UNE > News and Events > Browse by article > National sheep project to survey farmers

Next Memories shared at UNE reunion weekend October 5, 2004  

Previous New centre looks at educational opportunities September 28, 2004 

National sheep project to survey farmers

September 29, 2004

Thousands of sheep farmers are being asked to help with a $2.7 million, nation-wide project that could contribute to the “greening” of the Australian sheep industry.
The University of New England is surveying more than 6,300 producers in five States, seeking information about their use of chemicals to control parasites of sheep.
Lyndal Thompson, the UNE researcher conducting the survey and from UNE’s Institute for Rural Futures, said the project aimed to demonstrate that farmers could maintain production while reducing the frequency of chemical treatments. This would have several beneficial outcomes, she said. “For example, less frequent drenching would help producers meet standards required for ‘organic’ and ‘ecologically certified’ labelling of their products. At the same time, it would slow the parasites’ development of resistance to the chemicals. While parasite problems cost the Australian sheep industry more than $550 million a year at the moment, this figure could rise to more than $1 billion as resistance increases.”

The “Integrated Parasite Management (Sheep)” project, managed and funded by Australian Wool Innovation Ltd, has appointed 24 “demonstration farms” throughout the country, where modified regimes of parasite control, including less frequent drenching, will be tried. “We hope to be able to demonstrate the benefits of reducing the number of drenches by one or two a year,” Mrs Thompson said. “This would show farmers that there are simple and effective ways of handling problems such as parasites’ resistance to chemicals.”

The project is concerned with the management of both internal parasites such as barber’s pole worm and liver fluke, and external parasites such as blowfly larvae and lice. It involves researchers at the Universities of New England and Melbourne, the West Australian Department of Agriculture, and the Queensland Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries.

Mrs Thompson said the survey form would be posted, at the beginning of October, to sheep farmers in New England, south-west Queensland, southern NSW, and the sheep-growing regions of Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. “It’s basically a benchmarking survey,” she said. “The idea is to get a picture of what farmers are doing now to control parasites, and when and why they’re doing it. Another survey in two years’ time will reveal how much these practices have changed as a result of the demonstration-farm trials.” She is asking farmers to return the survey within three weeks of receiving it.

Mrs Thompson’s work is part of the socio-economic component of the Integrated Parasite Management project. Six other UNE researchers are involved in the project as rural scientists. As well as assisting with the trials on demonstration farms and assessing the results, they are conducting research on the effect of climatic conditions on the proliferation of worms on pastures, and a promising method of controlling the worms biologically. The coordinator of the UNE research team, Dr Andrea Crampton from the University’s School of Rural Science and Agriculture, said the method involved a fungus that was able to trap and kill worms on the pasture before they were able to infect stock.

Media contact: Lyndal Thompson, Institute for Rural Futures, UNE (02) 6773 5144 or Lydia Roberts, Public Relations Manager, UNE (02) 6773 2779.

Posted by Lydia Roberts at September 29, 2004 10:45 AM