This is Seeds for Success, a show where we have a good yarn about ag life with producers who are having a go. On the show, you'll hear from farmers in New South Wales who are out there battling the elements, making tough calls, and getting the job done. You'll get a laugh out of some of their stories and also pick up some know- how along the way. I'm your host, Neroli Brennan. Today, we're chatting with Richard and Bernie Sharp.
Richard and his wife Bernie run their farm Coraki along the banks of the Bogan River, 40 kilometers northwest of Parkes, where they run their SheepMaster sheep stud Winton Park, as well as a commercial shedding sheep flock and some cropping to complement the sheep business. In this episode, Richard and Bernie talked to us about the difference between SheepMasters and other sheep breeds, as well as how they may complement
different operations. Richard and Bernie are also new to the Parkes region and share with us their experience with buying rural property and farming across a variety of landscapes, including offering us some handy tips when purchasing our next property. Local Land Services Mixed Farming officer Rohan Leach sat down with Richard and Bernie at the Forbes office for this episode.
Good day, listeners. Today, I'm with Richard and Bernie Sharp from Parkes. Welcome to the podcast, guys.
Thank you, Rohan.
Thank you, Rohan.
Richard, can you start off with a bit of a rundown of your operation at Coraki?
Yeah, sure. We've got a mixed operation there, grain, grazing crops, and sheep, as well as a shedding sheep stud.
And hectares, what are we looking at there?
Hectares is around about 1,000 hectares now, over two blocks here.
What's the management like over the two blocks? How far?
Oh, they're only a K part, Rohan, so it's just all run as one.
And Bernie, what's your role in the business?
At the moment, I work off-farm four days a week for a stock and station agent in Forbes. And I help Richard on the farm on weekends as well as take care of the administration and paying the bills and things like that in the background.
So Richard saves up all the drenching of the shedding sheep for the weekends?
Everything.
Yeah.
Sheep work, fencing, everything. Yes, yes.
Oh, it's good to hear.
Although he does tell me he's very busy during the week as well.
Yes.
Any right of reply there, Richard?
No, but I've got to say she's very good with ramming posts in. We have a rammer, so she lines all the strainers up and we just ram them in, which is I couldn't do it on my own, so she's brilliant at that.
So just more of your block at Coraki, what are the soil types? Describe the landscape to the people.
Okay. So we're on the Bogan River, 30 odd Ks west of Parkes. Goes from a heavy clay underneath, goes from some heavier soil up to a red, what I'd call a red loam, then a red chocolate. And then it finishes a timber at the back, which we've signed with Biodiversity NSW. We've done an agreement there so that we can help in retaining that vegetation. But the soil's very tight. It hasn't been farmed. It's very run down and it hasn't been opened up over the last 30 odd years from the
previous management. So now that we're hoping to do that with a combination of using machinery and multi- species cropping to get the air and water into the soil.
And so tell us a little about your multi- species cropping.
Yeah, sure. So when we're in Tamworth, we started off up there and it's becoming quite a mainstream thing. People are replacing grazing crop sites in particular because they found the multi- species is allowing you to carry more per hectare and they're finishing quicker. So we brought that knowledge with us. I was doing quite a bit of contracting up there.
So we're doing both summer and winter multi- species. We've used some very smart different mixes, which have probably got too many things in them that some of them just don't grow where we are. You ultimately will need about four to five plant species when you're doing it. So in a winter one, typically you'll have oats, daikon, radish, maybe buckwheat. And you need to get those roots like the fellows are doing with canola, get the roots into
the soil and also get the microbes going. In summer, you're using things like sunflowers, buckwheat, or vetch is another one, things that get nitrogen and open the soil up. The animals really love it and they seem to eat different things at different times. One of the faba beans in our current winter, multi- species, they left it there, the lambs, for about eight to 10 weeks. Then suddenly they ate all the faba beans. They'd left them, they were sticking
right up, and for some reason their tastes changed. So it's interesting to watch it the way they, especially with shedding sheep generally, they tend to selectively graze and they're different species.
It is funny how a plant will just go through its natural progression of... And some days, yeah, they'll have higher nitrogen and higher protein, and some days they'll have higher sugars. And that's all it takes for the animals to go, " Well, bang, that's tasty. I'm onto that now."
It's not so different, Rohan, to humans. You can't eat chocolate all the time, although some people would think so, or drink beer all the time. So you need a balance of everything. And animals, they certainly know what they want.
Bernie, you guys have been here for about 18 months. So what was your situation before coming down to God's country?
Yeah, that's right. We do love it here. We had a farm in Tamworth. We were very lucky to purchase that farm just before things in rural real estate went a little bit crazy. And so we spent about three years up there. And again, made quite a lot of improvements to that farm. Absolutely beautiful spot. We love Tamworth,
and very picturesque as well. But we had quite a lot of hilly country, not all of arable country, so reasonable for grazing but there was nothing much really we could do to improve the soil or to provide extra grazing for our stock so we were quite limited as to numbers there. And with prices having gone the way they did there, there wasn't a lot of opportunity for
us to expand. And we were very keen to expand with our SheepMaster sheep, so we started to look around for different areas that would give us that opportunity to buy some arable country. And we knew the area around Parkes. We were familiar with it, and the prices there were much more reasonable than the Tamworth so we decided to make the move here and we're very glad that we did.
Yup. And so the move has given you a bit more scale and room to build?
Yes, room to build, room to value add, room to run more animals. Even on the same amount of acreage as what we had there, we are just able to run more animals here and have a more profitable operation.
Yeah. So what were you looking for when you were looking for a property?
The main criteria I think for us was something that was arable. That was the main criteria. And we also wanted something that was not too far from a main center. We're only about an hour and 15 minutes from Forbes. We're less than two hours from Orange. There are good livestock selling facilities at Forbes, which again is only 15 minutes away, as well as Dubbo. So we think being in the sheep business, you need to have those facilities close by and you need to have the services of a...
For us, having the services available and support available in those towns is very important, and that's why we chose this particular area. Like I said, price was a... It was a big consideration for us. It's very easy to overpay per acre, and you'll never make any money out of it no matter how well you do or how well you farm it. So that was a big factor for us.
And finally, we were hoping for something with a bit of infrastructure, good infrastructure on it, shedding silos, et cetera, and a nice house, a nice house.
Yeah. Just to chime in on that as well, Rohan, I think how I've always bought farmland is to work it out per DSE. You've also got to allow for being near a bigger center like Dubbo and Forbes, but price you pay per DSE is the only way to compare areas within reason. And obviously you carry more livestock if you've got higher rainfall. Further west, you get maybe the capital growth. It's not as easy sometimes to sell a place as it is
if you're at Tamworth or Armidale or whatever. So there's some other factors. But on the whole, you've got to have something to compare a farm at Tamworth, Murray, Liverpool Plains. Otherwise, you've got no idea what you... It might be deer in a certain area, but you might be able to run three times as many livestock. So that's always been the way that I've tried to work it out within reason.
Yeah. So you've bought and traded properties before in the past?
Yeah.
So what's your background in that, Richard?
I grew up in the Hunter Valley on a family farm. Went away to boarding school. When I came back, I was very lucky within a very short time of leaving school. I was managing a place, but then ended up buying part of that and then just expanded over time. And then we got bigger. In that area, we had about 6, 000 hectares by then and were cropping quite a lot. And I took the initiative of selling at the peak of
the previous property boom. And took a couple of years to do it, but we bought country at orange and had a magnificent place that was very heavy carrying. And I had some off- farm things I was doing then and we were just trading steers, so we got down to a low labor input and I had manager running that. And we did really well out of that pure Angus steers and their currency anytime in a drought or whatever. And we turned them over every one and a half times a year, every eight months. And
that was very simple. So that was a change of direction, and now we've ended up back in sheep again. So it's funny how things take you. I started off in sheep, cattle, and farming and then into cattle only and then back into the sheep and cropping.
Yeah. So getting back to your early comments about buying per DSE, carrying capacity, any tips for listeners on where that intersection or how to work that out for themselves?
Where I see things getting way out of hand now is people have got great assets. In the last couple of years, people nearly doubled their asset in value, but unfortunately-
In terms of their land.
In terms of their land. So this is the grounding from the logic. Equity doesn't equal cashflow. So a lot of people went out when the neighbors came up for sale, their own had gone up with value, so they borrow all the money to buy the neighbors and you've got to use everything to pay the new bit of land off. But it hasn't given you really any extra cashflow except for servicing the new block of land. And interest rates have gone up so it depends on when you enter
the cycle. To answer your question, I keep it simple. I've always thought if you can pay 6 to $ 700 of DSE on average, then you've got the improvements to factor in. We've got a new brick home and good improvements. You might prefer more acres and not get the house. The house is always a bonus price- wise. There's just a set of factors, and when I think capital gains across everything
is probably proportionate. The only thing that's really making it difficult for Australian farmers generally now is the outside interest coming in to use superannuation money, which is really putting a false floor in Australian farming to an extent because if only a few people, a small percentage are benefiting from selling their farms to the corporates, be it overseas money or local, whereas the majority just having to pay more to buy the neighbors and paying more rates. But
they're actually not making any more money. Yes, it's a great asset if you can service it, but that to me is a really big thing. These funds have got so much money now. For example, Canadian teachers pension fund, the Mormon church just bought land in Queensland, 265 billion they have in assets, and it makes it very difficult for a farmer to expand and get his children on the land. I don't know where it's going to end.
That's right. And I think what you just mentioned is something really important in terms of succession planning for farmers now because if it was difficult before to pass the farm on to someone, one of your children, it's certainly been worth the land is worth now. It's certainly very difficult to do that and it becomes prohibitive for a lot of families, and they end up selling up because they just can't
find any way of making it even remotely fair. Also, a massive barrier for new people to enter agriculture.
It's pretty hard to split a 5 to $ 10 million asset that's one parcel of land pretty fair and equitably, isn't it?
And there's a difference there of what's fair and what's equitable to keep a viable family farm going and to look after the others that aren't on the land. So that makes it very difficult. And to give you an idea of buying power, back in the '70s, I remember my father saying, one, we used to gross 10 to 12 bags where I grew up of wheat to the acre. And in those days, land and a ton of wheat was just about the price of one acre of land gross. And the expenses were one
fifth of the price of a ton of wheat. Gosh, today it's just, I know wheat's a bit better, but it's going backwards in real terms the whole time. I know people say you've got to get bigger, but that's the other problem now with the community generally around Parkes, Forbes, wherever it is. We're getting less and less people in those communities because people are getting bigger machinery. There's less people there to be on the local cricket club or
whatever it is. And so it's wrecking the fabric of all these little towns and you can't get doctors and can't get other services, and so that makes it really difficult. So it's not a bugbear of mine, but it's something that I find sad that wherever you go, you see all these little halls and clubs falling down because the people just aren't there anymore for various reasons, yeah.
Getting back to your point about 20% of your input costs being the value of the grain, I think the CSIRO farming systems trial, which is going on at the moment all across New South Wales in various locations, a recent figure I saw in that was anywhere from for every dollar invested, you're maybe making between $1.20 and $1. 40 in some of the better scenarios in cropping. So that's a scary thought.
Yeah. Well, if you compare that to racehorses, I think you've got a better chance at Randwick each way than doing that. And going back 50 years, when you purchased a farm, that was the biggest outlay you had. You could control your costs. These days when you purchase a farm, most banks won't go past 65% LVR, but you then need, for the smallest farm debt- free, you need about $ 200,000 to open the gate these days. So it's completely changed. And
when you speak of a dollar invested for every $1.20 to a $1. 40, we're relying on the weather. If you said to someone in Sydney, " Oh, I'm going to risk your whole income for the year and you'll be 20% or 40% better off next year," they'd look at you as if you are crazy.
I think everyone probably wonders why they're in agriculture at some times, but maybe let's get onto the points of why we are in agriculture. So you mentioned earlier that you've got a SheepMaster flock and stud. So can you start off with what are SheepMasters?
SheepMasters, yes. We came across them about four years ago. They're an Australian developed breed. They were developed in Western Australia and they've been around for about 30 years now. They're a beautiful shedding sheep, very clean shedding. They're designed for Australian conditions. They do very well under Australian conditions, even quite marginal conditions. They're designed to be able to forage and to be able to travel quite well over distances.
So they're quite well suited to the medium arid to arid areas, although they have a very good structure. They've got excellent feet so they can actually tolerate quite a bit of moisture as well.
Where they were developed in Western Australia near Albany, they were developed within three kilometers, I think it was, of the sea. And it rains there I don't know how many inches of rain a year. It could be 50 inches. But even when we went over to the sail, they were standing in three inches of water. And I think I might've seen one sheep that might've been a bit limp- y. But if they do there, they'll do anywhere. And this has been a...
We're constantly asked by people how are the feet because their other breeds, there's some that people aren't so happy about with their feet. These are bred for, as Bea said, for walkability, but they've got very good feet. So yes, they're bred in a very wet, unnatural environment for sheep. On that note, also, just out of interest, January before last, the manager of that stud over there came over the wall of a dam.
It was very hot weather they were having over there, in the 40s, and he found nearly 40 of these lambs swimming not on the edge, so swimming in the dam. And by the time he got his camera out, his phone, I think he got 26, that's on YouTube, of the sheep actually having a swim. So they're totally different. So when we mention water, it's not something they worry about too much. So creek crossings with water in the mark are negative, aren't very good as a boundary.
I'm just imagining delinquent lamb children just duck diving in a dam together. So that's where my mind's gone. Bernie, can you tell me a bit more about what's the breeding, the background behind them in terms of what have they been bred from?
Well, there was a number of breeds that went into the development originally. Quite a few breeds were used in the early days, anything from Dorpers to White Suffolk, Damara, Kojak. So I think there were up to about seven breeds initially. Some of those were only used for a very brief period. There's not much infusion there. But the breed's been stabilized for quite a number of years now where they've just
used pure SheepMasters and they've gone on with that. So what we have on hand now is very stable breed that's been bred back to itself for quite a while now.
So what differentiates the SheepMaster from other shedding sheep?
Well, we've tried other shedding sheep and we still have other shedding sheep as well. We bought a couple of good lines of Dorpers in the early days. This is before we got onto the SheepMasters. And we've also got a few lines of very decent Aussie Whites. I think there are a lot of good shedding breeds. I don't think that one shedding breed necessarily does everything for all people.
One of the reasons we were still looking even after we'd bought those sheep was that we just felt that in terms of structure, walkability, shedding ability, and just being able to produce a larger carcass without being over- finished.
Yeah, they look very slug. Having seen them for the first time at your open day the other week, they look very different to your well- muscled Dorper where you can almost see the lamb cutlets on the back end. But these SheepMasters are very different, quite long and leggy. But yeah, they're still obviously a lot of weight in them.
Yes, they're heavier than they look, I think, sometimes. I think for us they are an ideal sire to put over other shedding breeds, like you mentioned, the Dorper. Some of those Dorpers can really... They're beautiful sheep and they shed beautifully and they share the same fertility as a SheepMaster, but they can get almost a little bit muscle- bound,
almost a little bit too short in the leg. And this is a... A SheepMaster is a great way to add just a little bit of height, a little bit of range to the sheep, a little bit of length, and it allows you to maybe grow it out to a slightly heavier carcass than what you'd be able to take your Dorper to, thereby maybe just increasing a little bit of what you actually get for your sheep at the end of the day.
And Bernie, I know you work in the Forbes sale yards
I do.
With one of the agents here. Have you seen any differences in performance in the sale yards compared to other shedders?
Yes. What we've put through so far through the sale yards, we don't put a lot of sheep through the sale yards. We prefer to sell direct. It's only when we have little lots that what we have put through has been Aussie White crosses and Dorper crosses. In the yards at the moment at Forbes, pretty much all shedding sheep are called just a shedding run, but they seem to hold up the same as other shedders. They seem to hold up
well in terms of price per kilo paid. I don't think you're going to get a premium necessarily, and that's not what we are looking for. We're just looking for a good size sheep that you can hang plenty of meat off and get paid well by the kilo and have plenty of kilos.
Richard, what's the thing that you like the most about them?
A couple of things I like is the fertility. These things will join at 12 months of the year. They're unbelievable, which is a great positive, and no seasonality whatsoever. The other thing that I love about them is they actually, when you get a pure SheepMaster, you actually don't even get any wool on the mainstream growing. It's more like a satiny loose skin. So they just, you've seen it yourself on some of ours, and that's as long as it gets. They might get the slowest bit of fuzz,
so you haven't got anything dropping off. And the size of them, as you saw, we've got one ram there the other day. It weighs 163 kilos. Now, he's rising four from memory, but they get well into the 130s. Now, if you were person producing normal prime lambs, the shearers that have a fit, you wouldn't probably get shearers if you had to shear ewes that were 110. But what I'm saying is if you can get them bigger, but they're not something that people have got to handle, that's better for
your carcass. Normally, the ewes on these are 70 kilos or something, but they are getting bigger, whereas some of the composites now, they're getting up into the 100 kilos for the ewes. And I don't know how the shearers are going to handle those. So to answer your question, the fertility really is amazing and the walkability and the length of them, and I think you can always strive more and more. We are really focused on the eye muscle as we
go along. We are going to put together a lot of data and we're probably one to two years away from really having a lot of data where some people want data, other people don't want any. Personally, you look at an animal. If you like it, you then look at the data to see what it tells you.
So yeah, you've probably already dabbled in what my next question was, but what are the plans for your stud?
Main thing is we need to get our numbers up, especially in terms of our ewe flock still, because we can also see that as well as a market for rams, there is a massive demand for ewes. We get asked for ewes all the time. And at the moment, really by the time we class our sheep, we use all
our young ewes as replacement ewes. So we are really looking forward to building our numbers quickly enough that we can get rid of all our cross-breds and all our original sheep and really replace those with SheepMaster ewes, which will also give us an excellent base to choose from for our rams. Our big thing with our study is that we want to continue to bring in those outside genetics. We believe
that that's the best way forward for us. There are several SheepMaster studs doing absolute, including the wild oat, and the parents start doing an excellent job of producing absolutely top quality sheep, and I think that's a very quick way for our stud to move forward. So one of the big things for us to concentrate on going forward, like Richard says, is data. We know our sheep are good. We can look at them and know they're good. We
know the size we buy are excellent. And it will just be a real help for people in making a purchasing decision to have some solid data behind that. But that obviously takes time to record that we already electronically ear tag everything we have. We have all the equipment ready. It's just a matter of having the time to do it. So that's something that we will definitely focus on going forward.
And on that also too, when we bought the initial 10 stud rams when we first started, the muscle score on those was it ranged from I think the last was 46 up to 53, which is quite extraordinary for an eye muscle reading. And so that's what we'll be focusing on as well, because you can use them as
a maternal, a paternal, or put them as... Bea mentioned earlier that we will be at the national field days again this year, and last year I remember people coming up and asking about them, say, " Well, I've had an experience with this other breed." And I say, " Look, yep, we've got those as well. Put these over them and you'll actually be amazed that cross is a really good cross." And we're trying to explain to people. You want people to put the toe in the water and see what
the benefits are. And if there's something that's troubling them with another breed, see what you can do with crossing. And if you're happy with the cross, well, you've only got to go one more and you're nearly, you got three- quarter cross anyway, back to the SheepMaster. The other thing that's interesting too is that information that's just come out from Matt Dalgleish, I think his name is, from Episode 3 and the fact that in four years, the shedding ewes in Australia have gone up three and
a half times. From '20 to '24, they've gone from 2% of the flock nationally to 7%. So there's obviously a change in the air. And Bea mentioned earlier about having rams for people, it's a bit of chicken and egg. We've got quite a few rams now available. But if you haven't got them, people might go elsewhere. But if you have got them, then you've got to get the bars. So it's people
making people aware of what's available. We think Southern Queensland is a large untapped market now because of the amount of exclusion fencing that's being carried out on country that was traditionally properly Merino, Longreach and north of Longreach right up to Hughenden. And that's where these sheep will be easy for people that are probably cattle in mentality but would like to try sheep again. And if they've got exclusion fencing, it's a no- brainer.
So you guys sell your rams at a sale or just off- farm? Have you got an open day?
We have sold our... This year is actually the first year that we've had rams for sale that we feel we want to stand behind the quality and we want to stand behind our product, and we felt that this is the first year we've reached that. So we sold rams at two separate sales early in the year. We sold at the national sale, multivendor sale, and we also sold at a friend's sale in Dubbo. Our rams sold very well there. We're extremely pleased. We sell rams just
on the farm at any time. Obviously we've just had the field day. We've sold some more rams there. It was really good to see people new to the breed coming along as well to that. And we will be at the Orange Field Days, Australian National Field rays. We'll have some great little selection of Rams.
One that I've touched on already, which a lot of farmers don't mention, but I just wonder if that overseas investment, which is just seems to be almost open slather through the Foreign Investment Review Board, how it's affecting us. I don't think people realize how that's flowing down for normal farmers trying to buy more land, and there just seems to be no stopping the flood of that coming in. I
see that as being long term. And they're identifying Australia as cheap land, but are they identifying just as an investment because cheap land, or I'm just being cynical, not sure that they're wanting to grow food and feed the world. It's just an investment to a lot of funds. That's probably one of my biggest negatives for ag, Rohan.
And maybe on the opposite of that, Bernie, what do you see as a big win in recent years?
If there's something I would mention, it's probably the free trade agreements that seem to be negotiated in more recent times, and hopefully that will be a positive thing for Australia. I know certainly in the livestock industry, exports in both beef and lamb are up phenomenally this year, so that's got to be a good thing. So yeah, I think that's what I would say.
Fantastic, guys. I've had a great time today, and thanks for coming into the Forbes office. It's been great learning a bit more about the SheepMaster sheep.
Thanks, Rohan. Really appreciate your time.
Thank you, Rohan.
Thanks for listening. This podcast was brought to you by Central West Local Land Services. Local Land Services delivers advice and support to farmers, landholders, and the community across New South Wales. To learn more, you can find us online by searching for Central West Local Land Services. If you'd like more information about the topics we discussed today as well as links to relevant articles, fact sheets, events, and other helpful resources, we've added those into the show notes
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