lambs weaned and greasy fluselight or clean fluselight, number of lambs weaned, obviously being a good indicator of fitness, that ability to reproduce. So Argentina, the same deal, the sheep genetics database here, there's a negative correlation. It varies, but it's always that little bit negative. The good news is that's not too scary to sort of deal with. So just very briefly, a couple of research, and there's a lot more sort of depth to this, but with time. One that was done in Australia in the late 1990s, in the early 2000s, they just got the split of mobby years, the high clean fluselight, low clean fluselight mobs ran them through. And there's generally, there's a couple of little exceptions, but generally they run that 10 or 15% sort of difference. So it just backs up that sort of negative correlation. When you get enough field scholarships sponsored by AWI, looking at sheep and you're an Australian, it's a little bit of a challenge to go overseas and find something new and bring it back. At the time, the sheep CRC was in full flight. Genomics was about to come on board like all the really interesting stuff in the sheep world was happening kind of here. So I went and looked at a lot of other species and just got a lot of grounded knowledge in breeding and concepts. And one of the places, and it was one of the best places I went was in Holland, the New Holland genetics, an unbelievably long running performance based dairy breeding scheme. It's been going for 40 or 50 years ever since blub technology and breeding and breeding gaze have been available and things. It had a very interesting conversation with their main geneticists there. That red line there is production, so to speak, sort of highlighted as kilograms of protein, so volume and amount of protein in that milk that they're getting out of their dairy care. And obviously that, like wool cut per head or whatever, was a big part of their index. That's something that drives the profitability of a dairy herd anywhere in the world, but certainly in Holland. It was interesting that during that period of that focusing on that production, the fertility level mirrored it virtually, but going downwards. And that's a little bit scary, you know. And it wasn't as dramatic, as dramatic as this when you actually look at the scale and where it got to, but I like to say it got to the stage there in about 2000 that they had the most unbelievably genetic dairy cows that have ever been on the face of the earth. I just couldn't get them pregnant. And I'm not an expert in dairy, but I think they need to get pregnant and lactate before they can get any milk. So they had these extreme genetics that were really struggling to get pregnant. And there's a lot of cases that Angora goats were trying to drive that micron down really, really low. Same deal. So any single sort of trait is a bit of a problem. The really good news here in 2000, they realised they had a problem. They just readjusted the levers in their breeding program and things and it started going up pretty straight. I'd love to get an updated thing there. I've emailed this guy a couple of times to try and get an update to where he is, but I've never sort of got a response. But the real joy of that, they managed to stop that trend. But if you look at the production, they didn't have to give anything up. That stayed up at a pretty high level. So I guess the South Africans, when I went there, they had a price signal for meat a lot before we did in Australia and they really changed things around differently. And they were really aware of this sort of inverse relationship between groosy fleets weight and number of lambs wound. And so their solution was let's just take the wool away, which is the doonies and sams and stuff. And this is not a breed comparison or whatever. And they'll tell you happily that they, one of their attributes is a cut less wool for this exact reason. I just didn't think the Australian Marino industry would ever buy that sort of concept and things. So it was just really good for me to know there is a way. You can just need to read through the thing. You don't have to give up on the production, in this case the wool cut, that's 150 years of hard work have sort of done. Okay, those four pillars. I'm just going to really briefly hit those sort of things and some innovation that we think we're doing. So in 2007, all I want to do with those graphs here, don't read too much into them. I was hoping, Jason, what I mentioned a little bit more, but fat, growth and muscle are traits that are really important in this maternal space and for a lot of things for the protein in your meat and whatnot. So I just like to show how powerful genetics can be in the sense that in 2007, I did my Nuffield, I learned this, I rejigged, I came home and I started putting a lot of pressure on those traits in the breeding objectives. And it's just to highlight, you know, the genetic trends that we've been managing to achieve since then. And there's an eye muscle, that's a merino, 10-month old sort of merino thing, and it happens. And if you select for something, you will get it. It just works. And it's just this debate about the sheep industry and somehow she's different than every other species on the planet and Bluff doesn't work with her. It's just, I don't really understand where that comes from because it just works. And we had a worker, actually, and we were killing the first time we killed a sheep for the house. It was part of his deal and didn't he eat every about week? He told me it was time to go and kill a few more lambs. It was part of his package. But the very first time we did it, we were just cutting them up. He just went, look at these chops. And because this had been a gradual process for me, and I didn't really realise, you kind of just accept this as the way our sort of chops were. He just said that eye muscle and the loin and the thing is just really quite extraordinary. So it was just an observation. But so it does work funny enough. So those sort of great things are being achieved by ASBVs. We've got sheep genetics. We're the envy of the world, having that resource there and now genomics to sort of add a bit of accuracy in things. So I wasn't going to talk too much about those specifics, but that's one that's dear to my heart. And I'm just going to spend a little bit of time on that because to me it's a bit of keen. It ties in very, very nicely with what Jason was saying. So some research done in 1994 by Dov and others found that milk production was influenced by body reserves that in the EWIT lambing. Now, if there's any press here, stop the press. Front page news. Look at that. That is unbelievable. What a great scientific discovery that was. Good condition and that helps the EWIT produce body reserves in the EWIT for milk production. That paper that I showed before, Hatcher and Atkins, they found that, and Jason certainly alluded to this, that the High Queen Flaysworth used, the problem wasn't getting pregnant. It wasn't their fertility. It was lamb survival. So the only real difference, the joining rates between those two lot of years in that thing were very similar, but we had the problems with those lamb losses. I also found, when I started to sort of strip that back a little bit, that those High Queen Flaysworth used tended to have a lower metabolic energy status and body fatness. So there was that bit of competition that the energy was being partitioned towards the, towards the fleece, maybe a little bit more or something. So they were running at a lower body fatness, lower metabolic energy status. That's important for milk production. These lambs were dying. Like, it's a pretty simple jigsaw puzzle to put together when the pieces start start falling into things. So another way this happened was a, and a really old guy in South Africa sort of did all of that in a very simple thing. He just said, Andrew, if you've got to know anything about this stuff, you've got to understand one thing when you breed sheep, particularly marooners with a wool component, wool production and lamb survivals are competitors, literally competing on that news nutrition and so is our own survival. So that was a bit of a light bulb moment and I sort of approached things like that afterwards. What's it mean commercially? This was an indirect sort of thing, this fat, and it really comes back to Jason. And I really strongly believe there's another component that LifetimeU doesn't quite go into yet. It's not just the food of Alibi and where she's at too and what's the condition score. This is the sort of genetic influence that you can have. This was an experiment that was done by default basically after the thing. When your wardery started, I'm glad that they've dispersed because it doesn't make this difficult to put up. But I bought over my class of suggestions, 80 classed in years, what a great opportunity. South Australia, big framed and everything used and good outcross and classed in and all the rest of it. And I got them and brought them home against my better judgment because I weren't performance tested. So I should have known better. But anyway, I brought them home and after three months of putting them in by security to make sure that everything was right, health and everything else, they just went to disperse through our flock and ran and that a weak condition score four times a year. Lambing, weaning, probably lambing, weaning, joining and things. And so I thought, well, what I've actually done here is an experiment. This was after the user well and truly began only joined them for two years and then got rid of the things. But I thought, well, I've got that data. I just need to break up those two subsets. What does actually using a breeding value for P fat and Y fat actually mean to the commercial thing with regards to all the stuff Jason was talking about with regards to the condition score. And it's virtually one condition score. It would be the only difference where they sort of converge a little bit at the end there. That's because they dropped under what I think is an optimum level coming into lambing of sort of around 3.2. So they only converge there because I had to take them off, manage them different, bring out the feed cart, feed them barley. And so they actually came back up a bit closer there. So on a scale of one to five, you know, that that's a big difference. And that's a free kick. They just sort of track a bit better there. So that's pretty nice. The second one, phenotype after last night, everyone will probably relate to this bottle of wine. Fetotypes, dead set important. And I used to be quite a knocker of the show scene. And I don't really mind it because they're anymore. It's not my cup of tea, but it's a place where the animals can be certainly assessed and structured and things like that. But when you compare it to a bottle of wine, the bottle of wine itself has got a huge part to play. It's got just the vessel. It has to get from the vineyard to the retail store. It's got to have a label so the consumer can say, well, what's in it? It's got to be corked, or now it's a screw top that make it sealed so the wine doesn't go off like it's got a really, really important functional role to play. Once it ticks all those boxes like the sheep, they need to be structurally sound for rams. Test the three T's, testy toes and teeth. You know, they just seem to be really, really basic. But once you've ticked that off, I'm pretty sure most people here that are like drinking wine, what you're really interested in is what's inside that bottle. So you tick off that functionality role that has to be played and you go to the source, which is the genetics. And it's exactly the same with the sheep. There is some innovation to be done. The horns have to go, the wrinkles have to go, cleaning up their faces a little bit for grass seeds. It's got all sorts of correlations with these sort of traits with lamb survival and things. I think it's what is it, Jason? Eight or 10% for every condition score of wrinkle. You knock off them or something along those lines. It's pretty significant. So that's where we sit. And it doesn't matter if you buy the best bottle of Grainge Hermitage, if it's been corked or something, you'll have a big investment, but you'll be disappointed when it comes to drinking that wine. So once you get those things right, it's really, really important. And I just say, and it sounds a little silly, but it's really enlightenment. It's just an understanding that. Look at the animal. Sure, it has to tick all the boxes. It's got to be functional. But once it's done, don't spend too much time and energy and resources on all of that stuff. Because it's really the genetics that will go forward and create that youth look that Jason is talking about. Innovating management. I can run through these pretty quickly. How about this one? Mix farming in a land is land use. I live at Lockhart. Google sheep wheat belt. You'll see a nice big banana shaped thing going from sort of Queensland right through Lockhart, through Victoria to the South Australia. I'm fairly in the middle of it. And there's a lot of people shifting to 100% cropping. So to think that maybe the concept of a mix farming arrangement in the middle of the sheep wheat belt is an innovative idea is something that's a little ironic, but there's a bit of truth to it. Improved pastures. Jason obviously talked again about the importance of turning rainfall in the dry amount of grass and then into those products with climate change, climate variability, climate, whatever it is. We're getting a lot more summer rains. One of the presentations I went to and I'd seen it before, but tropical things coming further south and things like that. So we get big rain events. So I've really given up on that old fashioned pasture curve situation. To be honest, I think it's a very dangerous thing in this day and age to put it up there. But any time of the year with the loosened and improved pastures with the wedge tail wheat grazing crops that winter feed gap that used to really exist in winter with the use of wedge tail as a crop that's now my highest stocking rate period is the middle of winter where traditionally that's been when you should have carried the loose stock because you can just pile them on there. So it's just all these management sort of things that need to be do. Certainly educate yourself, do the lifetime you thing that Jason talked about. Get yourself one of those courses. Just things like that. Adopting technology. We're early adopters and that hasn't really always been a smart idea with regards to electronic tags and trying to get all the different systems that talk. It's just about driven insane at times but we've got there now. But just that an importance of the preg testing, the importance for me to scan to know that fat and muscle so I can pick the animals that are going to take me forward if those traits are important. Just that measuring or whatever and embracing genomics it's just pretty important. And the other one I've done is changing management is six months shearing. I could do a whole hour presentation on that alone. It is extraordinary. That is the biggest signal thing. That and probably the wedge tail weed are the two biggest management things that I've done to change the situation. And it's why those four pillars in a twine so much because I can't do this if I didn't have that genetic base and I put a lot of emphasis on staple length. I've got rid of the wrinkle. I didn't want to lose wool cut. I'm filling up bars with length of staple as opposed to density now. But I needed to do that because you want to aim at 60 mils twice a year. That's really a minimum. We've been lucky enough to get up to 69 in some six month periods and things with good seasons and our flavor and things. But yeah, these things aren't independent. I couldn't introduce this management tool without that genetic component to be able to get me there. Environmental innovation. It's just really... There's two parts to this here. I think there is a lot of innovation given this climate change thing. And what I'm talking about with that condition score thing is my own little hay making. I still obviously make hay and conserve fodder because you'll farm in the driest continent on the planet. So you've got to have a bit of a safety net there. But what I really like about this is those years you saw in that graph with that condition score, they always travel a little bit better. So when things are good, like those wedge tail wheat crops, or if we get seven inches of rain in December, which used to be just rubbish and just everyone would be complaining because you'd have to bring out the boom spray, now that can set up and they'll harvest that themselves which saves me the cost and expense of making that hay and doing the else. Stick it on their back very quickly and then you harvest it back later on. And when you're harvesting that back, you're making money because you're not spending grain to fill up that feed gap and that it really is a powerful thing. So the environment's changing. You've got to be innovating and changed with it. And just you have to really respect the constraints under the environment. This was in the Forken Islands. Once when I was only in Nuffield, I ended up in the Forken Islands, which is a fascinating place. And the little lambs there on your left were the new build things that were going to save the Forken Island sheep flock. They were some doonies. They came in the form of embryos. So they came straight by South Africa to Western Australia to the Forken Islands. The toughest place in the world that I've ever seen to try and run sheep. It is just miserable. So they brought these in. The ones on the right, but they're sort of corridor, comeback-y type of sheep with their natural things. They actually, they dropped those embryos right in the middle of their natural joining so they could get a decent comparison. So it was just no respect, basically, for the environment. Those doonies just did not do. They'd born in Mediterranean semi-warm climates and things like that. They picked up as embryos chucked in there as the new build saved the day. And they didn't grow and they were miserable and they just didn't. And I said, really, these are the sheep that are going to take you forward. So that environmental understanding is pretty important. So really, what's it all mean? And Jason's been through that, but you're really going to get, winning percentage has gone up, not just for myself or clients, and we're just seeing it. And that's ethical. That, Jason didn't touch on it, but those lambs that are dying, if we think mulesing is an issue for the sheep industry, if that 2,000 dead, 2,600 lambs or whatever it is out of 5,000 years really became a well-known world type of a situation, that would be a massive problem, obviously. So it's a good ethical way to operate. You get selection pressure and you get increased sales. The U-mortality at home with the six month shearing and that genetic buffer really, really is just about put our U-mortality to zero, particularly since we don't carry the older years because we've got better lambing percentages and younger years coming through. So we sell them on as brooders for pretty handy money. You cost the down that feed cart, your management, your labor, because they're easy care, pole, less fly strike. All those things are obviously down. You've got increased options. They've got the growth and things that you can get the U-lams up to a joining weight at sort of seven months. So you join your U-lams or join every three years, turning off heavier lambs. These are just little free kicks you get along the way. You do this to make your maternal U better by putting emphasis on growth rates and all of a sudden you're where the lambs are going off two months earlier, which means you've got better stocking rates and all the rest of it. So that's my last slide, which is that first one. It just really sums it up. There's those four pillars. There's a huge scope to make small changes and big changes and innovate in all those four areas. And you need to have that understanding of that relationship between production and fitness. But yes, the Marino U has got a very viable future. She is absolutely a cash cow. And I tell you, get on board because she is a very profitable, useful unit. Thank you.