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Twelve different families, mothering almost 1000 stud ewes annually, to produce true medium wool sheep. |
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Collinsville is run on a commercial basis comprising of 22,000 merino ewes producing 10,000 merino wether lambs |
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Collinsville’s cropping program consists of 3,500 hectares. This consists of wheat, barley, oats, canola, peas and lupins. |
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Irrigation program is run at North Booborowie and is mainly used to background wether lambs coming into the feedlot |
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Expanding operations in agricultural and station areas, and establishing lamb feedlotting for the domestic market |
Feedlot In our experience, feedlotting is a numbers game – we need to turn over large numbers to be profitable. If we put 1000 head through the feedlot it’s questionable if this is worthwhile, but if we put 30,000 head through it becomes extremely worthwhile.Lambs are trail-fed with their mothers on stubble, weaned early, and backgrounded on irrigated lucerne pastures (lucerne-italian ryegrass, lucerne-cereals and lucernesorghum) to a weight of 35 kilograms before being put in the feedlot. Over 14 days the lambs are converted to a pure grain diet, using 75 per cent barley, 20pc lupins, and 5pc ELMS nutritional pellet (which contains vitamins a,d,e plus a buffering agent to stop acidification from the pure grain diet). The whole process is important – the early weaning and trail feeding lambs while with their mothers sets up their ruminen to absorb proteins better, We’re getting good weight gains, and the lambs are being turned-off in 40-45 days. With the high grain prices last season, lambs have been backgrounded on cereal stubble and fattened on irrigated lucerne. Grain is just too expensive at current levels – $250 for grain is the point at which feedlotting works for us. All-up, 5500 Collinsville lambs are being prepared for premium markets February onwards. Since finishing the first stage of the feedlot, some 11,000 lambs have been put through the system, most sold to SA abattoirs. |
