Our farming system is now based on growing and then utilising as much home-grown forage as possible, with robust, efficient, low maintenance livestock. This has allowed us to keep cost of production low whilst significantly increasing output. Rotational grazing and forage crops have been introduced to minimise reliance on purchased feeds. Overall production has been lifted from 290-550kgLW/ha (for our sheep and beef systems) whilst purchased concentrate use has been reduced by up to 90%.

A huge emphasis is put on recording and monitoring performance of both our livestock and our pastures. Sheep are all EID tagged, weighed at regular intervals and the stud flocks are performance recorded. Pasture is measured with a rising plate-meter up to every fortnight during the peak growing season. Livestock performance, pasture measurements and cropping plans are all fed into Farmax software to enable informed, data driven decisions to be made.