Martin was born in 1961 and remembers feeding during the 1966 drought therefore is not fazed by the need to gear up to feed when conditions make that necessary.

He has been feeding on and off during the past five years, but is delighted not to be feeding at the moment because the property is drastically understocked and enough rain has fallen to produce feed for the remaining animals.

“We are running less stock this year because we believe stocking the country lightly gives it a chance to come back – we’re only running a sheep to 10 acres, where normally it would be a sheep to 4 acres,” Martin said.

The Lloyd family has been in the Blackall district since 1916 and has 66,000 acres on “Lorne” and “Tarvs”, which are 90km apart, that includes a mix of mitchell grass downs and buffel grass pasture.

After improving purebred Merino ewes over many years, Martin believes it is viable and worthwhile to feed these ewes through dry periods.

“There is no way we would sell off our core breeding ewes because it is too costly to buy back quality stock after rain. What you sell for $30, you’d pay $60 to buy back.”

Martin says the feeding costs are defrayed by the ewes continuing to produce a lamb each year on feed (90% lambing rate), although he doesn’t join them until they are 2½ years old when they are big enough to cope with lambing on feed.

“There are some losses from shy feeders when they start on feed, but once they get used to it we don’t have many losses. If they don’t want to eat, you can’t make them eat.”

At the start of the drought feeding regime, Martin feeds corn at a rate of one tonne per 2000 ewes per day along with either half a tonne of cottonseed meal per 2000 ewes or an equivalent amount of barley hay (see below for more details).

Martin wants to feed and retain his core breeders through drought situations and is therefore prepared to absorb the costs, including the hidden costs of fuel, wear and tear on equipment etc.

“I wore out a motorbike doing 10,000km in 10 months mustering the stock to be fed.”

Most recently, Martin fed his animals from July 2005 to February 2006 which was for eight months straight after only a four month break before that. He fed mobs of about 600, 900 and 900 in holding paddocks of 400 acres each.

He fed every day at the same time to keep the animals in a routine after finding that if he was even half an hour late they would walk away. The feeding routine took two hours.

“We are set up to feed with elevated silos that have been in place for 20 years. From these the corn runs out with an auger into a bin on the trailer. The cottonseed is dropped in a heap on the ground from an open bin on the back of the Nissan. We put Phoslick in troughs for the lambing ewes.”

“We started feeding corn and cottonseed but the sheep weren’t doing well enough on that so we changed to barley hay and corn to provide roughage to fill them up.”

“We put the half-tonne round bales of barley hay on the back of the vehicle, unravel it and drop it on top of the corn. It is a two-person job, one to drive and one to feed.”

Lorne has had rain therefore the feeding routine is over for now and the investment has paid off with the ewes set to lamb shortly (August 2006).

“The law of averages says that it has to rain eventually, so how many years you feed is only dependent on how deep your pockets are.”

The feed regime at Lorne: