The sheep industry has a large untapped upside in genetics and genomics, but needs to broaden the traits it is working on and spend more on the research that underpins them, says Dr Robert Banks, Livestock Geneticist at the University of New England.

Banks, who helped Beef + Lamb New Zealand review its current work and future direction, says the potential is clear.

“There’s a huge upside in using genetics, and in particular genomics, to build on what’s been done over the last 20 or 30 years, but expand the range of traits that are being improved, particularly social licence traits like emissions and welfare.”

New Zealand has the capability and the sheep to do it, he says. Phenotyping is one area where he says returns on additional spending remain strong, with more records across a wider range of traits needed to underpin the use of genomics.

“There’s lots of evidence that says the return on investment, in particularly industry good R&D in agriculture, is massive.

“It means that we could spend more, and we would still continue growing returns.”

Banks says the industry should pursue every possible avenue to reduce the cost of running sheep, including breeding its way out of problems rather than managing around them.

“I just don’t think people should have the idea that there are certain problems that will just never ever go away.

“They’ll go away if we choose to solve them.”

Shedding sheep and bare-breech breeding in response to fly strike in Australia are examples he cites of problems solved through genetics when producers decided they needed to be.

Banks says the sheep industry has been slower than dairy to connect genetic gain with feed and pasture management, and that bringing them back on track together would be a significant opportunity.

“It’s just a huge win-win.”

He says there is more scope for collaboration between Australia and New Zealand than competition, particularly around shared genomic reference populations, and that the global market for lamb and sheep products can grow well beyond what either country could capture alone.

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