 I would like to welcome our fair speaker for today, Nathan Scott from Achieve Ag Solutions. He will be speaking to us about making every moment count the one percenters that are worth so much to you and your livestock business. Nathan has a background in prime lamb marino wool and beef production and a passion for improving the productivity and profitability of livestock enterprises. He works with producers to increase conception rates, improve lamb survival, lift growth rates and hone overall management. Nathan provides advice to individual clients, works with a large number of producer groups, is a keynote speaker at industry events like today and is involved with various industry projects. He's based in Inverley in Victoria. Nathan's talk today is about the attention to detail. Howard is often the little things that make the difference between good managers and great managers. I'd like to welcome Nathan. Thank you very much. Thanks, Emily. So, as Emily said, I'm here to talk to you about what are the one percenters? The one thing that I get asked all the time with our clients is, what do the really good producers do that's different? We've got a range of clients, so those that are really pushing hard and looking for that absolute edge in terms of what they're producing, we've got others that are still making their way. But the question we get asked all the time is, what do they do different? Those really good producers, what do they do different? And it isn't any one thing. There is no silver bullet. There is no one single thing that we can go and buy. There isn't an answer that we can pay for that's going to make that difference. The reality is, how long have you got? What do they do different? It's a whole lot of little things. So I just want to cover up on some of those things. And some of the little things and some of the attention to detail that makes a difference. What they really do is they cross their T's and they dot their I's. That's the difference between the really good producers and the good to average producers. So just in terms of how you think about your production system, I just want you to imagine, imagine if you had a crystal ball. Imagine if you could predict the future. How much difference would that make to your farming enterprise? If we could actually predict the future. One of the problems with agriculture is there's so much that we rely on. How much falls from the sky? We can't predict all of the future. But what I want to show you is that we can actually predict a huge amount of the future. And it's actually your job, as livestock managers, as farmers, it's your job to predict the future. It's your job to see what's likely to come, see what the likely outcomes are likely to be and change those outcomes or plan for those outcomes. So that is your job. So I want to kick off with the first one and you're going to hear more from the other speakers today on some of these topics. I just want to sow the seed. The first one I want you to think about is the fact that we can actually predict animal performance. We can really accurately predict animal performance. So we talk about having a crystal ball. How can we predict the future? We can predict animal performance by using ASBVs, if you're in sheep. Breed plan if we're talking cattle. We have the ability to predict the likely performance of the future. The likely performance of an animal based on all of that data that's captured. The huge databases that sit behind the animal performance that we're going to see in the future. It's a prediction of those progenies' performance. So what happens is we often get caught up, though. We get caught between the now and the future. The now is the animal that stands in front of us. The future is the bag of genes. If you want to think about it a different way, we've got the visual assessment and we've got the breeding values. We've got a delivery unit, we spend a whole lot of time standing over and we spend a lot of time on it and don't get me wrong, that's bloody important, but we've got the bag of genes. So you're going to hear from Ferg later today. The thing that frustrates me the most in this industry is we get caught in an argument between visual assessment and breeding values. And you can't have one without the other. If you just rely on visual assessment, you're missing out on the prediction of the future. You miss out on the prediction of the future performance of the progeny. If we just use figures, you're potentially buying an animal that can't actually do what you're wanting it to do. Is the delivery unit going to be good enough? Are some of those visual traits that we can see, are you getting enough assessment? We have the ability to predict the future with breeding values, we have the ability to assess the delivery unit visually. You can't have one without the other. What I get frustrated about is our industry seems to get caught up in an argument about which one are you in, which side are you on. That's not what the argument is at all. It's whether we're using all of the tools that are available to us. And that doesn't matter whether we're talking cattle or sheep, doesn't matter whether we're talking marinos, crossbreds or composites. The other thing is, and this is something that I really don't think we do enough of, is we can actually predict his ability to work. That ram or that bull. You can have a look at the animal and predict whether he's ready or not, whether he's physically able to do the job. The problem is often we're looking at rams at 60 Ks an hour as we drive down the driveway. We're looking at bulls at 60 Ks an hour. Our assessment of them is, yep, they've all got four legs pointing towards the ground. They look pretty good and they're pretty healthy. What I want you to be able to do, or what we really employ you to do is to actually spend more time. Well in advance of joining is to make sure that they are physically fit and able and ready to do the work. So we got to get our hands dirty. We have to actually get in there. Now, if you're not confident doing this, then get a vet to do it. But I want you to be able to understand how to do it yourself as well. Now what we would normally do in this sort of scenario is someone would put up a bit of the rams anatomy for you. Give you an anatomy lesson in terms of the rams reproductive or the bulls reproductive organs. What I want to do is simplify it for you. And this is what we use with our clients because this is how you can visualize what you're feeling. So when we go to do a ram inspection or a bull inspection, the basic anatomy of the animal is you're looking for size. So you can measure the scrotal circumference. But in rough terms, you're looking for about two beer cans. You're going to have a couple of what feels like electrical cables leading down to the head of the epididymus. That feels like two golf balls. The half of a golf ball on top of a beer can. You feel that if they feel pretty much the same and we've got good symmetry there, you feel your way down. You're feeling for a firmness in them. So this is the bit that doesn't feel like a beer can. It's like a half tensed bicep. So if you half tense your bicep and feel that, that's the sort of firmness that you're looking for. If they're too soft or they're too hard, then we've got an issue. You work your way down to the bottom and you get to the tail of the epididymus. Again, bit like half a golf ball down the bottom. I can show you all the pictures of an anatomy lesson and you won't remember it. I can show you two beer cans with half a golf ball stuck on either end of it. And hopefully that helps you remember that's what we're feeling for. So we'll have these floating around. If you want to play with my balls later on, you can. So we can predict that. If we're going to have rams, we're going to have balls, we get one crack every year at it. If we're going to have them, you need to make sure that they're actually physically ready and able to work. So that's the testicle component of it. It's also the teeth, it's the toes, so checking their feet, making sure that they're actually right, tipping them over and actually checking the urethral function, the penis, making sure that they're actually ready to go. It's an important process. We get one crack every year. Let's make sure that we're going to do it properly. We can also predict pasture quality. So what I'm aiming for here and what I want you to remember is that I hate surprises. So we shouldn't, in our management, in our management of our livestock operation, we should not be getting surprises. And that's our aim is to try and reduce the number of surprises we get each year. When it comes to pasture production, we know and it doesn't matter what part of the country we're in, the dates along the bottom here do change based on your season. But we all follow the same basic pattern. And that is we start the year whenever it eventually rains and the year kicks off. We start in a period of time where we've got high quality but not enough feed. We then hit a phase which is our real sweet spot. It's where we've got high quality feed and we've got plenty of it. That's great. It's a bit of a limited window but we do get that window each year. The one that brings most people unstuck is when our feed quality starts to drop off. Our digestibility starts to fall away and we lose some of that quality. We've got a fair bit of feed in front of us but it's not the same quality. And then we hit that point in time in the normal season where we've got a fair bit of feed but it's rubbish. And a lot of cardboard is still just cardboard. That shouldn't be a surprise to us. We know that's gonna happen each year. So what changes, as I said, is these dates along the bottom but the rest of it shouldn't be a surprise to us. So we can actually predict what our feed quality is going to be throughout the year based on what rainfall events we've had. That's our job as managers. We can take it a step further and we can actually work out how much they can physically eat. So we can predict their intake. Now this, in terms of feed intake and the way that the animal processes food, this is the most basic lesson that I can give you in terms of how an animal works. If we put a kilo of feed in the mouth of an animal and 200 grams comes out the back end, that's 80% digestibility. So if you get a feed test back on a feed type, it will show you what digestibility is. That's directly linked to the energy in the feed. The bit that no one seems to spend much time talking about is how long that process takes and what influences that. And that's driven by fiber. So a higher fiber diet will have the same outcome but it takes longer to occur. And remembering that an animal only has a certain number of mouthfuls it can take in a day. It has a certain amount of time that it needs to sit down and ruminate. So the time that it takes will influence how much they can physically eat in a day. Now when we start talking NDF, neutral detergent fiber, we've got some ideal targets that we'd like to be able to hit in terms of the feed that we put in front of our animals. In sheep we're talking 32% or thereabouts. There's a bit of a range but just to give you a number to work with, 32% in cattle it's around 35%. What I want you to think about is that some of our feeds that we put in front of sheep aren't ideal. Some of the feeds that we put in front of cattle aren't ideal when it comes to fiber. And so we're limiting the amount they can physically eat in a day. Or we're putting in a low fiber diet which means that it shoots straight through them. So some of the examples, how much fiber do we want? The ones that are too low are some of our photocrop options. So brassica, chicory's not too bad, it's getting closer and we know that the grains are really low in fiber. So things are going to fly straight through the animal and if we just feed them just a pure diet of that, we're certainly not going to get optimum animal performance. So how do we balance it up? Well, what are the other options for us? And brassicas, we just had this conversation earlier but brassicas come up all the time. One of the reasons we use brassicas is because we can grow them at a time when we can't grow much else. And they fit into our rotation. They fit into the time when we're trying to renovate pastures and things. But in terms of the animal they're actually not a fantastic option for us. They're good because we can grow up when we don't need it. They're not ideal when we, in terms of the actual animal performance. Some of the more, what we would say perfect in that sort of perfect range, clover, loosened, plantain, lupins, in terms of, this is just purely in terms of fiber. So it's more in the zone of what we're actually trying to achieve. And then if we jump out into the ones that are theoretically too high in fiber for us, it's actually most of the other things. So I've thrown a few random things in here as well but even our ryegrass and flairis based pastures, that's why we want clover. A lot of why we want clover in a pasture system, yes it gives us nitrogen, but it also means that we've got a lower fiber component in our pasture rather than just relying on the grasses which is actually a bit higher. And then you get into things like straw and it's really important when you're looking at hay, even silage, we had a case of silage the other day someone sent me the feed test on their silage and the NDF was actually really high in it. Their intake was gonna be quite low. So it's just understanding that we can actually predict intake because the amount of kilos they physically eat in a day will have a direct impact on how much energy they can physically consume or put through their system in a day. You can predict that. We can also predict conception. Now, just a quick show of hands for me just because it's of interest to me. How many of you have done a lifetime U management course? Those with sheep? All right, that's a pretty good number. If you haven't done a lifetime U management course and you've got sheep, then I highly recommend that you do. To me, it's the thing that people should need to do before they manage sheep. And the reason is that we got this direct correlation between condition score and the performance of the animal. So being able to condition score an animal, know what its condition score is really accurately and know what its energy requirements are as it stands in front of you and what it's getting from the pasture. It gives you the ability to predict the future. We said before we would love to have a crystal ball. This is what we get. In terms of condition score and what we can predict, you will have seen these graphs a thousand times. I'm not gonna spend much time on them and you'll get a bit more of it from Deb later on as well. We know we can predict our conception rate. The higher the condition score of the animal, the less drives we get, the less singles we get, the more twins we get. Really well established. It's our ability to predict the future. Know the condition score of your sheep, know what your outcome's gonna be. Know the condition score of your sheep and influence and control the outcome. In cattle it's no different. So in cattle we know if we've got cattle at cows at one and a half to two condition score at carving, we know that that's only gonna translate into a pregnancy rate of around 78%. If we take it out to 2.5 to three condition score, we know we can get it up to 90%. And going much fatter doesn't actually make much difference. Having them really fat doesn't translate into more calves and can cause you other problems. So again, in cattle we know we can predict the future. If we have an idea of what the condition score is, now the hard thing in cattle, if we don't actually put our hands on them. And this is something that I learned the hard way. I've spent my life knowing that condition score in sheep was really important, putting our hands on sheep, condition score in them. Cattle were easier because we could just look at them until I had to actually do a cattle condition scoring exercise. We had a producer group there, we ran some young heifers in and I said to them, all right, we'll grab those two because they'll be a good example of the two different condition scores. And when we put them in the race and we put our hands on them, they didn't handle like we thought they would. Both of them were different to what we thought they were. And it was a lesson to me that unless we actually physically put our hands on them, at least sometimes to see where the condition score is, we were being deceived. So actually putting our hands on them. Now the biggest example I see of this is in heifers. And far too often we're running our heifers too fat leading into carving. That's partly because we're trying to grow them out, we're trying to grow them out quickly, get them to a joining weight. All those things are all happening. But at the same time, we know that there's a lot of heifers that are hitting carving at condition score four and unnecessarily. And it's just because we've conditioned ourselves to what we think a heifer should look like. And that's not necessarily how she'll handle. So the thing we're looking for is that fit, not fat, particularly in our heifers. The other major, and I think this is a pretty significant one within our client base is I'm really strict on weaning. I'm really strict on, and this is a sheep example, but really strict on weaning timing and making sure that we give use the recovery. So it's another one of the things that you have absolute control over. We don't have to leave lambs on use for any particular amount of time. If the lambs are heavy enough and we get the opportunity to wean them, we give ourselves the opportunity to influence weaning recovery in the use. So what does that look like? If we've got a five-week joining and we let that eulactate for 20 weeks, you might think, well, 20 weeks, I don't let that happen. The biggest way that that often happens is someone gets in your ear and says, yeah, we could sell them as suckers. They're nearly ready. I reckon give them another couple of weeks and they'll be right. And they might be 14 weeks of age. And then in two weeks time and they're almost ready to go again. Couple of bucks looking at each other over here. And then it gets all of a sudden, it just creeps out because, yeah, another couple of weeks and they'll be ready. And then they are ready, but we're already out to 20 weeks. And so that use recovery period now is only 11 weeks before her next joining. The flow-on effect of that is really important to your business because she won't conceive as many lambs. She won't have that same recovery. She won't do the same job for you next year. So the number of lambs that you'll have available to sell next, you won't be as many. The flip side of it is, if we stick to our 14 weeks lactation, we only let her lactate for that 14 weeks. We get the lambs off. We transition them on to better quality feed because your farm never has enough high quality feed across the whole thing to be able to feed everyone. But we can prioritize that to the lambs. That gives the you 17 weeks recovery. That's something that's directly within your control and gives you the opportunity for next year to give that you her best possible chance of conceiving as many lambs as she possibly can for you. We can control that. We can also predict things like lambing issues. And again, you're gonna hear more of this throughout the day, but the one message I have for you is what you need to be able to do is pay attention to what's happening in your lambing paddocks. You need to be able to see what's happening. You need to be able to monitor what's happening. You need to be able to inform yourself for next year. One of the simplest things that our clients do is they weigh every lamb they come in contact with. If they have a dead lamb, they find it, they pick it up, they weigh it. If they pull a lamb, they weigh it. I'm not sending you out to go and chase lambs to try and find them and pick them up and weigh them. I don't even want you walking through your paddock specifically to go and do it because you'll upset other youths on their birth sites. But we know that if we've got lambs under four and a half kilos, their risk of death goes through the roof. And that's because of exposure. If we've got lambs above five and a half kilos, we know their risk of death goes through the roof because of dystopia or traumatic birth. So one of the simplest things you can do is just weigh them, carry a set of scales. Doesn't matter what they are, $10 luggage scales will do the job for you. But it's something that you can do that helps inform you for next year. What was it that was causing my lambs to die? You can learn so much just from weighing them. You can just look for what's happening in your paddock. What's happening with different mobs of youths, what's happening between different paddocks, what's happening in areas of paddocks. It's actually just paying attention to what's happening. Golden lambs, it's the meconium staining. It's the first poo of the lamb. The first poo of the lamb will come out because that lamb is having a traumatic birth. And so there is your opportunity to see that we've got some form of traumatic birth happening in your mobs. Too often we see golden lambs and we pay no attention to it. Well, no one's ever explained to you what's happening. It's exactly the same in human babies. They see meconium. We know the baby's going into fetal stress. Gotta get the baby out. It's the same. So there's a lot of causes. So it could be big lambs. In this particular case, it's a U-lam. So she, it's a first-time lambing. Smaller pelvis. There's a whole range of things. This will be the first lamb, the cleaner one. It will have been a delayed birth. The second one's gone into fetal stress. It's past its meconium. So little things that you can pick up out in the paddock make a big difference. One of the questions I'm getting a lot at the moment is around wool growth. And how does that fit into our system? Where are we going? With our sheep type? What are we doing? Are we doing a six-month shearing or not? You can predict your wool growth. We know how much you're growing per month. That bit's not the difficult part. It's trying to make a decision around what we do. If you're in quite a long staple length. The conversations that I'm having with a lot of people at the moment is they're coming to me and saying, I think we have to go to six-month shearing. And my answer is why? Because if we've only got a small amount of our total clip that is going over length, then I don't want to jump ship just because of that when we've got the rest of the clip that's actually still at an appropriate length. Often what happens, we get a bale or two or three or four and everyone starts to get nervous. Our staple length's getting too long. We're getting penalized on those. But if you jump ship too early and you go into a six-month shearing phase and you don't have the staple length to actually be able to do it across the majority of your flock, you're just going to get punished for being too short. You wait for that opportunity when that flips. All of a sudden we are genuinely getting a penalty because we're too long. And in that case, six-month shearing can work really well. It can work brilliantly. We've got a couple of composite flocks that are on six-month shearing. Absolutely nothing to do with wool. It's a huge cost to the business going to that six-month shearing but it allows them to manage the animal really well. And so that's why they've gone that way. So I think it's one of the buzz things around the industry at the moment is going to the six-month shearing. We know that a nine-month or an eight-month shearing can be an absolute pain in the ass because it wrecks all of your timings. So it takes a lot of juggling. It's just one of the things that keeps coming up is people looking at when they should make that jump over to a six-month shearing. I want you to start thinking about how your animals behave. Now this one, I think the cattle industry has the jump on us in this. For those of you with cattle and who have already played around with some yard weaning, thinking about the animal, thinking about manipulating the way they behave, I think they've got a pretty good handle on it. I think from a sheep point of view, we need to spend a bit more time thinking like the animal. We need to spend a bit more time thinking about it instead of working against it, we need to start working with it. So I often hear people say to me, sheep are stupid. Sheep aren't stupid. Sheep actually aren't stupid at all. Their response is just not what we want them to do. So even if you, any of those scenarios where you think right now, I think of a scenario where you would say, oh, sheep are stupid. It's usually because we're trying to get them to do something that they don't want to do. You might even look at how Marina is running out of a gate, jump something that's not there. Someone in that mob saw something that they thought they probably should jump. And then everyone else saw it jump and so they think, well, there's something dangerous there, I better jump it too. And you look at it and you go, oh, sheep are pretty stupid. They're jumping nothing. Well, the first one thought they saw something. All they did was try and jump it and everyone else thought, well, there must be something there. Not stupid at all. They're just avoiding a danger. It's a bit like when we think about a you who goes out and lambs on the point of a hill when we've got a beautiful tree belt, a nice plantation of trees and she goes out and lambs on the point of the hill. You look at her and you think, oh, you stupid, bloody thing. Why are you lambing out there? She lambs out there because predators come from trees. Predators come from shelter. So she goes and finds herself the best vantage point she can find in the paddock and she will lamb out there. It just happens to be the most exposed one. So if we haven't got everything else right, like feed under her feet, conditions go on her back, mob size, birth weight in her lands, then yeah, she opens herself up to some risk. But in terms of survival and her lamb surviving, she's doing what makes sense to it. We look at it and think it's dumb. It's not dumb at all. Just not what we thought she should do. That's why it's important for us to drop that shelter, that wind speed. With shelter across the whole paddock. But if we start thinking about how animals are actually hardwired, how they learn, how they behave, we can influence our own outcomes and we can start predicting the future in that. Couple of really quick examples and these I think are really important. Most of you are probably imprinting lambs already. So in other words, introducing them to things just to put some of the science behind it. Lambs whose mothers were eating saltbush before they were born perform better on saltbush. So that's exposure to different tannins in the plant. It's the way that the animal reacts to it. That one's a more of a physiological thing. In terms of the psychology though, I think this is one of the best bits of work I've ever seen. So I've grabbed this out of one of the Agvik sheep notes if you want to read more about it. But in this trial, lambs were exposed to wheat for five hours at six weeks of age. So only six weeks old exposed to wheat for five hours. Then they weren't exposed to wheat for another two and a half years. So no unseen wheat in that time. There had been split into two groups. One of the lots of lambs saw it with mum. The other lot of lambs were drafted off the use and just saw the wheat on their own in that first exposure. So the only difference is, did mum eat it? Did I learn from mum? Did I see it on my own? The difference was those who saw it on their own when they were introduced to wheat two and a half years later, only 838 grams of wheat. Those who saw it with mum, 8357 grams of wheat. If mum eats it, it must be safe. It's a really simple concept for you to get your head around. We can use that to our advantage. If mum walks into a wool shed, it must be safe. If mum walks through a foot bath, it must be safe. If mum eats from a self feeder, it must be safe. We can do so much with imprinting and understanding the psychology of the animal. So one of the things that a lot of our clients are now doing is they've adopted some form of yard weaning. I'm a little bit hesitant to use the term yard weaning because all we're really doing is we're manipulating the psychology of the sheep in whatever the most practical way is. I'll just show you a quick video from one of our clients, Will Hansen. So he was one of our earliest clients to start doing. He's been doing it for a number of years. And this video was when he used to feed them in the yards and hold them there for a couple of days. These days, and I just saw him last week, these days all he does is hold them in the yards overnight. He still does what you'll see him do in this video, which is walk around these lambs, walk through them, get them used to a range of different senses. But what we're trying to do in manipulating the psychology of these animals is we're trying to get them to establish their own mob dynamic. So you think about what's happened in their life up until that moment, they've had a you to follow. They've always had a you to follow. But when we were in lambs off and we let them out into the paddock, they've got no one to follow. So there's no leaders, they're all followers. So they just, if you watch them, the lead changes the whole time when you let them out. There's no one leading them out if we just draft them off and let them run off into the sunset. And that's what they do, they run until they hit a fence and then they turn right until they hit another fence and then they turn right again. What we're trying to do by lock them up and ideally in smaller mobs is allow them the chance to work out who the leaders are before we open the gate and let them out. So that might be in your yards, then they might go into a little holding paddock. Doesn't matter how you do it, whatever's practical. If you watch this video, you'll see the three leading lambs. So this is Will walking around. He's been feeding grain in those little troughs, so that's what they're actually interested in. This was 12 hours into his weaning. Those three lambs are the leaders. And if you watch the way the whole mob moves, it's those three lambs that lead. If we would actually track it when he opened that gate and let them out, it would have been those three lambs that lead the way out. It's a simple thing for us to allow the opportunity for them to establish some sort of mob hierarchy. Figure out who the leaders are, figure out who the followers are. Really simple concept, something that we could be making more use of. And then one of the last things I wanna touch on is that we can actually predict animal health issues. So again, I hate surprises. I've just had one, and I'll use this example, but I've just had a client who's had some lambs. He just messaged me literally while I was sitting here before. He's had some lambs die. And part of it is because he has, in terms of his management, he did a couple of things that we could have predicted was gonna cause him a problem. It's not a major issue, but it's something that we could have predicted. The one thing I want you to do is to think about calling the vet and getting the vet involved before there's a problem. Now that's Sean, who you're gonna hear from. I'm sure he's wrapped that I stole his photo off his website. He needs to update his photo from the website. But the idea of a vet isn't to put fires out. My idea of a vet, yes, sometimes we need them to come and do an autopsy. Sometimes we need them to help figure out what the hell just happened. Most of the time though, we need them to be involved from day one so that they can help piece it together. We need them to be involved in setting a plan. And that's what you're gonna hear from him later on. It's about involving the vet before the problems arise, rather than just having them trying to put fires out all the time. That's one of the key differences with our clients is that they actually have a vet involved in their business. And then I would say we can even predict the bad years. We can even predict the poor prices. So think about bad years, first of all. For me, we're at Inverley over near Geelong. We've had three or four pretty amazing years. What do you reckon is gonna happen from here? Every client that I sit down, I say, we've had three or four amazing years. We've even had an autumn break, an early autumn break, and a spring in the same year, which everyone always tells me isn't possible, except we've just had three of them. So what do you reckon we're in the line of now? Surely it's gonna swing the other way. Now, it might be dramatic, but it could easily be. One thing we can predict is, if we've had three really good years, there's a fair chance we're either gonna get, go back to average or a poor year. I have said that for the last three years and been wrong each time. They've been lucky along the way, but we can make a prediction to know we need to be prepared for it. The saying, make hay while the sun shines. If we're making really good money at the moment and the seasons are going our way, great. If you've had a tough time, then you know that you've already had to tighten the belt. But what's happening at the moment is we've got a whole lot of people that are traveling really well. Price, commodity prices are good and seasons have been kind to them, and so they're spending money, which is great to see, reinvesting. But what happens is cost creep. People get a little bit complacent and then it starts to creep in. In terms of prices, I just mentioned, but if we're running on the 90th percentile or above, then we know which direction prices are likely to go. I don't want to be the cynical one in the room, but the reality is if we're at a high and we're in a commodity, we know that it's a cyclical thing. There's four most dangerous words when it comes to commodities, and that is this time it's different. It won't be different. Yes, we might have a new base in our land price, maybe we've got a new base in our cattle price, but we're in unprecedented territory. We know that the national rebuild of the flock and herd has been going on, so that's been driving a lot of prices as well. We know that we've had, even a pandemic didn't manage to bring us unstuck, maybe a World War might, but we know that it's, even if we take all those major outside factors, we know that we're going to end up with dips and troughs that are going to come into it, so we need to be aware of it. The one thing I would say, and this is across pretty much every component of your business, is that the time that the stress really kicks in is when you don't have a plan. So when people say to me, what do they do differently, I would say they have a plan for almost everything. My best example of this is about six years ago, my young bloke, we'd had a bonfire in the backyard, our little two-year-old was running past it to go to the neighbour's house, so not near it, but running past it, and he fell over. And what had happened with our bonfire, which was about six days older that stage, it had burnt the tree roots under the ground. And when he fell over, he fell onto hot coals, burnt his legs. Now, I was on my way back from Lamex at Aubrey, and I get a phone call to say, Jack's fallen in a fire. And that was as much, Jack's fallen in a fire, they're putting him in a helicopter, they take him to the Royal Children's. And that was all the information I got. Now, I can guarantee you that I didn't have a plan at that point, but I did have plenty of this. I shit myself. I didn't know what was happening. I didn't know if it was his legs, I didn't know if it was his arms, I didn't know if it was his face. I managed to get pretty quickly to the Royal Children's Hospital, and I drove in the bottom as the helicopter landed on the roof. And at that point, wouldn't say I was hysterical, but I wasn't in a real good way. I walked through the doors of the hospital. The first person I met was one of the paramedics out of the helicopter. And he just straight away said to me, are you the dad? And I said, yep. He said, he's fine. He's absolutely fine. He's gonna need some skin grafts. We'll put together a plan. The guys here will have it sorted. He'll be absolutely fine. That's what I need to hear. From that moment on, as soon as we got, by the time I got to his bedside, they said, here's what's gonna happen. Over the next few days, we're gonna do this. We'll have to redress these in this way. You'll have to come back tomorrow. We'll redress them. You're gonna come back every few days. We're gonna redress them. He'll be fine. The minute I had a plan, all of the stress went away. So when people say to me, what do the really good producers do? What is it they do different? They control what they can control. They manipulate as much as they can. Even if they can't control it, they're at least trying to manipulate and influence it. And they absolutely respond and respond quickly to any of the information they get. Whether that's a weather event, whether that's something that's happening on farm, but they have that ability to respond quickly. What they don't do is they don't let things slip through their fingers. Because that's where so much of our cost and so much of our wastage comes from. It's just things that slip through our fingers as managers. So they have a plan. They believe in their system. And ultimately they don't chase rainbows. So we don't go chasing a commodity because that's the cool thing to be in at the moment. Just be good at what you do. Be bloody good at it. The other thing that we live and die by is the fact that we can make good and bad decisions at the time and right and wrong ones with hindsight. So let that sink in for a second. I can make a good decision today, a really good decision today that turns out to be wrong. Because we got a rain event that I wasn't expecting. That doesn't mean that the decision I made was a bad one. It was a good one at the time based on the information. If you live by that, then your decision making will become a lot more proactive. Occasionally we can make a good decision that turns out to be wrong. Just as equally we can make a bad decision that by luck ends up being right. But think of it in that way. So what I want you to be able to do is I want you to review everything that's happening on your farm all the time. It doesn't have to be in a formal manner, but to be able to sit down. What was our scanning results like? What was our conception rate like in our heifers? What could we have done differently? When you get good results, reward yourself and reward your team. Particularly if you've got others on the farm. Never underestimate how important rewards are. That might be a slab of beer left on the front seat of the ute that they weren't expecting. A slab of beer on the front seat of the ute that says, thank you, you've done a great job. How good is that result we got? That will do more for you than paying them $2,000 more in their pay packet. It will do more for you than paying them an extra $5,000. What most producers or what most employees, family members want, is recognition for the good work they've done, not just more money. Then ultimately, once we've done all that, we reset and we go again. Now I get accused with my clients of making them perpetually unhappy, and that's because I keep moving the goalposts. Every year we will review, work out what worked, work out what didn't work, and if we've achieved one of the targets that we set, then we move the goalposts. That's the way it works, because it doesn't really matter how good you are, ultimately what we're working on is, whatever you can do well today, you can do better tomorrow. Thanks very much.