Lifting the Percentile Bar Adds Dollars to the Bottom Line

Cashmore Oaklea has just lifted the performance of their self replacing Maternals to another level with clients set to reap the benefits. Their top 10 percent ram sale has now moved to the top 5 percent with 450 of the rams a trait leader in one of the many ASBV’s offered.

What is special about these rams is their ability to add extra dollars to the commercial user’s bottom line. When looked at on a performance index basis they are $9 per ewe mated above industry average and with a ram mating 200 ewes across his working life have potential to generate $1800 extra life time earnings.

These extra dollar returns are through performance improvements across a number of areas such as fertility, growth, carcass and parasite resistance.

 A feature of the Cashmore Oaklea flock is their fertility, both in adult ewes and yearling ewes. Three hundred and fifty rams are in the top 10 percentile band for adult fertility and two hundred and forty in the top 10 percentile for yearling fertility.

Financial analysis of farm returns consistently points to fertility as being a major KPI in prime lamb systems and it is a very hard and slow trait to improve. At Cashmore Oaklea fertility has been a major focus with genes sourced from Australia and NZ over a long period of time.

The new trait, yearling fertility shows enormous range across flocks with some elite sires and alas some whose daughters will give very poor results. This offers great opportunity to buyers who do thorough homework and target the correct sire lines.

We are often asked why the Cashmore Oaklea flock has such high performance levels. The simple answer to this is that wherever our sheep go they perform at the upper or top level against those they are being compared against anywhere in Australia. . This may be in research trails, the information nucleus flock, DNA analysis or other new stud flocks.

 Our 30 year history of full performance recording a 7000 ewe stud flock, in a high stocking rate, difficult coastal environment has resulted in 48 sires being represented by sons in this year’s sale.

Now that is consistency of breeding at a very high level.