Thank you for joining today's webinar on Flock Data. Why Bother is part of the 2023 lecture series for the webinar Vett. So across the next hour, I'm gonna introduce myself, we'll chat about what flock data actually means.

Consider why clients might want to record or might need to record. Think about what data would be beneficial for us as vets, but also for the clients. Consider how people can record, discuss the benefits of health planning, and some things that are coming up, which can really help us.

Capitalise on any data collection that our clients are doing, discuss benchmarking and targets and the difference between those two things. Finish up with some top tips, and then all the way through this, I'd like you guys to reflect on everything I'm saying and some of the data with a view of how you can then engage more clients yourselves. Think about what, what the takeaways from this will be at your practise and with your sheep flocks and how you can make it work in your local area, as well as when we consider sort of national flog data as well.

So I'm Dave Charles. I qualified from the University of Birmingham in 2013, and then I went to Bristol Vet School and left there in 2019. I did a year in mixed practise, and then for the last 3 and a bit years, I've been at Scarsdale Mets in Derby, where I also started my advanced practitioner certificate, which, by the time this goes out, I should have finished.

And in 2021, I set up Midlands Advanced Breeding Services as well as a collaboration between three practises in the Midlands aiming to offer advanced breeding services, including laparoscopic AI. Which has been growing really well, but today we're going to talk about data. So what does flock data actually mean?

Bit of an ambiguous term, it's very different to different people, and also what we get back when we ask people for data, really varies depending on the client, the holding. And their interest as well. So I find, particularly at uni, when we talk about data, sort of herd health and flock health, the first thing that probably comes to people's minds.

A graphs like this, when we think about the dairy sector and all that extra information that we gain when our dairy herds are doing regular milk recording and sort of being able to analyse mastitis patterns, fertility patterns, conception rates. A little bit different for sheep, because we don't have people coming on all the time and doing the recording for us like we do with the the milk recorders, so. We're a lot more reliant on ourselves and the clients.

Obviously, now something that we're starting to do locally is utilising our vet tech a lot more as well in terms of data collection and then having that vet led data analysis and conversations, but the data can really be collected by anybody if they know what they're looking for correctly. So, flood data can encompass all sorts of things. For instance, it might be simple things such as flock size, might be replacement rates.

Weight, so birth weight, daily life weight gain perhaps, and then obviously your all important sort of killing out percentages, dead weight, carcass classifications. Report, obviously everything you do, that comes into data, whether that's average spend per you, whether it's genetic merit breeding vet reports. Scanning percentage, that's something that probably the vast majority of your clients will know off the top of your head, and that's a number that they'll quite often quote to you as to how well a year has been, but we'll discuss the pros and cons of using scanning percentages should be all and end all a bit later.

Market report. Egg count. So when we're considering flock health, parasite, burdens, partly rotation, faecal egg counts, and faecal egg count reduction tests are a really important piece of data that we want to be getting really every 6 to 8 weeks throughout the grazing season and obviously more if we've got an indicated problem, or if we're doing drench testing or.

Quarantine procedures. Why we want people to record flock data. There's a real variety of reasons, and the motivators for each farm and each flock might be different.

So for some people, it's just gonna be about farm assurance and getting that red tractor Favel box ticked. Brothers It's considering how they can make their management ease easier if they want to be butching animals in groups of age or weight, for instance, if they're thinking about ewes coming up to lambing, if they've got that data in the expected lambing dates and scan data, then they can obviously tailor the nutrition to minimise the twin lamb risk, and they can consider. He to vaccinations and all of these sorts of things as well, which will need the data of the scanning information and the expected landing dates.

Some people find there are financial benefits by being able to track the data easier because it reduces the time, the farmer's time, which might not have a cost that springs to mind straight away, but if they drilled down and they gave themselves an hourly rate. Having easier tracking would definitely reduce their hourly rates. It might help with breeding decisions, it might help with health and welfare decisions, and that input into conversations that hopefully clients are having with us, might help with business progression.

So if they were looking at growing the flock or increasing their profitability, we're gonna need some data already to know how profitable the flock is at the moment to see where we're going and where we want to actually be going. And then obviously, everything we do when we're thinking about administering medications, whether it's a sale or whether we're treating the animal ourselves, withdrawal records and declarations are a key piece of data which are needed before anything goes into the food chain. If you A bit new to talking to your sheep blocks about data, and maybe traditionally, you've been more just down the sick animal route, but you want to sort of grow your, your flock health knowledge, your flock health planning.

Maybe you want to consider setting up a flock health club, any of these things, and you want some data to really be able to help your clients achieve their own objectives, you need to know what you need to ask your clients to get. And so it breaks down quite nicely into two areas. So the first area is what we call life data.

So these things. Don't really change, so EID, the genetics sire, the number of progeny. The birth date, the date that they're cold, and then finally, a sale price plus or minus the carcass grading.

But then we also have variable data which will change, and we tend to refer to that as physical data. So this could be a weight at any one point in time. It could be daily live weight gains.

It could be body condition score at different seasons and different times of year. It could be the scanning result for that particular year. It could be lambing records, and obviously also from our point of view, reasons for veterinary treatment administered as well.

A couple of years ago, a study was done surveying vets who did a sizable amount of sheet work, and the question was asked, what information would be most useful for flock production and performance discussions? And so your top answers were. Percentage.

8 week weaning weights, which is something that definitely. Isn't necessarily recorded and reported into the vets as often as scanning percentages are. Body conditions growing at key areas and we're gonna touch on that later.

Daily live weight gain of the lamb. Sales information and reasons for killing, death, or treatment. And as I said, that was part of a sheep Society poll that went out in 2020, and as you can see all of these things.

The farmers probably have to hand anyway, they're probably making a record of it. But actually having it provided to us as the vets will really help when we think about flock health planning and getting involved in those production and performance discussions and being able to really work in partnership with our sheep clients and make sure that we're both aiming for the same goal that the client wants. So Next thing you might want to consider is how can clients record this data?

So, obviously sales records are pretty easy. Everyone could have those to hand, likewise, movement records. All of your clients should have a medicines book as well, which will be a really easy way of getting a lot of data very quickly about medicines uses.

Hopefully they're recording accurately the reason for treatment as well, and obviously that will have your individual animals treated data in there too. Some people go A bit more old school and would just use a notepad, a lot of farmers probably still have these hanging around the lambing shed when they're recording things like twins, triplets. Lambs born dead, all of these things, but there are some really good apps out there as well and, Very mindful that this isn't gonna turn into a sales pitch, but we work quite closely with with Allflex, Shearwell, Agrieb.

And it really depends what what the client wants from their upwards to different things, but. These can work really well for clients, particularly if you want to not just record that key data, but also if you want to be able to know. More accurate breakdowns of how the flocks rotating over the pasture, which animals are in different groups, what was treated when all of this can pull into the app, and it can work really well.

And now some of these have a advisor type login as well, so that your clients can give you access as the vet to be able to remotely view this data as well and really pick up trends, for instance, If a huge amount of lameness treatment was needed, then you can pick out these trends and it might be identifying some areas for intervention. Obviously this can also be done with paper records as well, but the benefit of a digital system is that it will produce all those graphs for you and save quite a lot of time. And then as well, this is something at Garsdale that we issue all our clients free of charge if they want one at lambing time, because it, it's an A 0 laminated chart that just goes on the wall of the lambing shed or in the house somewhere, and then you just write on it with a sharpie, and when we come and do the post lambing review, we can just pull that off the wall, and we've got all that data there.

It's not on scraps of paper around the lambing shed that could get thrown away or get wet or anything like that. So it was just a nice value added that we added in. Three years ago, and we found it really useful, and a lot of clients use them, and it really benefits everyone because it saves flicking through loads and loads of paper and can make your block health planning conversations a lot more efficient, which obviously also makes them more targeted, and you probably keep that engagement more.

So Hopefully you all know EID tags are mandatory and cheap and they must be tagged by 12 months of old. So that's one EID tag and then one visual tag as well. If people are tagging at birth with an EID tag, it can really help in terms of data collection, and we find that the folk who are doing that early on.

Tend to be the ones who have more of their daily life weight gain data and everything to hand, because they're using these EID clips from birth and therefore, every time they're weighing them or treating them, it all just gets typed in at the same time rather than having to be input into a system later. So yeah stick or panel readers, these can feed directly to one of your apps or onto a laptop, and it can allow for individual and flock level data collection. Cost-wise, we know now there are quite a lot of grants out there as well to help with people sort of with the setup, but you're looking at for a stick reader like that one, approximately 550 expat as an average, but for a full weight reader that goes on your, your weight scales and can also affect your gaits as well, you're gonna be looking around about 2000 pounds as well.

And then the tags, obviously with the EID a little bit more than the plain number tags, but they do have to have one anyway by law. Using the electronic systems, obviously would reduce human error, particularly if you're dealing with big flocks and you're identifying individuals, if you're treating a whole group, we can be reliable on the accuracy of that data, but there is more financial input, obviously with the increased costs. So what do we actually want to do with these records?

We all know the thing that turns everybody off from recording and using data, that's clients and vets, is collating data for data's sake. If we're going to use records and we're going to ask people to record things for us, we need to be able to show a tangible benefit and a tangible outcome so that they feel like they've invested their time wisely. And really being able to do that requires you to identify with your sheep farmers and your flocks.

What areas they want to work on. And that depends on where they are in the flock cycle. So if they're at the start, you might want to use the information that you collect to inform decisions as you grow.

So it might influence sort of purchasing records or how you're gonna divide up your pasture for rotational grazing and these sorts of things. It might influence breeding decisions. If it's already a large flock that's doing a lot of recording anyway, then obviously we're gonna want that data for healthlaing, for flagging points for potential investigations, setting targets, and also what we can do is we can get a real-time cost per animal and track the effectiveness, for instance, of a, of a breeding female, by looking at the number of lambs that they rear each year, looking at, Any problems year on year to help inform culling decisions as well.

What health plan reviews. The main thing is, it should be far more than a a tick box exercise for farm assurance, although the benefit I guess of the farm assurance visit is it gets you on the farm to start these conversations and have a look at the records. It doesn't need to be something that you only look at once a year and then it's shelved and filed away.

It can be a fluid document, which can be added to, reviewed. Even sometimes we break them up and we look at key production areas at relevant times. So for quite a lot of our flocks now.

Rather than just doing one big visit in the summer ahead of the, the red tractor visit, for instance, we'll split it up and we'll do a post lambing review 4 or 5 weeks after the end of lambing. And then we might do the rest of the stock health plan, so sort of the biosecurity, all of that side. We might do that in the summer when the client's got a bit more time, or perhaps in the autumn, but you really want to make sure that Particularly with lambing data, you want to get that information while it's hot and while lambing's in people's minds.

We find if you go and talk to people about how last lambing was when they've really started tapping for the next year. It's a bit of a distant memory. They don't necessarily remember how many losses they had.

Whether it was a good year or a bad year, they're already thinking about the next year to come, so actually splitting it up can help with client engagement and also, potentially let you identify things early, so that for instance, if you find that you had a lot of, Abortions and you suspected a to so if you, if you get in there early, those barring news or those uses that aborted are probably still there to blood sample while there are schemes available to subsidise the blood testing. And also, you know then that you're gonna have your answers in time to go in with those abortion vaccines a month before the TUs go in. Whereas if you're only talking about it at tapping time, or even worse when you use are in Latin, then there's not really anything you can do about it for a whole extra year.

One thing that we're quite keen on is separating it out from other visits. So we try and do this with our dairy farms as well, that perhaps we don't sit down and go through the whole herd health plan after a fertility routine in the same way with the sheep work, we don't try and tie. Yeah, on to the end of something else.

We try and have a separate session. Clients can come into us, or we'll go to the farm, and then it's the main thing on everybody's mind, it's not have them to, when you're looking at some different animals or doing a lameness workup or anything like that, it can be really targeted focused time. The other thing that we're quite big on now, sending out record requests in advance.

So. Probably all of you are familiar with the health and performance record templates, they might look a bit like this one. And we send those out to clients in advance now because they can then pull all that data and actually.

The health plan visit meeting, whatever you want to call it, can actually then be targeted analysis of trends rather than tallying everything up. We can go in if we've got the data in advance and really focus on the bits, perhaps that they're above target or quite a long way off the benchmarks, and discuss how we can really focus on these particular areas. As well, obviously, most farm practises still work on a charge per minute model as well.

So actually, if we can save the clients a lot of time because they're not having to collect all their data while we're there, it means that, They're happier to have a longer visit discussing actually the outcomes and things that we can do rather than feeling like they've paid us for a lot of time when they've been looking for things. Obviously also it's a two way thing. You really want to think about what you need to do before you set on foot on that farm for that flock health plan visit as well.

So, do you need to produce your antibiotic reports before? Have you looked through your clinical notes for the last year, analysed any trends or any visits in what kind of sick animal. We've seen what kind of data we've provided, whether they've not vaccinated when they have in previous years.

If you're prepared with all of this before, you can be far more effective when you're on the farm, and then it's really considered as value added and you'll really grow your client engagement. For the review is a chance that pack of the year gone, so that's your, your analyse section, but it's also a chance to look forward and plan for the year ahead. So I quite like this cycle here where we analyse, we plan ahead, and then throughout the next year we're gonna monitor, and then you're gonna come together again and review, but that doesn't necessarily have to be a 12 month farm assurance cycle, that can be.

Any timeframe that suits you and that particular farmer. So yeah. Whether it's looking at, at the end of lambing, finding a problem, analysing it, making a plan, and that plan might actually be to go in early with toxo to vaccinate against toxoplasma.

The monitoring might be analysing how many bowel news you had at scanning, and then the review would come straight after that. It doesn't have to be every 12 months. And this is what's so good about using your flock data strategically, is it can show areas for attention, it can show possible improvement sections, and it can also identify where we might want to do some further investigations.

So to get on farm, take some bloods to implement faecal leg count testing, to implement faecal leg count reduction testing if we think we've got a resistance problem, to recommend perhaps postmortems if you're suffering with a lot of land losses as well. Perhaps it's. Teaching farmers to do.

You know, aborted or new, new lamb postmortems as well, you know, just to look at the lungs really quickly or perhaps. You know, it's saying if you get any abortions, this is the policy, a chance to remind them of the zoonotic health impacts as well. But what if you go to a farm that's not farm assured, so they're not used to having you on the farm once a year because they need to for their farm assurance.

Not everyone we go to, to be honest scheme. Hopefully, year on year we're seeing more and more people joining farm insurance schemes. But until they become mandatory, not everybody is going to be on one, and we don't want to just leave these clients behind and therefore also be detrimental to the welfare of those flocks.

So one way we, we can look at this is perhaps with a a flock health club. So all of our flock health club members, whether they are farm assured or not, they get a flock health planning visit. And that's included in the cost of the flock Health Club.

So for us it's an hour's time, which has already been paid for in the, in the monthly membership with the call out as well, and that is just to go over the flock health plan. Really sort of set some targets, consider how the year's gone and utilise that cycle that we were talking about earlier about analyse, plan, monitor, review. It might be that you get called out with the disease investigation, so it might be that you get called out because somebody's having a lot of abortions.

And that might be where you really start looking at the data and you can ask those bigger picture conversations beyond just the animal or animals that are presented to you. It's a chance to get on that farm and start the other conversations and build that relationship. Client talks again.

They're a really good way of engaging people with a particular topic, and also a lot of farmers like them because they can network and talk to other people who might be in similar situations and see what's helped them, and so. It could be that you've got a mix of clients that your client talk, some might be pharmasured, some might not be, but you might find that they get talking because they've had a similar issue, but the one that is pharm assured, they've worked with you closer through the health planning and picking up the data. But there's no reason that that is impossible to the non-pharmaceut client and that might just highlight that for them.

We do quite a lot of training. So whether that's like lambing courses for sort of new entrants or for new staff, or whether it's a more advanced sort of body conditioning scoring or medicines training, these sort of things, they're all good ways to start to talk about data and trends and really drill into what's going on on these flocks. And obviously as of 2022, the animal health and welfare pathways launched as well, which could be a really exciting opportunity to get onto farms that we might not normally be on because it's open to everybody, not just the farmers short.

Hey. It could be an exciting year of that starts in 2022. Your clients only need a minimum of 20 sheep to qualify for the payment.

So obviously, at the moment it's 436 pounds for a review payment. You have to do some testing for some intake resistance. But beyond that, the scope is quite open to tailor it to What you can identify with that particular client would benefit them.

It might be that you start with the endoparasite section because you're gonna do your analytic resistance testing anyway. It might be that you're going to a client that does a lot in that area anyway, and They might want to focus on lameness and really. We can use that visit and shape it how it works for the client and for that relationship to really drill into the data and get some funded on farm time and sort of consider health planning and also utilising the data to really benefit that client and that flock.

The other thing, obviously if you're pharm assured, but even if you're not pharm assured, we do antibiotic monitoring reports for everybody. Antibiotics could be a whole webinar in itself easily or probably even a whole series, but. It's not important that if you're gonna talk about flock data we need to be talking about this as well.

So the rumour targets. Across the board, 7.5% of all targets were hit.

We do know that a lot of that really was the, the pig in the poultry sectors, but on a sheep level, 34% reduction in oral antibiotic use in lambs. That's obviously gonna go down even more. We expect to coming off the market this season.

And also we've got a reduction in antibiotic use and prevalence of sleep illness and abortion, to monitoring and increased vaccine sales. Hopefully we're all familiar with the NOAA livestock vaccination guide that came out last year. Because interestingly in that lameness vaccine.

Coola vaccine and toxoplasma vaccines are all listed as category one vaccines, meaning that all stocks should receive these unless there's been a vet discussed conversation and a reason why that flock should not be receiving them. And it's an interesting one to think that there might come a point in time where this becomes quite a strong recommendation uptake through the farm insurance schemes. So red tractor, for instance, might very much suggest that all animals on a red tractor insurance scheme should be receiving category one vaccines.

That might be quite a way off, and it's purely a A hypothesis at the moment, but it would be interesting if some of the big dairy milk buyers make category one vaccines mandatory as part of their contract. There's no reason why other people couldn't do it in the sheep and the beef sectors as well. A lot being done obviously to tell much more today.

So in the latest report, it targets for 2020 to 2024. You want the data from 8000 plus flocks through the e-medicine cup, and this is really. How we're gonna get a much better idea of how we're doing in the sheep sector, because the amount of data for the sheep sector compared to say the pig or the poultry, is that much smaller that we can't really track the impact we're having until we get all this extra data coming up.

We want to further reduce the oral antibiotic use of lambs, as I mentioned obviously before, SETA is now off the market, so this is gonna be a very, very significant reduction, but. When we think about the data, what we need to be monitoring in our flocks that maybe we're heavily dependent on SETA, is that we're not seeing huge rises in joint ill or navel ill or other diseases as a result of that blanket specta not being used anymore. And to go to less than 0.05 use of HPCIA.

So when you're thinking about the medicines hub and all of this antibiotic data recording. I can't speak for every practise, but I know our practise, the big thing that we've really had to change. Across the whole practise really is to get a lot more specific when we sell to a mixed enterprise which animals that bottle is for, so.

That takes everybody right from reception. If somebody rings up and orders a bottle of Betaox through to educating the clients that we're gonna split the account up so we know what's for the sheep, what's for the beef, for instance, and also for the vets as well to make sure we're recording accurately our clinical notes and which animals we've treated and not just putting on a genetic, generic medicines record. There's some really good resources out there.

For antibiotic monitoring and reporting, so I tend to use the ones from Suet Society and the University of Nottingham. So they provide you with a really good calculator, a guidance document, there's an advice webinar, and if you use their system, it automatically separates out the report, HVCIAs, topical antibiotics, and oral antibiotics for lambs as well, making sure that. If you're gonna do any of the reporting yourself and not use their calculator, this is the key metric that you need, so total massive antibiotic per unit of sheep weight mix per gigs.

And that's your calculation there, total mig divided by 20 times the total number of lambs, plus 75 times the number of ewes for kilogrammes. And this is the spreadsheet which I was talking about that calculated it nicely. As long as you have a good record of what you've sold, it's got drop down options to pick your products, which will tell you the route.

It will know the ms already, so you just put in the number of mLs or the bottles, for instance, or the number of units. You can see here, 5 units of alaycin. So that'll be 5 bottles.

But for instance, it here nicely tells you 500 mL of aammycin. So that will also be 5 bottles, but you can see it splits up the meals and the units nicely. And if you put in any HBCIA's, it will automatically flag them up for you with your critical warning, and you can see in the top right here, it splits out your DCD and your DCD critical as well, and it does it as well.

So it shows you your total m for kicking the flock, but it also highlights how much HPCIA use is going on with that flock as well. An antibiotics again, there's a lot more we can do. So hopefully we've all seen the EMA categories, so the category D prudences, which should be our first lines, and the category C, the cautions, which we should be a bit more reserved with.

There are some really good webinars through the Farm Bet Championche that hopefully everybody gets on board with and signs up to, and we can consider smart goals as well, and these can link into how we're using antibiotics data too. So for instance, one of our smart goals is to reduce the use of category C's around lambing time and increase the use of category Ds, so using more beta marks or. Penicillin products as well and reducing perhaps how many of our farmers are using category Cs, so pen and strep as a first line there, and this is, Easy to track obviously through the data in this reporting that we're doing, but it's also a really good chance to engage with clients and have discussions around, The different antibiotic categories, the idea of antibiotic resistance.

These things that perhaps we might not be talking about that much, we know we're getting spoken to a lot as vets, but we need to make sure we're engaging clients with this and bringing them on the journey too. But obviously, as we said at the start, people don't like collecting data for the sake of collecting data. You need to do something with it.

And one way we can do this is by looking at benchmarks and targets. It can be a good way of tracking progress and also identifying areas that we could look at. For me, the important thing is that benchmarks are not the same as farm specific targets.

So it's really important that if you're setting targets. You need to consider The client's motivators and what's realistic and that might be that you need to use. Year on year goals rather than just saying this is the national benchmark, this is what you should be doing next year.

For instance, if you've got a farmer where they've got 20% lameness within their flock, then we know that. 2%, the national target in 12 months' time, probably isn't that realistic, but you can say this is where we want to work towards over a number of years and look at perhaps doing a lameness reduction advisor visit, maybe a bit of bility scoring, some culling decisions advice, and setting actions and measures to do incremental decreases, for instance, you might say, well, if we're 20 this year, let's aim for. 12 to 15% next year, maybe 5 to 8 a year after that and then get below 2% in 4 years' time.

So you're working towards that benchmark and the client knows. One day that's where you want them to get to, but you're not sending them an unrealistic goal, which they're not going to engage with by saying, right, you reduce your loans by 18% in 12 months. We know as well when we're benchmarking and setting targets, we need to be realistic because there are variations between different breeds and obviously particularly between hill, upland and lowland.

We need to consider what the industry agreed norms and targets are as well when we're setting benchmarks. Consider the welfare and the financial effects of putting in targets as well. You know, you can't just turn around and say, well, I want you to go zero antibiotic use next year, because there might be a very justifiable reason why they are using something at the moment.

And so you need to identify these areas and then consider whether you can reduce antibiotic use, perhaps by implementing vaccination protocols. Any farm specific targets and any bigger picture benchmarking data needs to be objectively measurable, so that you can track that data year on year and do your benchmarking. And then also consider at what level you want to benchmark.

Do you want to just be doing national benchmarking? Do you want to consider regional benchmarking, or do you want to consider what the breed standards are? So we do a lot of regional benchmarking within our flock health club, so we collect a lot of data.

We're still split up in lowland. We don't really have many hill breeds in in where we are, in what makes up our clientele, but we'll, we'll split by that. But then we'll anonymize all of our flocks, and they'll all get a letter, but only that client knows what their letter is unless they want to tell anybody else, and we'll do an antibiotic use report for the practise for the clients.

In the sheep sector or within the flock Health Club and then they can see how they're doing compared to other people in their geographical area on our client base. So for start and simply considering benchmarks. We look at 4 key areas.

Let's talk about cuting benchmarks, scanning benchmarks, lambing benchmarks, and growing benchmarks, and there are some really good resources out there. So the benchmarks that I tend to use with my clients and that we're referring to in. The rest of this webinar are drawn from AHDB FAS, Scots, and Project Lamb as well.

All of these are freely available online so you can take them away and use them in your practise as well. I The U to RAM ratio obviously will vary depending on the synchronisation system. So if they're using progesterone or progesterone devices, if they're using RAM effects or if they're doing, for instance, laparoscopic AI, the ratios and the requirements are going to be different, but we have covered this in another webinar already this year on advancing and synchronising uses.

Your mortality is one that we tend to look at it in time. We want to be aiming for less than 4%. And we can consider the replacement rate around fucking time as well.

And that's looking at the number of views purchased over the years puts around times that by 100. But do be careful because this isn't useful if your clients tell you that they're consciously trying to increase their numbers, because then the, the replacement rate. Won't be relevant as they'll obviously be buying in an awful lot.

Stanning is probably the one that clients tend to talk about the most. So we look at 175 to 195 for lowland, 150 to 175 for upland, and 100 to 135 for hill breeds. We want less than 2% bar on news.

And if we're not hitting these, the question we want to be asking is, if not, why not? So for instance, high number of Barnes, this could be a trigger for a disease investigation. It might be that we want to consider some barring new bloods.

We might need to be thinking about toxoplasmosis, but we also might want to be thinking about the tux. So consider going forward, introducing pre-breeding examinations, potentially semen analysis, making sure we're doing lameness assessment as well, and considering body condition scoring of the ewes and the rounds. I mean it.

Overall, lambda scan sale, we want less than 15%. In an ideal world, less than 5% intervention, and hopefully the one that people are most familiar with is less than 2% abortion, because if we're getting more than 2% abortion, or 3 abortions in 2 days, that's the trigger for an abortion investigation. Looking at lamb deaths, we want less than 5% porn dead, less than 5% dying under 7 days old, and less than 2% between 7 days and weaning, and that's the same whether it's highland, lowland or upland.

And again, really think about when you're discussing this with clients or maybe you're doing a bit of in-house CPD or a bit of an in-house audit, the questions have in the back of your mind, if not, why not? But the big one Which I think is the most important statistic of any production year for a hoop frog, is what the real lambing percentage is. Most clients are gonna talk to you about the scanning percentage, particularly if it's really good, but they don't necessarily tell you what their actual landing percentage is, so.

Total lambs sold, but total lambs retained, divided by a number of years put to the top 100. And again, 170 for lowlands, 140 for uplands, 100% for hill breeds. This, if used correctly, can be a real indicator of the profitability of a flock, and we can break it down and look at where the problems are and discuss management or medical or preventative interventions.

And if not, why not? So we can think about growing. Like an average lime growth rate weaning of 180 grammes a day.

Like to be weaning at 25 to 30 kg, this is gonna vary very much in the time it takes to get to that weight based on condition score, the forage and the age of the years. A lot of research and industry advice, they tend to agree, approximately 12 weeks, but 30 kg is the optimum weaning weight. But if you find that your ewes are getting too lean, or if the forage height, if it's not a good year, drops below 4 centimetres, or the lambs are growing less than 150 grammes a day, then we might want to consider early weaning, particularly when we consider that we're gonna want to get a lot of these ewes back in lamb quite soon.

And ideally 20 kg by 8 weeks. And if not, why not? So consider perhaps if you're not hitting these, it is going to be looking at what the forage is like that year, what condition the uses are in.

Whether they're keeping triplets on uses, for instance, therefore reducing the amount of milk and the losing that they're getting early doors. If we think about replacement. Like to see 2 to 3% less or less and 15% or less used coal is.

20%. Replacement retention, and if not, why not? So if there's a really high replacement rate, honestly, one of the options is that they're buying a lot of things in and throwing everything off.

But the other things to always consider are going to be iceberg diseases. So if you've got a really high culling rate, perhaps, either they're being quite aggressive in their selection, and this could indicate perhaps a big lameness issue. Maybe we want to look at the 5 point plan.

It might be a trigger with really bad mastitis season, could be a lot of prolapses, which might be an issue with human nutrition, or. You know, we need to be thinking about OPA, MV CLA. Are they killing a lot of old thin ewes that they can't keep the weight on.

This could be iceberg disease indicators, and there are some really good. Blood screens out there and panels for you and thin testing which will affordably allow you to test for all of these as a bit of a panel. And the other thing you can always do is open up a couple of ewes that dye, or a couple of colours perhaps, maybe send one here for a postmortem and a bit of a screen.

For the conditions going. Something that we talk about a lot, something which. You know the chance can be a really good on-farm training session to do with clients to see the variability perhaps and how different clients.

Body condition score if they body condition score at all, and again, almost do a bit of a quality check across your, your farms if you could get. 89, 10 farmers from different flocks from one farm and go through together and see what sort of consensus you're getting. So why does it matter?

We know that having the appropriate conditions score will affect colossum quality, increase the lamb's rear. When we're coming in to tapping and mating season, it can improve the fertility. It will also improve lamb birth weight and the amount they can provide for growth, and obviously also hopefully you'll get decreased mortality because the ewes will have a bit more hardiness and resistance, particularly if it is a, a harsh winter.

What does it relate. The figure that we talk about, it takes to 8 weeks to gain 1 unit of body condition score. That's why I like my clients to body condition score that is about 8 weeks before the taps are gonna go in.

So that if we need to rapidly increase the condition score, they've got the time. 12% of the live weight is approximately equal to one body condition score. So for your average 70 kg you, one condition score is 8.4 kilogrammes, and for a bigger animal, maybe at 90 kg, you're looking at 10.8 kilogrammes.

We have Variability in the targets throughout the year, and variability between lowland, upland and hill bridge again. So you can see here if we're going left to right, you've got your tapping targets first, and then mid-pregnancy, late pregnancy, and then as expected. Body condition score is probably going to be at the lowest at the time of weaning because they've milked really hard to grow those lambs and hopefully get them to that 30 kg weaning rate which we want to get to.

But we also know that if between weaning and tapping, they've not put that condition back on, we can see ewes coming into each of us at the wrong time, we can see an increase in foetal absorption, we can see decreased lambing percentages. And there was a really good study published that showed that a lowland flock with body condition score of 2 will on average have 145 lambs per 100 years tups, but if they're actually on that target. And hitting 3, then 185 lambs produced per 100 uses put to the top.

So that's a real difference there. And don't forget the RAs either, they need to be in 3.5 to 4 body condition score topping.

We know that they're gonna lose 15% of their body weight over topping, which For the sake of the study that produced this data was 2 cycles. We know that if their body condition score is too high, the tups can get lazy and we'll see decrease in the mating ability. And we also know that we want them to have got the condition back up to a 3 by housing time to survive a harsh winter.

So that's a lot of benchmarks, and that's a lot of data and targets that you need to keep in your mind that we've gone through in this webinar. So, as always, if there's a way to make your life easy, make your life easy. Don't reinvent the wheel.

There are some really good pre-built calculators out there. So on the left, this is the performance indicator which was produced by MSD and Project Lam. And on the right, you've got the AHDB records from their turning records into performance indicators spreadsheet.

Both of these identify the benchmarks and the targets that you're gonna want there. The Project Laund one splits it out by Lowland, Upland and Hill, but both of them let you input your own data, and you can set your own targets as well and produce a really nice report in that flock health planning or data review session with your client to sit down and look at how the year has been and agree together, perhaps on a target that you'd like to hit. Next year.

Screen summary, make sure clients keep good accurate records and also encourage them to annotate their notes. So if it's a poor straw year, if they have a lot of issues with dog worrying, or if they sent things away for postmortems, annotate that on the records as well so that there's a bit of context. Behind the numbers, so if the numbers maybe aren't where.

They'd like them to be when they're looking back with you at the last couple of years, and there's a, a particularly low year saying, there might be some context to it, it might be that. They had bad dog worrying. We saw this quite a bit with flocks over lockdown when there were more people walking.

Unfortunately we saw more dog attacks, but it's important that we know these things as well, when we're looking at trends and how year on year flocks are growing. Compare records, compare them against past performance on that farm, compare them against industry targets and benchmarks like the ones we've just spoken about. If you've got a flock health club going, encourage benchmarking within the grid because that will be within a geographical area, and people therefore are probably facing similar challenges, and you can see how you're performing as an area.

Don't aim too big too fast, if clients aren't doing very much data recording or target setting at the start. Than just pick a couple of priority years in year one and make them relevant to what that client wants to achieve as their first port of call. And as we said with that as well, if they're a long way off, perhaps the industry.

Benchmark on the industry target, give them stepped year on year progressions so it feels less daunting. Encourage clients to calculate their true lambing percentage. Using that calculation on that slide earlier, utilise networks and buying groups.

So, A, for your clients to talk to each other, but also as vets to really get out there and further increase recording of data nationally, but also if you want to consider maybe you're working with rare breed flocks and you're not quite so sure on. What the scanning targets for that particular rare breed should be utilise reed societies and this sort of information too. She ret Society is a brilliant network, and if you're in, say, perhaps one of the corporate practises or, or a group of independent practises, you might have a sheep clinical working group or a super advisory group that you can tap into as well.

And ultimately Get excited about Flock data, get excited about starting these conversations with clients. I know when I started doing it at Scarsdale, I went to a lot of clients who, Really got on board with it and we're really keen that somebody had turned up on farm with a real passion for the sheep work and just starting that conversation really rolled a lot of other things to start happening. And actually it's also how we ended up setting up Midlands advanced breeding as well.

That all came out of conversations with clients about their tapping data and their targets. You'll be surprised what happens. These are the references as well if you want to look at anything in any more detail.

Notably there you've got the Project la flock performance indicator, which you should be able to get through MSD if not through the Project La website. You've got the AHDB Tony records and performance indicators, which is freely available online. There as well, and we know our livestock vaccination guidelines is also freely available online.

My contact details, feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or anything exciting that comes off the back of this webinar. Otherwise, thank you very much for your time and good luck engaging your clients with their data.