Scoping the benefits of saving labour in sheep enterprises in Australia

Summary

Bio-economic modelling identified the relative importance of specific management and genetic interventions to improve labour efficiency and its impacts on profitability. As expected, constraints on the supply of labour had a significant impact on stocking rate, the level of farm profit and the optimum mix of enterprises in both the mixed crop/livestock farms and the livestock only farms. If owner operators, with or without access to hired permanent labour, are unable or unwilling to hire casual labour then they are unable to match labour supply to the seasonal labour demand. Therefore technologies or strategies that reduce the labour required in the seasonal peaks will allow producers to increase profitability by better achieving the potential of their farming system.
On sheep properties there are multiple seasonal peaks and therefore improving the efficiency of most husbandry tasks in isolation generally has little or no impact on farm profit, although there are exceptions for some tasks, regions and times of lambing. By contrast, improving labour efficiency for tasks that involve changes in labour input in a number of periods, rather than one or two periods as occurs for the husbandry tasks, or adoption of a package of changes to the livestock enterprise, can lead to large increases in profit.
Systems to improve the efficiency of pasture and sheep monitoring and grain feeding, plus adoption of ‘easy-care’ sheep, led to the biggest increase in profit across all regions.