Lamb Survival Initiative – Wrap up 2015-2018
SIBI’s Lamb Survival Initiative, through involvement with regional grower groups, aimed to provide the support required for producers to achieve 100%+ lamb marking rates. The initiative provided training and support, encouraging producers to set achievable targets and benchmarking their marking rates against other producers in similar regions and state-wide.
The Lamb Survival Initiative is now complete and operated over a three year period with the first groups organised in 2015. Facilitators met either on-farm with each producer or via group meetings to provide support and training on topics such as condition scoring, feed budgeting and husbandry practices for increasing lamb survival.
Collection of information on their flocks reproduction cycle has enabled producers to gain valuable understanding on where lambs were being lost throughout the reproductive cycle providing them with targeted ways to improve their lambing percentage.
The results across the groups in 2017 show:
- The greatest losses occur between scanning and marking
- Scanning percentage sets the potential and twin survival is the key driver of lambing percentage
- The survival rate of singles is around 90%
- Lamb survival rate decreases as twin numbers increase. Twin survival is the key to improving this
Producers involved in the initiative over the three years stated that the reason for joining the initiative was the desire to improve lamb survival (especially in twin born lambs), to improve their management skills and to improve lambing percentage. Overall feedback from producers involved indicated that they found the Lamb Survival Initiative to be highly valuable to their business.
Some of the key take home messages that participants listed included:
- Ensuring that the right sheep were selected for your enterprise
- Feeding sheep to their requirements was important
- Condition score at joining was paramount
- Managing multiples in smaller mobs increased lamb survival.
Further information on increasing lamb survival can be found in the September 2015, March 2016 and September 2017 editions of the Ovine Observer or on the DAFWA website