Key Messages:

• Assessing the economic outcomes of containment finishing Merino lambs compared to paddock-based finishing systems, including costs, labour, and profits.
• Understanding the whole farm impacts of implementing a containment finishing system, including paddock-based feed utilisation, feed allocations, system flexibility, and overall resilience.
• Quantifying Merino lamb production performance in containment finishing and investigating the potential to target alternative market specifications.

Project Summary:

Finishing Merino wether lambs on cereal stubbles in the WA Wheatbelt is common due to low cost, but declining stubble quality, seasonal feed unreliability, and market penalties for over-aged lambs highlight the need for improved post-weaning nutrition strategies. 

The aim of this MLA Producer Demonstration Site (PDS) project is to demonstrate that utilising containment finishing systems for Merino wether lambs post-weaning can improve profitability, market compliance, and early market readiness compared to paddock finishing in the WA Wheatbelt. 

Project Background:

In the Western Australian Wheatbelt, finishing Merino wether lambs on cereal stubbles is a common, low-cost system. However, stubbles rapidly decline in nutritional value, resulting in low feed utilisation, reduced growth rates, and delayed turn-off. This often leads to lambs missing optimal market windows and incurring price penalties. These challenges are being intensified by declining winter rainfall and later seasonal breaks, which limit pasture availability during the critical post-weaning period.

Containment feeding offers a potential alternative by providing consistent nutrition and allowing feed resources to be reallocated across the farm, including improved pasture recovery and ewe management. At the same time, genetic improvements in Merino sheep have increased their growth and carcass potential, creating new opportunities to target higher value markets.

Despite this, adoption of containment finishing systems remains limited in Western Australia due to uncertainty around costs, labour requirements, and whole-farm impacts. There is a lack of regionally relevant data comparing productivity, market outcomes, and economic performance of containment feeding against traditional paddock-based systems, which this project aims to address.