Ben Watson - SA

Feeding barley sprouts has transformed the economics of lamb finishing for Ceduna farmer Ben Watson.

“The cost of feeding lambs on grain just didn’t stack up,” said Mr Watson.  Keen to explore value adding potential for his sheep flock, Mr Watson spent more than 12 months researching alternative strategies and came up with the  low cost option of growing his own sprouts.

He has been delighted with his initial results on a small property where he combines sheep with 4000 laying hens and cereal cropping.  A controlled atmosphere fodder growing unit was installed in a shed on his property in July. It produces 240kg of fresh sprouts daily which he uses for both paddock feeding and feedlot finishing.

Mr Watson bought the unit through Don Westlake, the South Australian agent for Fodder Solutions.  The company manufactures a range of different sized units for the Australian livestock market at Toowoomba in Queensland and Seymour in Victoria.

“I wasn’t sure how sheep would go on a diet of sprouts, but I had a good look around and decided it would be a sound investment to have an endless supply of nutritious green feed,” Mr Watson said.  “It will enable me to feed around 350 lambs year round on about 16 or 17 tonnes of grain.”

The sprouting unit has brought welcome certainty to Mr Watson’s enterprise in an arid region where annual rainfall is around 300 to 350mm.  “We haven’t even had our average fall for the past few years so it’s been pretty tough,” he said.  With the sprout supply, Mr Watson was able to take in lambs from a neighbour who had run out of feed. “They weren’t going to survive and instead they have thrived on my place.”

He is keen to focus more on meat production rather than wool and has been crossbreeding Merino ewes with Dorper, Dhone and South African Mutton Merino rams.  “I fed 350 lambs in a 170 acre paddock for four and a half months and they did really well. The block had pretty much been eaten out and all they had was a daily ration of sprouts and a few bales of straw.  They came running for the sprouts every time I drove into the paddock. And they didn’t go moving about looking for a pick afterwards so obviously they were contented.”

He is now finishing 135 lambs in a feedlot, aiming to have most turned off by mid-January averaging 25 to 28 kilos dressed weight at 9 to 10 months old.  They are on a diet of about one kilo of fodder and half a kilo of oats with some wheat straw for roughage.  Mr Watson lambs in March-April and will use the fodder to finish his own and brought in stock, significantly increasing the property carrying capacity. The lambs are sold to a butcher in the region or trucked 800 kg to market in Adelaide.

Mr Watson said there had been considerable interest in his sprouting experience across the western SA region with more than 60 people attending an open day inspection.