Good At Finishing? You Need To Be Great!

November, 2024

Beef and wool are better at turning poor-quality feed into product. Cows are great at utilizing poor-quality feed, and Merino sheep don’t require high-quality feed to produce a fine fleece. However, in lamb, you not only need high feed utilization, you also need to convert feed into kilograms of lamb. This hinges on maximizing feed quality, which is determined by pasture composition and subsequent management.

Success in lamb is based on growth rate, which is a subset of feed quality. Given the importance of stocking rate, achieving growth rate can be difficult during lactation due to feed limitations and worm burdens. Mentally, producers need to split breeding and finishing. Breeding focuses on delivering as many lambs per hectare to a finishing system, and using available feed resources to maximize weaning weight.

Finishing is about growth rate. The difference between 175 grams a day and 350 grams a day changes a typical lamb’s turn-off time post-weaning from 60 days (two months) to 120 days (four months). That extra two months adds labour and husbandry costs, which heavily contributes to the cost of production. Another important consideration is that high-growth lambs—whether on grain or grass—have a lower feed conversion ratio, meaning less feed is required to put on a kilogram of live weight.

One of the problems is that there is no set recipe in grass finishing systems. What pasture is best varies with every postcode and environment. We use lucerne, chicory, and clover, but the downside is that if these aren’t managed precisely, they can struggle to persist, making them a high-cost option. You unfortunately can’t just be good at managing finishing pastures; you need to be great. Species selection, weed control, and grazing management must be precise. Those who use these systems effectively run highly profitable lamb operations driven by growth rate. Those who don’t manage them correctly produce slow-growing lambs, making it a high-cost option.

The single biggest opportunity for clients is to become better finishers. You can’t be simply good; you need to be freakishly great.