I manage a livestock and cropping property called Terinallum. It’s in the western district of Victoria, two hours west of Melbourne. There are three full time staff on 8,000ac. However, we get contract labour in at busy times. We use a contractor for lamb marking, shearing and crutching. We get our crops sown by contract. We just do the spraying and the preparation work and all the animal husbandry. There is a full time gardener on the property who looks after maintenance and he flips over and helps us on the farm if we need him.

This year we lambed down 9,300 ewes. The aim is to have 12,000 composite ewes for meat and have them lambing down from July through to September. We do a lot of dry land cropping. This year we planted 900ha of dry crop with 200ha of that being eaten off or locked up for silage or hay and the remaining 700ha will go through to grain production. We also contract rear cattle to utilise the surplus grass we have grown.

It costs us $6 per head to shear a sheep and we get $7 on average per fleece. This is from meat sheep, however, where the wool is 35 micron and basically valueless. No one really wants the product and we’re competing with New Zealanders who put a lot of that micron wool on the market at a lower price than ours.

Compared to a Merino wool operation they would spend about $7.50 to shear a sheep because there’s more wool preparation required but would also receive a higher payment. A Merino ewe with about 17 micron cutting about 5kg/head would produce a $60 fleece - 10 times what we are producing, however, they don’t have the lambing percentages we would have.

Land type

The land at Terinallum is naturally treeless, it’s sort of volcanic plains country, I guess. The area was known as pleurisy plains because when the first settlers came, there was a lot of pneumonia and pleurisy because there was no shelter. There have been lots of trees planted over the years.

It’s very fertile but windswept and cold with average rainfall of 650mm. About 50% is flat, rock free arable country that you can crop 100% and then we range right into hardcore volcanic rock, where you just have to pick your way around the rocks but it’s very fertile and grows grass all through winter and provides excellent shelter for lambing ewes.

There are dry stone walls in this area similar to those in the west of Ireland. These walls were built by convicts when the land was being cleared.

I visited sheep operations in Ireland and the UK a few years ago and there were plenty contrasts compared to how we farm in this part of Australia. I found that with some farmers, the drive has been taken away by the subsidies. The desire or need to innovate has somewhat been diminished by the fallback position. I understand there’s a little bit of social engineering with the subsidies because its about keeping farmers farming.

I visited a farm in Wales where every birth was assisted and they all had c-sections. I thought ‘why on earth would you be bothering with this breed?’ It’s so labour intensive but I guess when the average flock size is less than 150 ewes, you could probably afford to spend the time and you might be paid a high premium so maybe it pays off.