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What Will Sheep Farming Be Like in 2020?
By Peers Davies MA VetMB MRCVS
Peers is a dedicated sheep vet and sheep farmer. He works closely with farmers across the country providing independent flock advise on every aspect of sheep production from health and fertility to grazing and feeding. His job is to provide proactive, impartial, high quality advice to each sheep farmer, which is tailored to their specific situation to make their business more productive and more profitable.
Some people may not agree with me but, in my opinion, if you want to be making a living out of sheep in ten years’ time, you will have to be both an excellent shepherd and a ruthlessly efficient businessman or businesswoman. I am a Sheep Farmer, a Sheep Vet and Advisor so I see the industry from three different angles and I am very optimistic for the industry. There are certainly the opportunities out there to make a good living from sheep for anyone who is enthusiastic, hardworking and open to new ideas.
For many years the vast majority of sheep farmers have been making a loss, year on year and only staying in business thanks to the SFP. The EBLEX and HCC figures make for depressing reading with only the most efficient units making even a small profit. Subsidies are disappearing bit by bit and like it or not, sheep farmers will have to survive on the sale value of the lamb they produce.
We have the ability to control our productivity and our costs, we can do nothing about the market price of lamb and we cannot rely on the current high price of lamb continuing indefinitely. To survive we have to produce more kilos of lamb per acre for as low a cost as possible. We will have to follow the example of the pig and poultry industries, who are able to grow and expand their businesses without any subsidy at all.
The New Zealand sheep sector was forced to adapt when subsidies were withdrawn in the 1980’s, the farmers who stayed in business were the ones who were ruthlessly efficient at producing large volumes of lamb and a decent margin even at a very low market price. Obviously, we are a very different country to New Zealand with different strengths and weaknesses but the essential qualities that make a good, profitable sheep, pig, or poultry farmer are very similar and have more to do with how you think about your business, than what you actually keep on your farm. These sectors do two fundamental things in particular which most sheep farmers don’t do - yet:
They know exactly how much it costs to produce a kg of lamb p/kg dw
The vast majority of UK sheep farmers have no idea. Every pig or poultry producer will know their cost of producing a kg of meat because they have to, it is essential, as they have no SFP to take up the slack. This one figure is more important than any other. Every aspect of your business will contribute to it, such as your lambing percentage, mortality/ barren rate, and feed bill, but on their own they do not determine your profit or loss, whereas your cost/kg dw will do exactly that. If you work out this figure you can benchmark your farm against others and see what the strengths and weaknesses are. If you don’t know your costs, then you cannot plan effectively because you do not know what effect any change will have on your bottom line. You might as well be guessing!
They record and analyse individual animal performance
'If you don’t Measure it you can’t Manage it’ this is true of every business, especially farming. Dairy farmers are a good example, where keeping records of individual cows performance lets you identify trends across the whole herd that enable you to solve problems early. EID makes individual record keeping far easier, if you use the data to improve your management, then it will pay for the cost of the tags and reader many times over. Collecting and analysing information is just as much a technical skill as grading lambs or shearing a ewe.
It requires skill and dedication. When done well it can be very rewarding! Understanding what to record and how to interpret the results requires experience, it is very easy to waste time and effort collecting data that is impossible to interpret while missing something else that is very useful. It is addressing these fundamental issues, where an independent sheep advisor is essential to help you get the most out of the information you have collected. Every pig and poultry farmer will have regular meetings with their advisor as will most dairy farmers. If you are a proactive farmer then you can get a huge amount out of developing a close working relationship with a dedicated sheep consultant or sheep vet whose advice should pay for itself many times over!
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