 So I'd just like to introduce our next speaker, Deb Scammel, from Talking Livestock. She'll be talking to us today about pregnancy management, what we know now. Deb Scammel is a livestock consultant who founded her own business, Talking Livestock. She assists producers with nutrition and production planning in their sheep and beef enterprises by consulting directly to the farmers as well as running industry courses and projects. Prior to starting her own business, Deb worked in the commercial nutrition space and has also been involved in sheep genetics programs, EID, extension and research activities. Deb is based in Seven Hill in the Clare Valley and today she's going to talk to us about the impact of heat stress on reproduction at joining, the economic case to pregnancy scan and manage use to a pregnancy status and new research looking into some of the causes and contributing factors to u-mortality, especially in multiple bearing use. Thanks Deb. Thank you. Thanks very much. Oh good. So thanks, Nathan. That was a great intro into a bit of planning, predicting the future and working out where you're trying to head with your sheep enterprise. We had some good discussion over in the corner and I think that's where I'm going to come into it too. What are the issues and how can you plan to avoid the same issues year after year? But I'm going to be touching on a lot of sort of latest research. So I'll cover some of the basics but there's been some really interesting projects going on within SA and other states within the last few years. So I'm just going to cover off on some of those. So Adelaide Uni has just done a really interesting review on sort of heat stress and reproduction over joining. So I'll touch on a recent pre-scanning project that there's just some key messages coming out at Adelaide Uni and we'll go through some u-mortality causes, another project that's come out of Victoria and we'll talk a little bit on lamb survivability as well. So I guess the heat stress project, so there's been a lot of sort of projects looking at the effect of heat stress on reproduction. So Adelaide Uni's had this recent project basically reviewed the data and see how it's affecting what we're all doing in the paddock. So a lot of my clients are sort of lambing in autumn into winter and we're often joining over those December, January, sort of hottest kind of months, even Feb can be pretty hot. So basically, you hear all about global warming. We're looking at that projected increase in temperature over the next period of years. So it has been one of the issues flagged as, you know, future of the sheep flock. It's going to have a potential quite large impact. So, you know, the summaries have sort of shown $2.1 million, sorry, 2.1 potential lambs lost in the Australian sheep flock due to this effect of heat stress on fertility and rams as well. So when we're talking heat stress, you know, we're not talking a significant temperature, but it's moderate temperatures sort of over this 32 degrees and it's for a prolonged period of time. So it's not your one-off hot day, but it's where you're getting those weeks or two weeks over joining where you've got that prolonged heat that we're seeing quite a significant effect. So what we're seeing with you use that week prior to Easter, so the week before you put your rams in during Easter and then the following five days where we're seeing the biggest impact of this heat and with rams the major impact is the heat effect on the ram prior to mating as they're developing that semen to join with the use. So, you know, there's some good summaries here of the times we've said. So you've got your ram here, you know, zeros when you're joining, putting the rams in with the use. So your semen is taking sort of that six to eight weeks to develop. So you can see there from 42 to 14 days prior to joining, any period of heat over sort of five to seven days is reducing fertility. It's reducing the sperm numbers, but also you're getting an increase in abnormal sperm. So you find that you do have some embryos that potentially don't survive and also a decrease in pregnancy rate. So something to be aware of there. And then we're seeing here the major impact on use is these seven days prior to mating and seven days into joining. So prior to a use. So, you know, if you haven't used teasers, the use basically starting to cycle as the rams go in, they're stimulating them to start estrus. So if it's seven days prior to their estrus, they've had the heat, you'll find they've got reduced duration of the estrus period, less incidence of estrus, and then there's an increase in embryo losses and wastage. So what we're seeing with this heat stress is around estrus. If they're having this heat for the first seven days into mating, you'll find you'll have large quantities of embryo loss and wastage of those early sort of fetuses forming. So they've said sort of five days before estrus, the heat for a solid five days can reduce fertilization rates by up to 60%. So that's what the trials have sort of shown. And a lot of these testing has been done in sort of heat chambers. So the sheep are kept in house conditions so they can control temperature. So the problem is when they're walking around a paddock, you have even larger impacts of heat as far as reduced feed intake within that pregnant yew. So in the house conditions they'll often keep eating but when they're in a paddock situation, they'll back off their feed and not eat as much as they normally would. So that's another issue again. So it's something to be aware of. The end point of this report was that further research is basically required. But I guess my key practical message for you guys from this is shade. So if you are joining over summer, looking at, you can't control the weather. Like Nathan said, you know, you don't have a crystal ball if you're going to have these hot period of two weeks. But having shade in your joining paddocks mean you can have that significant decrease in temperature where the yew's are standing. And I guess the awareness that if your fertilization rates are back a bit or you might end up with yew's join later in their joining period just because of that period of heat prior to joining. So we also look at overpregnancy. So they've got the effect of cold as well, but today we'll just focus on these heat just because I said in our joining periods in South Australia, those days over 32 degrees I feel are our highest sort of risk. So they've also looked at the effects of heat stress on the actual pregnancy. So as I said, heat stress will reduce the feed intake of a pregnant yew, but it's also reducing placenta and fetal growth outside of the feed intake of the yew. So it's having a separate effect on that fetus inside as it's forming. So, you know, we've got an extreme here where it's hot the whole pregnancy, but even mid to late gestation, mid gestation or just late gestation, we're seeing this impact of decreased birth weight, decreased survival of a lamb and a decrease in weaning weight all associated with five days or more of 32 degrees. So the ones they did in the housed areas have five days of heat over 24 hours reduced the birth weight of a lamb by 1.76 kilos and over just a 12 hour exposure for each of those five days reduced it by 0.75 of a kilo. So when you're looking at a five kilo lamb, it's a significant reduction in lamb birth weight. But yeah, just a bit of something to think about there and I'm sure something you'll see a bit more come out of. So I'm going to touch on some yew mortality and I'm going to go through some data that's come out on yew mortality, but first I wanted to prompt you guys what's normal yew mortality? Does anyone have a figure? They'd call normal. When do you call your local vet? Like when do you get worried? Is there a line you start to get worried? 10%, 5%, 2%? Where's everyone start to get worried? Yeah, and everyone's got their own level I guess on their farm of normal and it does depend on the age makeup of your flock, numbers of multiples, things like that as well. But I think there's a bit of a gap missing in the industry where we probably don't all know what is normal on our farm. So if you're not recording mortality over lambing that's probably the first key is just to start recording how many yews you have lost over that lambing period. So trials that have been conducted in Australia over sort of the last 10 years we've seen this massive range of between 2% and 11% basically amongst the flocks that have been in research sort of flocks which a lot of it is done on commercial property. So in my mind I probably target with my clients sort of 2% and maybe another percent over the year just older yews and misadventure, bits and pieces but if we get too much more than 2% over that lambing period we're starting to sort of work out what's going on. But you guys have to come up with I guess where you're sitting and then work out whether you're happy with it or whether you need to try and improve it. But yeah, so I guess a lot of the figures we see are annual figures lost over a year but for the purpose of this I like to focus on just what we're losing over lambing. So there was an MLA report done in 2015 looking at just diseases of priority that are affecting sheep production and the pregnancy ones are focusing on what's dystocia like those difficult births that you can lose lambs and yews, mastitis, pregtox and hypoxemia so I'll touch on all of those as we go through. But I guess back to basics there was a really good number of people I could see from my position that have done a lifetime year management course but I guess I like to always go back to basics of condition scoring. So checking the condition your cattle or your cows or yous are in prior to lambing and carving that'll help you predict sort of where your mortality should be. So obviously if you're in these underconditioned stocks so under two and a half we're looking up over getting up towards this five, six percent and your multiples are going to have an even higher mortality so if your key issue is getting them to lambing in the right condition that's something you need to focus on first and as I said your twin bearing yews are always at much higher risk of mortality so often in a system where we push multiples being conceived we end up with a higher portion of multiples to singles the yew mortality across the year will often go up and it's because you're running more high risk animals so there's something to keep an eye on but running twins is always going to be harder than running single bearing yews. So and I guess you know the reason we're so focused on year condition score as well is just for this lamb survival so you know as your twin lambs get more so marinos we're aiming for this three and a half condition score at lambing you're more likely to get that four kilo lamb that's got more chance of surviving the yields around three kilos will be closer to that optimum weight of five kilos so Nathan's already put this up but basically you know in that five kilo range is where we're aiming to try and keep your lambs alive and it's just because they've got more brown fat so they've got more of their own fat that lets them stand up, follow their mum and survive before they sort of get their first drink so you know your little three kilo lambs don't always have much chance of surviving so who's in the room's preg scanning? Yep, good to see as well so I've just got some key messages that have come out so Adelaide Uni have also just completed a preg scanning project so there's a few key messages that are still in draft form we've sort of got the jump on them but that'll be coming out of that project shortly but their data showed only sort of 40% of sheep producers in South Australia are preg scanning and obviously with preg scanning you can have your wets and drys or your singles and multiples so with this data I've put up this profitability advantage is if you're scanning for singles and twins and about half of that is if you're just doing wets and drys so obviously doing wets and drys especially if you're in a poor season means you can get rid of the dry animals you know not waste valuable feed on dry animals but I guess the goal is to have your twins and singles in separate mobs so when the full report goes through different breeding enterprises, different feed situations different rainfalls and that's the average profitability but we see a massive increase in profitability for areas with not enough feed for years where you're hand feeding that's where you'll get that real advantage of having your singles and twins separated and it's because you're basically allocating better paddocks, more sheltered paddocks more supplementary feed to the animals that need it and then we'll hopefully reward you with two lambs per most of you use so there is that range there but so $5.75 per year scanned over the cost of scanning so 2000 new flock looking at an extra profit of $11,500 so significant difference it has come up in this project versus other data done and that's just because of the extra price of lambs that you're able to keep alive so return on investment of 400% so you know hopefully pretty worth spending that money scanning within this project they've also looked at accuracy of scanning so they've done a lot of double scans seen how many fetuses have been lost and their key message was basically to prepare used properly for scanning so I guess we're seeing some in accuracy with scanning data and often it is used, haven't been off feed for long enough so you've got to have them off feed and water for your six hours and have them prepped properly to get a good result and it needs to be 80 to 90 days after the lambs have gone in with a traditional five-week joining so I guess there's things as produced as you guys can do to get a good result out of your scanning so I guess the reason we're scanning people that haven't scanned multiples and singles before I really prompt you to do it to see how many lambs you've lost as well so if you're running a wet-dry mob and you don't know how many twins you've got in there you don't always know how many fetuses you've actually lost so what we're looking at is 100 single bearing use here they've got 100 potential fetuses and so looking at sort of Merino industry targets we're looking at keeping 95% of those alive so that'll then give you 95 live lambs you're 100 twin bearing use we're looking at 200 potential lambs and this is where the huge wastage comes in in our industry really is those 60 loss fetuses so every 100 twin bearing use in a paddock there's likely to be 60 dead lambs and that means you're marking 140% which is Merino industry target and fairly acceptable within twin bearing mobs so for me that's where your opportunity is but also without knowing this data you can't really calculate what you've lost so Nathan's gone through some of this so this is the lamb, the golden lamb that Nathan was talking about someone actually hasn't survived so same as what Nathan sort of prompted you guys to do I guess it's just taking note of what you're losing and why so you know I've got the same suggestion of weighing your lambs because you know as a consultant people will call me and say we've picked up there's so many dead lambs in the twin lamb paddock and it's like what's happened and without any information your vet or your consultant can't work out what's gone wrong there and we can't really fix it for the following year so you know this is that golden lamb that's had a distressed birth dystocia probably brain damage you know potentially died inside and it's actually not walked or breath or even had a drink these hooves aren't very clear sorry but you know looking at the dead lambs that lambs never walked it's not got dirt on its feet where this one at the bottom here has walked and it's got dirt on its feet so you know if you're finding a heap of these lambs that have never got up you know you've got a bit of a dystocia difficult birth potentially brain damage and they've never even stood up to have a drink where these animals potentially had a drink and you know you can go next step do your own autopsies and check if they've got milk in their stomach and that can answer even more questions again so yeah I feel like talking to farmers over the last sort of year we probably need a few more lamb it's not being run just so people get a bit comfortable with what they're looking for and it can answer a lot of questions on farm this here is a brain edema so with dystocia you know if you've got large single lambs but it can also be multiples or mis-presented lambs this has basically suffered brain damage as it's been born so by cutting it into its brain you can check if they've got that brain damage and you know that animal's likely never drank or walked either because it's had this significant brain damage so basically this is a trial that was done through Massey University but they actually tracked in Australia eight merino and merino cross flocks and they basically just looked at cause of death so there was 25,789 lambs born across the trial so significant amounts of data and this is the cause of death they found within the lambs so I think you know it's been reported for years in Australia dystocia is our biggest risk of losing lambs so we've got these three types of dystocia so dystocia A is that brain edema present so you know they've got significant brain damage they often don't even get up dystocia B there's no brain damage but there's central nervous damage they're still they're basically still born they won't breathe and they've never sort of walked or metabolised their own fat for energy so you know they've basically died during the birthing process or prior and then dystocia C they've still got central nervous system damage but they've breathed and you can tell inside they've metabolised their own fat so they've basically all caused lambs not to survive because of dystocia but when you add those three together they're still the most significant cause of loss we saw within these trial animals starvation, mismothering is the next most common so you know there's a lot of data around about mob size so you know lambing small groups of twins together so you know you imagine if you've got 200 twin bearing use in a paddock and they all lamb they're 200% so you've got 400% potential fetuses the cause for mismothering is absolutely massive so you know anything you can do practically to reduce this mismothering and the starvation of the lambs that are mismothered will have a massive reduction on that and you know there's some things you can't control you know predators you can bait and do what you can but you can't always reduce these but you know this dystocia can be a heavy male presentation but a lot of it can be nutritional too so I think there's things you can look at for these things exposure will touch on shortly so within this trial they also looked at sort of chill index so you know how we said about the birth weight so you're looking at that optimum survivability of your 5 kilos what we find with birth weight is it's basically the ability of that animal to withstand a weather event and said there's some things you can't plan you can't plan the weather but you can plan a sheltered lambing paddock putting high risk animals in and you can plan feeding use up to a birth weight that means they're more likely to survive so we've got here your low birth weight animals you know as the chill index gets higher you've got more rain, more wind and the temperature goes down so low birth weight you're at 1% mortality there significant weather event you've gone up to 4% medium birth weight so this was 4.6 to 5.6 kilos and the high birth weight was over 5.6 kilos so the low one there was under 4 kilos so that's a lot of your multiples so without shelter they're not going to be able to reduce their chill index with a weather event but with shelter you can drop the chill index down by at least 100 so that's where you can make a difference to those high risk animals so I'm just going to jump back to you mortality so as we've said this is I guess the biggest take home for me is what is your you mortality and why and I guess when they're high enough use are worth a lot of money at the moment at what point do you call your vet and get a disease investigation because you're worried about a number of losses so you know for me I want to know what's gone wrong and I want to be able to fix it before you land the same thousand years down next year so what we've got so this you mortality project was done in 19 and 20 and it was a large number of research organisations so we had livestock logic, vet clinic in Victoria, opinion advisory University of Melbourne and also Merdoch University involved so it was 51 farms over WA SA Victoria and what they found was a single bearing use overall mortality across the two years was 1.4% twin bearing use around 2.2% so just as we said they're high risk animals, they've got two lands they've got to get two out and also get through pregnancy developing those two fetuses the key here triplet bearing use we see this at 5.1% mortality is anyone scanning for triplets? yep, a few of you so I guess the key is across marinos especially we don't get a lot of people scanning for triplets but all of us have seen often your twin bearing mortality will get quite high especially when you've joined using quite good condition if you cut the use open you can often find three lands so with marinos we often just put them into a multiple mob but be aware that you're potentially conceiving triplets and not managing them as a separate group so I think in some ways it can make you feel better about your mortality if you know they were a really high risk animal it's just good to know I'll go through these headings with you so within this trial they basically the farmers determined cause of death and then there was a large number of animals that the vets actually did an autopsy on so this data was across those 51 farms all of the animals that were autopsied so we've got on this far left side still dystocia so obviously with dystocia in UU and land you've got the damage happening to the land that means it's not going to survive but you've also got those UUs you've all seen them they've got stuck lambs, they've maybe got one out they've gone septic, the UUs died so that's right up there with the common cause of UU death across this project the next two we've got is septosemia and trauma so septosemia is often damage has happened over that slow birth they've had lambs stuck inside so it's often quite associated with dystocia also with your trauma to the uterus as they're trying to give birth so those three weigh up on the largest cause of death so the next one we've got there and I'm going to talk a little bit more about this is hypocalcemia so we've got metabolic issues like hypocalcemia we've got hypomagnosemia here which is magnesium deficiency and we've got preg tox in the middle there too so I'll touch on those in a few more slides but often your hypocalcemia is also associated back with dystocia so a lot of the animals that died of dystocia also had hypocalcemia and it's because these minerals are involved in the birthing process so often if an animal is nutritionally not there with minerals or energy they run out of energy to push those lambs out so it can end up being that they've stopped giving birth the lambs are stark but sometimes it's a lack of other things that contribute to dystocia so I guess same as this the key out of this was we've got a huge issue here but there's probably more research to be done into where it all sits and with other things so we've got some other things here like prolapse your mastitis here often happens just after lambing and you know some just unknown cause which you always unfortunately get so looking at the causes of dystocia I think we probably think dystocia is often just large lambs so often people think they've fed them too much the lambs are massive but when you look at this breakdown from this project there was only 15% of the dystocia cases due to fetal size so overfed ewes often in the last trimester so we've got here 58% of animals that were basically now presented so you know they've come with a leg back backwards so they've tried to come out bum first and the ewes just can't push them out or often it's twins and they'll both be trying to come out at the same time so you know there are some dystocia so that happens that there's probably not a lot you can do about now presentation of multiples but it's the awareness that it could be causing some of your issues so we've got in here this is uterine inertia so that's basically contractions have sort of stopped and they've been unable to push out the lamb so as I said some of that can be related to nutritional issues that have caused the dystocia as well and then we've got some issues with the population there at 4% and then just significant trauma or unknown sort of dystocious causes so yeah just something to keep an eye on and as I said if you have mortality getting higher I think that's where you do get a consultant or vet involved and you know with the losses some flocks are seeing I think it's worth getting to the bottom of what the overall cause was of you and lamb death so with your metabolic disease a lot of flocks that are grazing in a special serial zones you're on these calcium sort of magnesium deficient pastures and often with your fertiliser history the soils are quite high in potassium and nitrogen so that'll actually then tie up further absorption of magnesium and cause more of an issue so you know over the last few years especially when it's been dry and we've been feeding a hell lot of grain I've seen sort of a lot of calcium magnesium deficiencies in use so the interesting part is I guess we know these contribute to you mortality we supplement and do what we can to balance the rations to prevent it from occurring but this is a recent study there was Charles Starrt University and Sadi and they actually looked at the flow on effects I guess of subclinical metabolic disease so you know especially in older use in the study that livestock logic did they basically found 5 year old use were 2.4 times more likely to die of hypocalcemia than 3 year old use and that's just because of the ongoing drain on their system of depleting calcium year after year and I've found it significantly worse with grain feeding as I said enough calcium and too much phosphorus but what they found in this other study this was done in 2020 as well basically calcium has an effect on your smooth muscle function so and a role in uterine contraction so if they do have hypocalcemia but survive they actually have a slower birth process which means the lambs and ewes are more likely to suffer from dystocia causing those deaths so even if you get your use through but your borderline you're still likely to see a flow on effect and the other thing they found was there was an overall effect on lambs survivability so they had decreased colostrum and decreased them a genesis of the offspring so that's their ability to stay warm if they're calcium deficiency and with adequate calcium, magnesium they also found they had improved weights at marking I guess if you're losing use to these issues it's worth getting on top of so you don't have the flow on effects so I'll just finish up before I get pulled off stage with your another interesting trial just on your lamb mortality versus older use so this was done in New Zealand out of Massey University they looked at lambing 1200 they call them U-hoggots but we call them U-lams when they joined at sort of 6-9 months of age so basically what they found was and I guess I'm seeing a lot of people joining U-lams but not always with a good plan of where they need to be and the optimum way to join them so what they found within this study was as you increase the average daily weight gain from mating through to lambing there's a much higher risk of lamb mortality so to me that's animals that are joined but maybe not quite at target weights and then they've had to grow quite a bit through pregnancy to hit target weights but they've ended up with much lower levels of lamb survivability so half of the lamb mortality within the sort of 1100 U-lams that were lamb down was due to stillborn animals and that was highly correlated again to that higher growth rate through the pregnancy and the stillborn lambs were all just way below optimum birth weights so it means to me we're sort of maybe not targeting the right animals to join they're a little bit light and what they found here was some U-lams basically petitioned energy to their own growth and not enough inter-feetal growth and you know across the whole thing 78% of lambs survived but I guess the key is all of those lambs we're kind of losing in that system which you know it's an emerging I guess trend at the moment you know I quite like it to boost numbers in enterprise but I guess it's just looking at which animals you do join and then you know within the U-lams there is this loss so we had the average of 2.5% of U-mortality and that actually caused 11% of the lamb death so you know that does have a big impact in older and younger use on your overall death rate and basically there was 1.8% of those that resisted to lambs so that's what Nathan said with your fetal size versus your shoulder structure of the animal so a small hasn't hit frame size U-lamb can't always push out the large lambs so I'll skip over that one and so basically similar take-homes you know I guess today is just prompting you guys to plan and for me it's just measuring what's causing those the lamb mortality and what's causing your U-mortality you know call in an expert if you can't work it out just so we can manage the same issue next year you know as we said weighing your lambs so you work out if you've got undersized lambs or oversized and you know the key as I said you'll see this data come out from this preg scanning project but you know we're seeing probably double what's been forecast in the past as far as profit increase with preg scanning and managing your singles multiple separately and also yeah so just observing so I guess you've made your plan but observe what's happened with those lambs and use and you know if something's gone wrong you know prior to your lamby again the following year put in your calendar that you might need some extra supplementation you might need something balanced you know you might need to condition score you use to make sure you've got optimum lamb birth weight so yeah plan observe and then replan thank you for that