Visit to Stud farm & another research site

Australia's sheep industry has a dual purpose wool and meat. On many farms up to 70% of farms income comes from wool. It is only in more recent years that people have started crossing the Merino's with terminal sires e.g. Dorsets, Suffolk, Border Leicester.

The sheep stud I visited this morning is a Poll Dorsets sheep stud producing 60+ rams sold on farm. It was obvious it was all about figures and thats what the customers are looking for are performance figures. They select for early fast growing lambs to have as many as possible lambs ready for slaughter by weaning. Lambs are mostly sold with deadweights of 23-25kg at up to 8 months. I was really surprised that not huge rams can produce fat lambs this quickly with good carcass weights.
There are a number of selection parameters performance and visual. Many buyers are looking for low WEC and good growth weights.

The second meeting of the day was at a research site focusing on GHG emissions. The majority of the discussion revolved around the two new pieces of legislation that have recently come out in Australia. The Carbon Farming Initiative (CFI) policy and the Clean Energy futures. This allows a mechanism for landowners to offset carbon through mechanisms such as sequestration, improve soil carbon, plant trees, less methane, less nitrogen etc. The idea is that landowners will be able to generate carbon credit units that they can trade with poluters. However the accepted methadology must be followed and some of these have not been finalised yet as this only came in on 1st December.
Various way of reducing emissions was discussed e.g. improving efficiency, reduce methane  emissions, improve manure management, sequestration of soil carbon etc. However allocation of carbon credits will not be as straight forward as this. The aim of the CFI is to reduce emissions intensity. Improving efficiency may not count but if there is more product and less animals it might count.