Breeding Poll Dorsets does not need to be a battle of “fire and ice” or the numbers camp and the phenotype camp. Blending both together will create the demand for Poll Dorsets into the future.

Speakers at the National Poll Dorset Conference were quick to show respect to both sides as they suggested the way forward for the breed, highlighting the value of using performance data alongside visual trait selections.

Sheep Genetics Operations Manager Peta Bradley told delegates that while seedstock producers were constantly monitoring sires, the commercial producer essentially made a ram selection decision once a year. That decision-making process will come down to which driveway they are going to drive down when they buy their rams.

“As we move forward, commercial producers are more and more astute,” Ms Bradley said. “They are more financially aware, they need to make a quid and look at different ways to do that. They are asking for more data and more information to help make an informed decision on which genetics they are going to purchase.”

Ms Bradley likened the selection process on the best-performing rams to a sporting team, where looking at its logo did not tell anything about performance.

But with a sporting team, talking to the coach, finding out about training regimes and how well they travel to play at different venues does provide data which can help assess the potential.

She said sheep breeding should be considered the same way, with the sheep version of the sporting questions asked of the breeder.

“Once you have picked your team, or in the case of commercial buyers, which driveway you are going to drive down, the next question is which ram or which pen of rams you will select or take home,” Ms Bradley said. “That’s like taking the team and saying which player has scored the most tries in the past season. It’s difficult to make a decision by just looking at the team photo, but if you have more data, you can start to make a bit more of an informed decision.”

Ms Bradley said commercial breeders were thinking about two main questions when they bought rams.

“The challenge for a commercial business is to assess if they are happy with where the breed is and where the breed is heading, and if the answer is no and you want a different outcome, you are going to have to do something different,” she said.

There was also now the ability for commercial breeders to use combined LambPlan evaluation, allowing sheep breeders to access data and compare terminal and maternal breeds.

“This is a one-stop shop for genetic evaluation for prime lamb sire breeds,” Ms Bradley said. “It allows a greater comparison of breeds, compares genetics of different breeds, and more data therefore can better predict genetic merit.”

NextGen Agri Director Mark Ferguson said Poll Dorsets had been overtaken as the premier terminal breed in about 2013–2014.

He said it was important to think about what breeders might need to change to reclaim some, or all, of that ground. Part of that was the breed’s competitors’ willingness to embrace performance figures.

“The number of Poll Dorset animals being submitted to LambPlan was overtaken by our competitor in about 2013,” Mr Ferguson said. “There were a few reasons behind that, as there was a higher uptake of LambPlan in our competitor than Poll Dorsets and the breed was perceived as the best alternative to use over Merinos.

“But I’m not worried about the past and it now doesn’t matter because, as a breed, Poll Dorsets need to design animals that can be dominant in the industry and suit what it needs.”

Mr Ferguson said customer focus was critical, and there were two “very clear” customers.

“At one end, there is the consumer of the product, and we used to think of families in Australia eating a chop,” he said. “Now 68 per cent of lamb is consumed offshore at high-end restaurants, eaten by people who are willing to pay for it.

“If they are not enjoying it, the whole thing doesn’t work so we need to think about that when breeding.”

The other customer for a ram breeder was the client – the person who will turn up to a ram sale and buy rams.

“The two very clear customers are equally as important,” Mr Ferguson said. “While the one that pays the money is the most important on the day, as an industry we need to think about other customers as well.”

Mr Ferguson said everything in breeding objectives should be focused on one of those two customers – either the end consumer eating the lamb or the producer driving up your driveway to buy your ram.

“Every good business is focused on customers, and those that don’t, don’t do that well,” he said.

Mr Ferguson said intramuscular fat was a good example of how to ensure quality.

“We have heard about it for years, and we finally have tools in place where the IMF can be measured, and we are starting to see differentiation in the market,” he said.

“Beef is well ahead of us in this game, obviously through breeding for IMF.

“Perhaps we lost our way when we focused on growth and muscle too much and not enough on meat eating quality.

“Now we are well and truly back on track with genetic trends for IMF ticking away beautifully again.”

Mr Ferguson questioned just how hard the push should be for IMF.

“How far should we go and do we need to be 10 per cent?” he said.

“The answer is probably not, as we all love and eat lamb at 4–6 per cent marbling and we really enjoy it.

“In your breeding objective, it’s up to you whether you make that 7 and above or are happy to keep it where it is.

“But it needs to be part of the breed objective because letting it slip makes it tough to eat.”

While effort had been focused on the IMF part of the eating quality equation, shear force must also be part of this.

“So when you put a butter knife through a bit of lamb loin, it is easy to cut and easy to chew and is a fantastic eating experience, so IMF is good, really tender is even better,” he said.

Mr Ferguson said this was where genomics was important, as over the next two decades there was nothing else that would give breeders shear force data, with the inability to determine shear force based purely on IMF.

“The breed needs to keep topping up the genomic database to keep forcing shear force lower,” Mr Ferguson said.

“I think we forgot about shear force because Wagyu told a story about high IMF and tenderness, but shear force is equally as important.”

Mr Ferguson said it was important to make decisions that would have the breed, and breeders, ready for 10 years’ time.

Angus breeder Erica Halliday from Ben Nevis Angus at Walcha, NSW, said it was possible to breed for type and for numbers, something they had done in their own business.

“We decided we wanted to do something different and used the fire and ice model to get where we wanted to go,” Ms Halliday said.

“There are some Angus breeders who breed for type and some people who breed for numbers.

“We decided we liked the type of cattle my father and grandfather had, which were successful and worked in our country.

“That type of cow was important for her constitution, ability and all those things you breed for.

“At the same time, we wanted to ensure that customers had a good eating experience.

“It seemed like people wanted to be in one camp or the other, but we decided we wanted to do both.

“To do that, I think you needed to do things differently and a lot of genetics wasn’t working for us that others were choosing.”

That led Ben Nevis to test internally within their herd to find animals that worked for them.

“This has been the culmination of type and genomics,” she said.

“We looked at every female on the place, rated her on how her progeny performed and progeny sales.

“We developed indexes in the herd to determine the cows we would have as donors and the rest we made as recipients, and we made real genetic progress.”