Lambs Alive takes my lifetime passion of increasing lamb survival rates into an online coaching program to help many more farmers make deeper and sustainable change.
The Lambs Alive program runs alongside you for the full 12 month year.
A seven month formal training program tracking your lambing season, you can access at any time.
12 months access to our private support group.
8 live support calls with industry experts.
Coaching is delivered by me with support from some of the best farmers in your region, as well as other farmers who are having a good crack at things.
The focus is on implementing the practical applications that will have the biggest impact for your farm.
The truth is, aside from being a husband to my wife Penny and father of 4...
I am my life's mission.
I have a vision of saving 5 million lambs. Lofty goal I know, but as you are aware the impact on the animals, the farmer and the supply chain as a whole is enormous.
My ethos has always been to produce more from less and guide farmers on how they can use their existing resources to make sustainable change across multiple points of the lambing season, both on my own farm and in the programs I am involved in.
One such program is Lifetime Ewe Management (LTEM) for which I was the lead author. LTEM coaches producers to understand and evaluate the impact of ewe nutrition on ewe and progeny performance. The program has now been delivered to over 4,000 farmers (representing 30% of the national flock) by myself and over 50 educators who I directly trained. Participants increased their number of lambs weaned by 8%, improving the whole-farm stocking rate by 10% and reducing ewe mortality by 30%.
Another program that you may associate me with is Bred Well Feed Well. It’s a one-day workshop for sheep producers that I co-developed which deliverers best practice breeding and feeding messages. As the primary deliverer of the program, it has now reached 4,500 producers that are breeding and managing their animals so that they are fit for farm and fit for market. Evaluation shows that participants who have increased marking rates solely due to BWFW have done so by 9%.
Having grown up on farm all my life, initially at Flowerdale Farm in Kinglake, then at the foothills of the Grampians between Dunkeld/Glenthompson, then onto Newlands at Apsley and finally the expansive plains of Casterton/Strathdownie, I have a life-long experience in the sheep and beef industries.
Along with my wife Penny and her parents, I now manage a significant livestock enterprise near Glenrowan in north east Victoria, with 3000 ewes and 250 cows. This self-replacing high productivity operation provides me with a great practical background and a constant reality check with the challenges that all producers are facing on a day to day basis. A key focus for the last 10 years or more has been to improve lamb survival, with our flock now achieving 90% survival rates of foetuses scanned.
