David and Melissa Greig ‘ Bellevue Rural Enterprises’ Tottenham NSW

Tottenham sheep producer, David Greig faced the double challenge of lamb survival and lamb production in an environment, marked by tight climate times and unreliable rainfall, with the need for a resilient and robust style of sheep that required little hands-on management. David and his wife Melissa and two daughters, operate a mixed farming – winter cropping and merino sheep enterprise outside Tottenham in the central west of NSW. Their main enterprise is selling ewes, both first-cross ewes to prime lamb producers and merino ewes to first-cross ewe and wool producers. As David explains a deliberate decision to introduce more robust, plainer bodied merinos through the use of Australian Sheep Breeding Values, coupled with learnings acquired through AWI’s Lifetime Ewe Management program, which taught him the importance of matching animal nutrition and condition scores with reproductive cycle; have been pivotal to addressing lamb survival with lambing percentages now double what they were eight years ago.