"I’ve always mated my hoggets in my system — I haven’t changed just because of the good prices ... You can’t wake up in the morning and decide you are going to mate your hoggets, you’ve got to prepare them to be mated, there’s a bit more work in it but if you got 60% of them in-lamb, it pays for the work."
"It isn’t on my radar. Any hogget mating has usually been accidental. I can see benefits to it but with our set up and stud operation, it would be an extra layer of complexity and work for us and we are getting reasonable lambing from our main ewe flock and while the extra lambs would be handy, we don’t have any plans to do hogget mating at this point."
"We have been mating our ewe hoggets for a few years, it is part of our farm systems rather than a policy set on market schedules. We mate all our replacement ewe hoggets that are more than 45kg liveweight at mating."
"We’ve been doing it every year for the past 15 years. I think it is something people should be looking at to make more money."
"We don’t. Our contribution to hogget mating is supplying Southdown rams for people to put over their hoggets. We can’t do hogget mating with 19.62 stock units to the hectare. We prefer to keep all the old ewes rather than mate the hoggets."
"No, not at the moment, I may do it, I’m just waiting to see. I’m pushing the boundaries with my stocking rate already without mating my hoggets, that’s the reason I’m not doing it. I’d have to destock ewes to lamb my hoggets and I’m getting a big lambing anyway."
