Stocktake of the Australian sheep flock

Summary

Over the last two decades, the Australian sheep industry has changed from a wool oriented industry to a dual product sheep meat and wool industry. The increased emphasis on lamb production has led to a rise in the relative importance of reproductive performance. The RD&E Priorities and Investment Plan for Sheep Reproduction (Sheep Reproduction Plan, SRP) targets lifting reproductive performance by 10 per cent in the five years to 2016-17. This is an industry wide target, and not a specific target for individual farm flocks. With limited resources, it is not possible to deliver a full extension service to every sheep business to help achieve this goal, nor would they all take up the initiative. Thus the challenge of evaluating how to achieve a 10% increase in marking rate lies in identifying how many producers will adopt the necessary changes, what marking rate they are currently reporting and what increase they need to achieve. 
By segmenting the potential audience by region, current marking rate, farm flock size and breed mix, it is possible to evaluate the overall increase in marking rate that would be achieved from different levels of increase in marking rate within individual segments. This project was undertaken as a desktop study to provide a detailed description (or segmentation) of the demographics of the Australian sheep population, and to evaluate what changes would be required to lift marking rate by 10% over five years. To do so it extracted additional information from the ABS census and survey data, and used this data to model how many extra lambs and sheep would be turned-off for a range of scenarios (e.g. constant sheep population, constant number of breeding ewes, flock composition that maximises lamb turn-off). With increased and/or more efficient turn-off as the key outcome of increasing marking rate, a national flock demographic model was adapted to enable various reproduction outcomes and flock compositions to be evaluated, and to estimate the actual and potential turn-off capacity of the flock