Crunching the Ag-Tech Numbers Saves Time for Australian Farm

Time management is key on the Walker family’s farm, where a mix between cropping, commercial sheep and two studs means timing is everything, according to an article on The West Australian website.

The Newdegate farmers’ mixed cropping-sheep operation has doubled in size in the past decade.

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They also have a Suffolk and White Suffolk stud, Jusak.

Expanding the business meant a few things had to change.

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Peter Walker said their original lambing time was in April and May — right in the middle of seeding.

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“You’d wake up, go and check the lambing sheep and look for any problems,” he said. “You’d mark as many as you could, then make sure you had the airseeder and boomspray running, then duck back to the sheep again and try and catch up on the job you’d left there.

“If something went wrong somewhere, you ended up doing an average job of both.”

Back then, the farm had three labour units, with Peter, his father Syd and a workman.

The 4000ha seeding program alone was enough to tie them all up, let alone the lambing of their commercial and stud ewes.

The family had been manually collecting performance data on lambs to gather Australian sheep breeding values via Lambplan but found time constraints were making it difficult.

Read more at TheWest.com.au.

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