With strong meat and wool prices this season, it's tempting to think the hard work is behind you once lambs are on the ground and growing well. But talk to any experienced producer or any nutritionist or vet who spends their career around confinement systems, and you'll hear the same thing: weaning is where the next twelve months of profit gets decided.
It starts before weaning day
Good weaner management isn't a single event on the calendar. It's a timeline that starts with ewe nutrition through pregnancy and lactation: a well-fed ewe sets her lamb up for a stronger start and an easier transition, while an underfed ewe is forced to choose between losing her own condition or cutting lactation early, pushing the lamb to start foraging before it's ready.
Marking matters more than it gets credit for too. A rushed, high-stress marking without pain relief, without time for ewes and lambs to properly mother back up, can act as a kind of partial wean in its own right, and it's a real contributor to the lighter, harder-to-manage weaners producers sometimes call “woody.”
The numbers worth knowing
A few figures are worth pinning to the shed wall this season:
• Target weaning weight: roughly 45% of the ewe's mature weight. Try not to go under 20kg if you can help it; lighter weaners carry a higher risk of sickness and death.
• The bottom 25% of weaners at weaning are considerably more likely to become the mortalities and morbidities later on; drafting them into their own mob, even roughly by eye, gives them a real chance to catch up without the competition from bigger animals.
• Imprint feeding — providing ewes and lambs access to pellets before weaning so lambs learn by copying them is one of the highest-leverage, lowest-cost things you can do. Without it, only around 5% of naive lambs will eat in their first day in confinement, rising slowly to 60% by day five. With it, that jumps to roughly 90% on day one and 95%+ by day five a genuinely dramatic difference in how smoothly (and safely) a mob transitions. We recommend 50-100 g/hd per ewe using either EasyOne or Easy2Gro. These are safe options and support this important imprinting step. If you are going to be supplementing or finishing your lambs get a delivery early and do this important step to set them up for success.
Confinement, done properly
Once lambs are in confinement, the same planning mindset applies. A low-stress induction in quiet yards, no dogs or noise, ewes well out of sight and sound, gives lambs the best possible start, with their only job on day one being to eat. Trough space matters earlier on(aim for around 15cm per head on double-sided access, tightening up once the mob is settled), and it's worth keeping a close eye out for shy feeders in that first week or two.
Behind all of this sits one of the biggest, quietest risks in confinement feeding: acidosis. It's consistently the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in confinement research, and it comes down to how carefully energy is introduced into the rumen. Push too hard, too fast, and pH can crash in a way that's very hard to recover from.
That's where Milne's own products and research come in. We've invested significantly in developing products that reduce acidosis risk and remove the guesswork for clients during this critical period. Our HyFibe® technology means lambs move forward and gain weight from day one, rather than the week of backwards growth that lambs can experience when transitioning onto a home-mix grain diet.
Help WA get counted - National Survey about containment feeding
Holly Ludeman recently sat down with Jillian Kelly, Director of Animal Health and Nutrition at AHN Consulting and a ruminant nutritionist with deep experience across confinement feeding systems, for an in-depth conversation covering everything from imprint feeding and weaner risk through to confinement nutrition, pregnant ewe management, and reintroducing ewes to green feed.
That conversation ties into a larger national picture that's still taking shape. AHN Consulting is running a national survey on confinement feeding, with fifteen sites currently being monitored across the country and acidosis has already emerged as one of the standout challenges, the same risk we've just walked through above. But WA's voice in that data is thin so far.
The more WA producers who take part, the better the industry's picture of containment feeding becomes including the research and resources that get built off the back of it.
Here's how to take part:
Complete the Paddock to Pen containment feeding survey — a national project run by AHN Consulting, the University of New England and the SQNNSW Innovation Hub, looking at what's actually happening in containment feeding systems across Australia right now. It takes about 20 minutes, responses are confidential, and two respondents will be drawn to win a $250 prize pack.
