On a weekly basis, you will hear people chatting about lambs “dying down”, “dying up”, or even “dying steady”.

I don’t pay much heed to this information; as soon as the annual selling begins, it quickly becomes clear whether or not the weight of lambs in the weighbridge is translating into the maximum paid weight. I am also not one of those producers who refuse to give free kilos of prime lamb carcase away to the factories.

My argument is that the only way to maximise returns is to stray slightly over the upper weight limit. I understand the counter-argument about inefficiently producing lamb that is not paid for, but my answer would be to shrug my shoulders and say, “So what?”

If I stubbornly refuse to allow lambs to creep over the acceptable weight, then I will take a huge hit on the ones that don’t kill out particularly well, and, as we all know, those 17.5kg carcases really pull the average price down.

For example, 15 fat lambs were killed on 23 September and at that stage, 22kg was the maximum paid weight. My average paid weight was 21.5kg, and the lightest lamb was 19.2kg (R3).

However, my true average was 22.34kg, due to seven lambs dying into heavy carcase weights.

There is no doubt that it is painful to do the maths on a 24.9kg U4 lamb, especially when you may well see it hanging in your local butcher’s shop. He then completes your misery by telling you how much he paid for it!

Special

At the beginning of November, I was down to the last 35 lambs for selling. These included pets, ewe lamb pairs, triplets, and various other special cases.

As you can imagine, the last of my lambs aren’t quite fatstock show quality.

Irrespective of how they looked, I decided it was time to work out exactly how they were killing out, so I weighed those destined for slaughter immediately before leaving the yard.

They had been weighed the previous day, but I hadn’t written the weights down, so put them in a fresh paddock overnight, and weighed them in the morning.

Despite the weights being completely different from the day before (mostly significantly lighter), I sent them on. It had been a wet night, and I wondered if they had simply lost a bit of gut fill, or whether the first weighing wasn’t completely accurate.

The range of weights across the group was enormous, and this was reflected in the grading sheet. They varied from 18.2kg (R2) to 24.2kg (R4), and the average paid weight was 20.67kg (actual weight 20.84kg). They killed out at 45.2%.

These were grass-fed lambs which weren’t getting any meal.

Presumably meal-fed lambs are killing out a few percent higher than this?

Of course, this 45.2% is an average figure. I find it perplexing that I am unable to work out the killing out percentages for individual lambs. This is because the individual tag numbers cannot be correlated with each carcase.

Accounted for

As producers, we have to ensure that every animal is individually identified, that it is farm quality assured, that every dose and injection is recorded, and every morsel of concentrate has been accounted for.

Then we read in the press about our state-of-the-art meat industry being the envy of the entire world, with total traceability at each stage of an animal’s life.

Yet, if someone asks us how the different breeding strategies and feeding regimes on our farms are translating into progress for sheep meat production, we have to shamefully admit that we are floundering in the dark.

I cannot fathom why this fairly simple step between matching up tags and carcases hasn’t been made years ago. I would love to know exactly how that wee butterball of a ewe lamb killed out.

And I would definitely like to know just how badly those uncastrated ram lambs with big horns and long lean backs perform.

But it seems that this information wouldn’t be of enough benefit to other parts of the meat industry, and so it is largely ignored. For me, that is hindering progress on this farm.