Labour efficiency in sheep enterprises: lessons from a spring-summer guide

Why the guide was written#

The paper opens with a blunt observation: the national sheep flock had fallen to a mere 40% of its size at its peak in the early 1990s, and some saw the industry as approaching a loss of critical mass. Against that backdrop, Bob Hall, Andrew Thompson and Mandy Curnow set out to produce a practical guide rather than a research trial, aimed at farmers, advisers and students in a defined rainfall zone of eastern Australia.

That zone is described as covering inland Queensland and New South Wales tableland and slopes districts where most rain falls across the warmer months, totalling 650 to 1000 mm annually. This is one of several regional editions of the same guide; a separate edition covers the Western Australian zone, which is catalogued elsewhere in this index as the WA zone edition of the same guide.

The authors acknowledge that a sheep enterprise may not always match the income of alternative enterprises, cropping in particular, but they stress that sheep simply do not produce a negative income, and that farm profit tends to fall once cropping passes a certain share of the property. On that basis they frame the decision not as sheep instead of cropping, but as sheep run alongside it.

What the guide actually covers#

Rather than reporting a single experiment, the document is structured as a management handbook with sections on business performance, labour timing, husbandry, animal health, feeding and genetics. It draws on data sourced from NSW DPI, Holmes & Sackett, PrograzeTM and an MLA report, among others, to illustrate its points with real figures from industry benchmarking rather than a controlled trial.

The central argument is that wool cut per head or sheep prices are not what determines success; instead the guide points to a handful of business-level measures, among them how many animals are carried per hectare, how much profit comes from trading livestock, the overall cost base, the margin left after variable costs, and output per person employed. The guide treats these as the levers that actually move profitability, invoking what it calls the 20:80 rule, where a small number of factors give most of the difference in outcome.

Much of the guide's practical value lies in its treatment of labour as a resource to be planned like any other input: matched to feed supply, concentrated into efficient systems, and protected from waste through facility design. This is the thread that runs through the book-length collection this item belongs to, the Sheep simple guide collection, and it connects to wider management thinking discussed in the index's broader collection of books, extracts and reviews.

Matching the sheep calendar to pasture growth#

A core piece of evidence presented is a pasture growth curve for a tablelands district of New South Wales, comparing several pasture types, including fescue, phalaris, microlaena, perennial ryegrass, red grass and oats, each paired with white or subterranean clover. All pasture types show low growth in winter months, improving as temperatures rise in spring, with annual species such as oats and clover declining again over summer.

The guide uses a spider web diagram to compare pasture growth against the nutritional requirements of a September-lambing flock stocked at 7.5 ewes per hectare. Where the feed requirement line sits outside the pasture growth line, there is a deficit. The authors conclude that a September lambing lines up peak pasture supply with peak flock demand more closely than other lambing times, while also allowing autumn pasture growth to be stockpiled for winter grazing.

This matching exercise is presented as a labour-saving measure as much as a nutritional one: because pasture is described as the cheapest and easiest sheep feed to provide, aligning stock requirements with when pasture is actually growing reduces the need for supplementary feeding and the labour that feeding out demands.

Stocking rate, gross margin and cost of production as decision tools#

The guide presents a chart comparing gross margins across different sheep enterprise types for 2012 and 2013, measured in dollars per dry sheep equivalent (DSE), covering options from 18 micron and 20 micron wether and ram enterprises through to Dorper meat and maternal systems. It notes that converting dollars per DSE to dollars per hectare requires multiplying by ten to account for a stocking rate of 10 DSE per hectare, sourced from NSW DPI data for 2014.

A separate table drawn from Holmes & Sackett data sets out cost of production ranges for a group of mixed enterprise producers split into bottom 20%, median and top 20% performers. For wool at 19 micron and finer, the bottom 20% recorded 11.00 to 14.00 dollars per kilogram of clean wool against 5.00 to 7.00 dollars for the top 20%; for lamb on a dead weight basis, the bottom group sat at 3.00 to 4.00 dollars per kilogram against 2.00 to 2.50 dollars for the top performers.

The guide also suggests that a flock of 1500 to 2000 DSE could realistically be looked after in roughly one day out of every seven, freeing the rest of the working week for other pursuits, but adds the caveat that producers with poor labour productivity should fix the farm first, meaning the feeding system, laneways and shearing shed, before assuming labour can simply be redirected elsewhere.

Facilities and mob size: practical paths to labour efficiency in sheep enterprises#

Laneways are described as the single biggest labour-saving investment a sheep enterprise can make, because they let a farmer return sheep to distant paddocks without droving and encourage regular visits to the furthest parts of the property. The guide recommends laneways of at least 20 metres wide, designed to serve most paddocks, built as part of overall farm planning, and ideally finished with piped culverts and cement crossings for all-weather use.

On mob size, the guide argues that the total effort a sheep job takes tracks much more closely with how many separate groups of animals are handled than with the raw head count, so fewer, bigger mobs reduce droving, starting and stopping, and waiting between musters. It gives a worked example: a marking team handling 1000 lambs a day implies a mob of around 1200 ewes, and crutching the same mob at the same time would need two cradles processing 600 ewes a day each, or three cradles at 400 each.

Smaller mobs are reserved for specific purposes such as breeding rams, progeny testing, single sire matings and multiple-bearing ewes. On this last point the guide cites research, attributed to DH Fowler in an MLA report, showing twin lambing survival at 83% when the lambing rate is low (0 to 16 lambs per day), falling to 80% at medium rates (17 to 32 lambs per day) and to 63% at high rates (33 to 48 lambs per day), which supports keeping multiple-bearing mobs smaller around lambing.

Work amalgamation and shed design#

The guide sets out how to combine multiple jobs into the same yarding, describing lamb marking and pregnancy scanning as two major tasks around which several other jobs can be clustered. At lamb marking, the suggested combination includes crutching ewes, marking and culling dry ewes, drafting off dry ewes, vaccinating and ear tagging, and culling lambs on wrinkle. At pregnancy scanning, the combination includes drenching based on worm egg count, drafting dry and multiple-bearing ewes apart, condition scoring, and giving a booster vaccination.

A broader table in the guide lays out four critical operations across a year, namely lambing/marking, weaning, shearing and pregnancy scanning, and lists which additional jobs for lambs and ewes can be attached to each. The stated aim is that nearly everything that needs doing to a ewe over a year can be achieved within these four yardings if they are planned well.

On shearing sheds specifically, the guide treats shed quality as equivalent in importance to harvesting machinery, recommending a daily output target somewhere between 150 and 200 animals shorn for each non-shearer rostered on in the shed. It estimates that building a new shed costs approximately 20,000 dollars or more per stand, so a five-stand shed could run to over 100,000 dollars, a figure the authors compare to the cost of a small tractor.

How far these recommendations can be trusted#

It is worth being clear about what kind of document this is. It is a practical guide compiled by industry and department specialists, drawing on benchmarking data, grower surveys and selected research citations, rather than a peer-reviewed trial with its own controlled comparisons. The pasture growth figures, gross margin charts and cost of production tables are presented as illustrative examples from named external sources rather than results generated by the authors themselves.

We would treat the specific numbers in this guide, the DSE-per-labour-unit suggestions, the shed cost estimates and the lambing survival percentages, as useful benchmarks for discussion with advisers rather than universal targets, since they are drawn from particular seasons, regions and producer groups that may not match every farm's circumstances.

That said, the guide's underlying logic, that labour efficiency in sheep enterprises depends on timing work to pasture growth, concentrating jobs into fewer and larger mobs, and investing in laneways and shed design, is argued consistently throughout and supported by the cited benchmarking data wherever it appears. The guide's detailed tables, from gross margins to shed costs, are what give a reader something concrete to check their own figures against, which is arguably its main practical contribution.

Sources and further reading#

• Trove library search: find a library that holds the paper
• Meat & Livestock Australia: red meat industry research and marketing body
• Australian Wool Innovation: wool industry research and marketing body

Questions#

— The Livestock Library team