 Thanks for having me as part of your day. Today I'm presenting on sheep electronic identification and what's in it for you. Clearly we're doing it under different circumstances at the moment given the Victorian COVID situation. Hopefully I'll get over to South Australia soon. But, let's get on with the presentation. I just want to start with one simple question. And that is, what excites you? What excites you about our industry? If I bought a 15 year old kid in, sat them down in front of you and said, tell them everything that excites you about the industry. What would it be? What's the progress we've made as an industry? Now if I want to poke fun at our industry, and perhaps I can because it's mine too, I can point out the fact that we started out with a hand piece that looks like this. And now we've got blue ones, red ones and yellow ones. And if that's a sign of our progress, that really frustrates me. Now I get told all the time that farmers won't change. I think that's crap. I wouldn't have a job if that was the case. The way I can prove it is if I said to all of you, who wants to be better? Who wants to be better tomorrow than you were yesterday, better next week than you were last week, better next year than you were last year? I know what the answer is going to be. We all want to be better. And the only way that you can be better is to change. If we keep doing things the same way we've always done them, we'll keep getting the same results we've always got. So the only way we can be better is to change. So what is it that we can adopt? Now I'm here to talk to you about one specific technology, that's electronic ID. We know that all of the sheep wandering around in our paddocks have a story to tell us. They have a history. There's a whole lot of stuff that they've done we don't know about because we don't track it against the individual animal. Now I want to expand that a bit further. And I want to introduce this concept of population dynamics. Within any population there's a bell shaped curve. Poor performers, average performers, superior performers. Now if we look at the traditional mob based system, while we are trying to kick out some culls and this depends heavily on what sort of traits we're looking at, ultimately what we end up with is that same variation within each age group, all the way through. If we switch over to an individual animal selection system where we're tracking individual performance, our aim is to try and identify those poor performers as early as we possibly can and kick them out. Now how early we can identify them is going to be heavily dependent upon the trait, the individual trait that we're selecting on and how early we can record enough information. And then essentially what we end up with is the average and the superior performers retained within the flock. Now the one I really want to point out is the fact that we've been kicking some of our best genetics out simply because they have a birthday. Some of our old use, and it might only be a small portion of them, and they do need to be still fit and healthy with good teeth, good feet, all those things, but some of them are some of the best genetics on your whole farm. Just take one example. If you're kicking dry use out at scanning every year, the fact that she's still there as a six year old means she's done a bloody good job. So maybe we need to be giving a little bit more credit to some of our older girls who are actually some of the best performers on the whole farm. And so that's the key difference. Under a traditional mob based system, we're tending to keep some of that variation in each age group. Under the individual system where we're tracking individual performance year in, year out, we're kicking out the poor performers or the passengers in the system as early as we can and we're capitalising on those best performers. All we're doing is grabbing that bell shaped curve and we're giving it a shove. We'll change the shape of it but it's still there. So if at some point in the future you need to cull some more sheep, it's a drought situation, you've still got a bell shaped curve, you can still come and take another slice off the back end of it. And to give you an idea of what makes up that bell shaped curve, the sheep CRC did some work a few years ago looking at the variation in performance within commercial flock. So within a commercial group of marinos, they found that the top 25% of views were cutting $82 worth of wool. The average for the group of animals was only $54 worth of wool. And so that tells us that the bottom 25% weren't doing a hell of a lot. They were cutting $37 worth of wool. And if all we ever look at is the average, we'll only ever see the $54. They also looked at the fertility of the flock or the lumber of lambs weaned. Again this is across marinos, commercial marinos. And in a group of commercial marinos they found the top 25% were weaning 143% lambs. The average, and again this is the bit that we only ever see, the average was 86%. And that tells us that the bottom 25% were doing stuff all. 28% lambs marked. And all we ever see is the average because that tends to be all we ever follow. And one of the other reasons that that bell shaped curve is important and being able to track individuals is the fact that the humble old weather has gone missing from our system. We don't have them anymore. They were the great release valve of our industry. No one ever gets emotionally attached to weathers. And so it's a really simple and early decision. Pressure comes on, offload the weathers. When we're a full breeding system we don't have that same luxury because we tend to be emotionally attached to use. And we will hesitate. We don't make that same decision. Until you know that they're not as good as the rest of your sheep. As soon as you can identify that those aren't as good as the rest of your sheep it makes it a simple decision. Pressure comes on, let's get rid of that bottom 10%. Let's get rid of the bottom 20%. Whatever it might be, whatever the situation determines you can offload sheep and feel really good about it because your flock is better tomorrow than it was yesterday simply because we took out that bottom end of those sheep. So we can do all of this without electronic ID. Why do we need EID? Put it simply, it's more accurate, it's easier, it's faster and most importantly all of those three things make it more likely to happen. So what should we be collecting? I'm going to start really broad here. Everything costs you money. Every piece of data you collect is going to cost you money in some small or large way. It's either going to be in labour or it's going to be in time or equipment. Ultimately there's no point in collecting it unless you're actually going to use it. Too often I've had people say to me you should see the data we've collected I've got all these spreadsheets and I say to them what are you going to do with it? And they say I don't know but it's going to be good and nothing ever happens with it. We can't have that. You can collect anything you like. Objective measurements, subjective assessments, anything. You can record it against the individual. If you want to record the eye colour of your use, go for it. The challenge is that the more data you collect the more difficult it is to manage and the less likely you are to ever actually use it. And as we said at the start, every bit of data costs you money and there's no point in collecting it unless you're going to use it. So only ever collect data that's going to add value to your enterprise. So what are we looking at? There is an almost endless list of things that you can collect. Individual body weights, fleece weights, fleece testing, pregnancy statuses, birth statuses and right through to pedigree, which I want to talk about as a separate issue. But first of all I just want to show you one of the basic concepts that can allow you to step into EID without having to go and buy a whole lot of equipment. And that's this concept that when you order your tags you receive a bucket file. And to put it simply, what a bucket file is, your tags have a physical number printed on the outside of them and when you read them with your stick reader or with a panel reader it produces an electronic number. They are two different numbers. What the bucket file does, essentially it's just a spreadsheet that matches those two numbers up together for you. And that's a really useful tool for you because it means you can actually read or use the visual numbers on the outside of the tags and correlate that back to an RFID number or the electronic number. So I'm going to show you how we can simply do that. The easiest way is you track the sequence of those tags when you put them in at landmarking. So if you have ordered tags and you've got them numbered from 1 to 2,500 all we need to know is that tag 1 to 350 went into twins and it might even be twins by a particular sire or sire group. You write that down in your notebook. You go back to your bucket file and then you can actually record that against their electronic number. Their electronic tag number. So that you forever got that birth status or sire or any other information you want to record that's the simple wins that we can get without actually even owning any equipment. I'm going to say to you it's not perfectly simple because there's always too many things going on around the marking cradle and often we can get distracted. So you have to concentrate to make sure that you write down which tags went into which mob. Other than that, it's pretty straightforward. We can do simple recording like that that actually requires no equipment in the first instance, right through to the more complex and the more complex are things like pedigree matchmaker. Now pedigree matchmaker is where we have a panel reader set up out in the paddock with a single file entrance so that the sheep have to walk past the panel reader on their way to water or grain or some other retractant. We have tags in the use, tags in the lambs and the panel reader records all that information of who's walking past. We put it through some software and that estimates who belongs to who. It's not simple to do sometimes particularly training the sheep to walk through but it can be quite effective. My honest answer is it will get replaced as some of these newer technologies with proximity tags and things come into play and they offer us that a simpler solution to recording pedigree. But I want to show you why pedigree can be really useful in a commercial sense. And this is this concept of little weight weaned. Imagine if we could tell you that those lambs were read by that you and they weighed this much. What we use is pedigree matchmaker to tell us that the lambs belong to her. We weigh the lambs around weaning, 85 to 100 days and then we calculate what the little weight was that she weaned. In other words, how many kilos did that you produce for us? And that gives us the ability to select on a range of different things. It's fertility, number of lambs born, survival, lactation, lamb growth. It's called a composite trait selection because there's multiple traits that we're able to apply selection pressure on at once. And this is what it looks like. So every one of these dots is a U from one of our clients. These lambs were weaned and weighed at 85 days. Every one of those is a dot, is a U and up the left-hand side shows you how many kilos you weaned. Now you'll see there's a gap through the middle of that graph. That's the difference between singles and twins. So next time someone says to you, I want one good single. I always want one good single. Don't need twins. It's crap. One single can never compete with twins. And if you look above that 80 kilo line, they're pretty much all triplets. Because the weight of triplet lambs is so much more advanced than the weight we're ever going to get out of singles or twins when you combine the animals together as a combined little weight. Singles can't compete with twins, twins can't compete with triplets. Now clearly there's some complications in lamb survival and things that we need to consider, but that's in terms of the actual competition, they can't compete. If we convert that over to money, this is what it looks like. We've got used that have read nothing. Therefore they've cost us money. $0 earned and we've spent money and labor on them. At the same time we've got used that have weaned over $250. Plenty of them over $200 and a lot over $150 worth of lamb. And that's at pretty conservative pricing. So we ask the question, what are these guys doing there? Do we need them in our system? Now this one's a bit more complex, but this graph's really important because it shows us just how it's possible for us to make mistakes if we don't understand the context of some of our culling decisions. So this one, I'll just explain it so bear with me. We've got you live weight across the bottom and we've got the kilograms of lamb that they weaned up the side. The color of the dot indicates the condition score of the animal. Now if you focus on the bottom right-hand corner of the graph you're going to find some heavy use that haven't weaned much lamb and they're in really high condition scores. Now if we don't know what they've actually produced for us and we need to make some culling decisions after weaning, as those use run up the race and you're on the drafting gate, they are going to look magnificent. They'll be big and fat and shiny and they're big and fat and shiny because they've done stuff all. And this is how we can make mistakes when we don't have enough information on the top left-hand corner of the graph. We've got some use there that are lighter, they're lighter in condition, they're lighter in live weight but they've produced some serious amounts of lamb. And those ones mightn't look that impressive as they come down the race at you after weaning but they're the hard workers, they're the ones that have actually put in the effort. And the same thing can happen if you're making decisions on any marinos or any wool traits, any of these things, just knowing whether something's born as a twin can significantly influence the outcomes. So we should only be comparing twins with twins. We should only be comparing singles with singles on a whole lot of these traits, particularly wool traits and things. Otherwise what you'll do is you'll constantly select single-born lambs and over a long period of time you will hurt fertility. So again, we ask this question, should these sheep be there? Ultimately, I like to ask the question of why. Why are we doing it in the first place? Can you imagine a dairy farmer milking cows morning and night and not paying any attention to how much milk went into the vat? They just wouldn't do it. For those of you that are mixed farmers, imagine sowing the farm down, harvesting the crop and just paying no attention to where it came from, which paddocks did what? Now we want to know where in the paddock it came from. Why aren't we doing the same thing in sheep? You can't improve what you don't measure, but the collection of data is a complete waste of time and money unless you actually use it. And so that's why we need to talk about data management. It is the most important part of your system because if you don't get it right, the data you collect is of very little use. There is designated software that can or dedicated software that can help you get the most out of your EOD system. I would always ask the question, do you need to manage it yourself? If you're going to be managing your data at night when you're tired, you've already had a beer, that's not the time to manage your data. If you don't have the skills, don't manage your data. If you're not interested in it, don't manage your own data. There are people that can do that for you. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on equipment because you'll have plenty of people locally that can talk to you. All I really want to point out is the explosion of equipment we've had over the last 10 years. It's so much more user friendly than it's ever been before and we have a huge range available to us. When it comes to auto drafters I will just point out that the lead-up that you use is just as important as the piece of equipment itself and that goes also for sheep handlers. The other thing I've just mentioned on sheep handlers is the fact that quite a few people over my time have justified buying one because they're going to crutch their use through it and that's going to help pay for it. They get about 150 years into it and they wouldn't decide that was a terrible idea because even if you're quite good at crutching and quite quick, there's still only one of you going. It's nothing like having three or four people dragging them over the board and so it just takes a long time. There are some other ideas other products out there variable rate drench guns, vaccination guns in other words they pick up the weight from the handler as they're standing in the handler and adjust the dosage for you. Great concept. They are quite expensive if you're looking for a little cheats way of doing it. Hang three drench guns above your handler all set at different dose rates grab the right one for the weight of the animal that's standing in front of you. I always like to point out there are service providers so a lot of your preg scanners they can record pregnancy status for you as they're going and ultimately I would say just check out what contractors might be available to you. Do you need to own your own equipment? How often are you actually going to use it? Do you need to manage your own data? Again we've made that point pretty strongly and just check are there contractors in your area. Ultimately start with the basics. You don't need to run out and spend a whole lot of money and implement a whole lot of changes all at once. Just start with some basics. This is just a really quick example this is a thousand merino weaners that were fleece tested, fleece weighed then the bottom 20% were all culled out and the whole job was done using contractors. These were some older farmers who had no interest in learning how to use the technology all they wanted to do was get the outcome and so they used contractors to complete the whole thing. The only thing they did differently was they put in a different target landmarking. And just finally what about our farm? There are hook tracking systems coming into a range of processing plants in Victoria and into South Australia and this is going to give us a totally different look at what we're producing. They're going to give us feedback on hot standard carcass weights for individual animals. We'll get some information back on retain and trimming so if you sell a lamb that's 45 kilos but it only dresses out at 17 kilos or 14 kilos we want to know what happened to it and is there something we could have done better on farm to stop that trimming from happening. Other general health information and long term we'll start looking at potentially seeing dressing percentage and I would say definitely seeing DEXA come into play and that's going to give us the opportunity to predict lean meat yield and potentially see a new value based payment system and this is what it looks like. So a DEXA unit can produce an x-ray image of the carcass from a processing sense it allows robots to be able to break that carcass down by using precision cutting. From your point of view it allows the estimation of lean meat yield quite accurately and so at some point we will see a change in our payment system where rather than just being paid on carcass weight you will get paid on lean meat yield. Now if we only go selecting for lean meat yield we have the potential to damage our meat eating quality traits. So there are tests underway at the moment of different pieces of equipment to be able to estimate meat eating quality traits as well. And in combination that's when we will see at some point in the future a value based payment system. So I ask you again what excites you about our industry? I think it's pretty straight forward. If you aren't excited about the sheep industry right now then you're never going to be. We are in a golden era where equipment and technology is coming towards us to give us greater control of the outcomes in front of us it also gives us the best possible opportunity for your operation to be as profitable and productive as it can possibly be. It's not the tools though it's never going to be the tools that make you money. EID is not a silver bullet putting tags in isn't going to make you money. Decisions make you money not equipment and tools. Ultimately it comes down to you and your decision making. Whenever I'm working with clients we have the same saying if we do well today we can do better tomorrow. Thanks very much.