Triplets and quads could boost returns

With sheep farming becoming more profitable with the recent price rises, do we need to shift the bar of production further to keep the rising tide of dairying at bay?

Landcorp geneticist Geoff Nicol, believes so, and suggests we are not thinking past the square with our triplet and quad management.

Many farmers treat triplets as a negative, but maybe it's because they don't understand the difference in feeding levels and management required for multiple births.

Wastage in the difference between scanning percentages and lambs survival for sale is often 30% or worse, although some top farmers have reduced this to about 10%.

Processors would give their eye teeth for a good percentage of these lambs lost especially this year. Do farmers need to scan for triplets and manage them differently to realise this potential?

More triplets– and even quads – should be viewed as a good thing and a route to raising returns on sheep farms, says a leading geneticist. Just as the thinking shifted from one good single being the goal 20 to 30 years ago, now a shift is needed from twins being the target, says head of Landcorp’s genetics unit, Geoff Nicoll. “We should be going for more triplets and quads,” he told Rural News at a field day earlier in the summer.

Nicoll is quick to point out there are some farms where this target isn’t appropriate, notably hill country. However, he suggests that even some of these properties could target higher lambing percentages and use a contract arrangement with a down country farm to handle multiple-bearing ewes. Where producers are moving to more triplets and quads, management changes are needed to rear these litters. He says while there’s a need for research into that, much of the technology may already be available— just not applied on sheep farms.
 

“Why don’t we feed sheep like dairy cattle? Why don’t we have intensive lamb rearing operations, be that on pasture, crop or in a feedlot?”
Problems currently incurred with triplets and triplet-bearing ewes are often because they are managed as for twins, both in utero and on the ground. Consequently ewes carrying triplets are more prone to metabolic problems such as sleepy sickness. Lower than ideal birthweights reduce survival rates if triplets do make it onto the paddock. However, getting enough feed into a ewe carrying triplets is far from easy: demand in the latter stages of pregnancy is almost a third again of a ewe carrying twins.

“It’s more about feed quality than quantity. Grain is one answer, but not necessarily the answer,” Nicoll explains. “Lucerne might be a possibility. “Flushing isn’t so important in highly fecund ewes.” Some farms are already managing triplet and quad-bearing ewes separately, notably stud breeders, and it’s probable there are management lessons to be learnt from these, he says.

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