 Hi, I'm Michael Wurst from Rural Solutions SA and we're here today filming at Glen Tilley's and we're looking at the benefit of pregnancy scanning and how EID can be used to capture data from individual animals. So behind us we have Cousins Marino Services who are actually scanning animals for Glen Tilley at the moment. We are also going to explore ways that we can actually use the data that we are collecting today for Glen to make management decisions to improve his flock and to achieve his goals for his enterprise. Our property here at Hillcrock Grove is 780 hectares, approximately 10 kilometres south east of Tali. We do have quite an area of Hills Drazing which is ideal for our sheep enterprise. It's about 400 hectares is arable for cropping ourselves so about 80 hectares of feed and hay and 80 hectares of grain and the balance is sown by people that are leasing our property. The sheep enterprise is a marino self-replacing flock. We've scaled that down too as we've reduced our business and now we're running 720 marino use. The goals for our sheep I guess we're looking for a really true dual-purpose marino. Looking for high lambing percentages, high growth in our lambs and we're still looking to maintain a good wool cut in that as well and above average wool cut. So on our current figures our sheep are producing 120% lambing, we share twice a year, the use of cutting 7.5 kilos of wool of 19.5 micron wool. Weather lambs at 9 to 10 months of age grow out to 25 kilo carcass so it's a pretty productive package. Now we're getting a good wool return and a good meat return out of our sale sheep. We've been pregnancy scanning for about 15 years continuously, initially we were looking just to remove the dry use and we've found that we really didn't have a high number probably 4% was about 4-5%, maybe it was a normal figure so it really wasn't a big part of our scanning but we realised that we needed to identify the twins and to manage those separately and so that's where our focus has been in recent years is to be scanning for the twins and in the last few years since we've done Lifetime U we've really focused on the nutrition and so now we've lifted up the twinning percentage probably used to be about 50% of our use with twins we're now generally in that 65% of our use conceiving twins. The pressure is on then, I guess we now know there's a lot of fetuses there, that's our challenge is to be able to get as much survival as possible. One of the issues we find of course is as you know what you've got you also know what you're losing and there's a lot of wastage and it's a disappointing thing to have that wastage in your business. Once we've got the singles and the twins allocated well then we manage them separately so obviously the twins will go into the best feed situation and in recent years that's been to go in a confinement and be fed pellets and high quality hay and really focusing on maintaining their condition and we work very hard on maintaining their condition. If we're really tired on feed well perhaps the singles may have to go into containment on a lesser ration and it's based on working out their needs, the ME that they require and we feed them the appropriate rations. Having a high percentage of lambs is a real bonus and the Merino U is quite capable and it's quite possible to get good percentages out of Merino U's so we now are able to class very heavily in our young youths. Last year we only retained 45% of our young youths that was all we needed as a replacement number and so we had a lot more sale stock and that was a very good income razor for us and obviously you're lifting the quality of your stock by classing hard on the selection process you can put a lot of pressure on those sheep and retain your very best sheep. Good day Josh Cousins from Cousins Merino Services we're a small agribusiness based out of Barra South Australia, we provide a number of services across the state and into the parts of western New South Wales and Victoria. One of our services is pregnancy scanning so that's what we'll show you here today. So here we have, we're using the panel reader and the scale head to electronically what record the information here with today we have the Gallagher scale head but we also use TrueTest, how it works is the sheep will come into the crate, there's a panel reader on the other side which will recognise the electronic ear tag which will come through which will be recorded on the scale head which is connected up to the IV scan which is the ultrasound that we are using. From there I'll be able to select if she has a single twin or if she's dry. So from there that will be imported straight into the Gallagher scale head, that will be recorded for lifetime data and you can take that off of there at whatever point by either emailing it directly off your phone or by plugging a USB. So today we're using a panel reader hooked straight into the scale head straight into the IV scan which this is probably the quickest and best way of recording the data but this only works efficiently if ever you or with a lot like most of you use have tags in them. If you have a number of use that don't have tags the reader obviously will not read it and when I press what is however number of lamps is inside the you it will change the you that's already been released so it can vary your results a bit. So if there's only a number of use that they have an electronic tag in it the best way is to use a stick reader. So you scan the tag and you have set up on your reader to set it as a dryer single or a multi-web unit. So here we're using an IV scan which is just an ultrasound, basic of an ultrasound is you have the probe so the ultrasound will send sound waves out of the probe and then we'll turn the signal back into the probe. So this only works if you have connection on the skin if you have any air in between the probe and the skin it'll break the connection you won't get that picture that is why I'm just using some water here which I'm spraying on with a just a whale pump so that way I can get that connection into the skin and which will give you the picture up on the screen. So as the you comes into the cradle the panel reader will recognise the radio frequency on the ear tag the scale head will recognise that and I'll put the probe on the bare breach underneath the U there and I'll scan through I'll see she only has one lamb in her I'll press my counter which goes straight into the scale head and then I'll let her out. So for today we're only drafting one way we're drafting the drives off at other places you can draw three ways which allows you not to mark them but unfortunately we haven't been able to set that up today so he's coming in here she's got twins so when I'm scanning here I'm either looking for two heads or two bodies so she's got a head there body there head there and another body there so I'll take my chances if you see two heads or two bodies that that's going to be two lambs another one's coming there she's got another set of twins in a nice set there and there and you can see those circle don't looking things that codleadens so that's what surrounds the fetus and that's what all the blood vessels flow through so generally if you see a lot of codleadens you can tell it's going to be a healthy lamb. With the EOD tags by recording that we're then in a position where after perhaps a two or three years you're able to then say well these particular youths are consistently producing twin lambs so we then are able to if we choose to use those youths continue to use those youths and and put aside the other youths we may sell them or whatever choice we have but it certainly gives you the opportunity to make better utilization of your better stock. I'd like to thank Glen and Josh for allowing us to come down and for their technical input into today's video.