WoolDrift Farm, located in the beautiful green stretches of Grey County, Ontario, has long been a standard bearer of Canada's dairy sheep industry. Chris Buschbeck and Axel Meister, transplants from Germany, established their farm as a meat sheep operation in 1989. They had met in Germany while studying complementary subjects: agriculture for her, nutrition for him. They were familiar with sheep farming for dairy, as it was more popular in Europe than North America at the time. When Chris and Axel moved to Ontario in the '80s, they began a sheep-farming journey that would directly impact the genetics of North America's dairy sheep. 

"We were looking for ways to increase our farm income," Chris says, "and were familiar with sheep dairying from our European background. We soon found that there were no dairy sheep in North America and most people did not know that you can milk sheep."

After five years of farming for meat, they were ready to branch out. They imported sixty-one East Friesian embryos from Europe. Thirty-two lambs were born from those transfers, and WoolDrift Farm's journey into dairy sheep began. 

Today Chris and Axel keep sixty milking ewes on their 80-acre farm. They milk seasonally, from March to November, after weaning lambs at 30-40 days. The ewes graze all throughout the milking season, supplemented with mixed-grain feed, and are given free-choice hay rations in the winter. No matter the season, the sheep have free access to the outdoors. 

With the use of artificial insemination and embryo transfer, their flock has transformed over time from Rideaus to entirely East Friesians. Chris and Axel continue to source new genetics from across the globe in order to diversify their flock and improve production. To assist with keeping their flock healthy, WoolDrift Farm utilizes GenOvis's EVB program for data analysis and management.

Data collection provides better understanding of the flock

GenOvis is an on-farm sheep genetic evaluation program, which allows for evaluation of the genetic value of breeding stock based on various traits. These traits have been determined to be economically important regardless of breed, based on input from farmers and the dairy community at large. Dairy traits have been collected from participating farms for more than a decade. This has produced a substantial database of information and assessments about the participating sheep. These assessments are coded by breed and crossbreed percentages, so that direct comparisons can be made using statistical relevance and breed attribute. Sheep traits, such as pedigree information and birth weight, and milk traits such as quantity, milk fat percentage, and somatic cell count are all used as comparable attributes.

Overall data collection has continued for almost a quarter century, and so the dairy attributes and general sheep growth attributes weave together to become an essential tool for producers, helping to create more productive flocks. 

GenOvis's data allows farmers to analyze their sheep by Estimated Breeding Values, or EBVs. The EBVs can help a farmer determine who to cull and who to breed, based on hard data rather than emotional decisions. When a farmer measures the output and information from each sheep, they can then compare and contrast this information within their own flock. Not only their own flock: this data can be contrasted with that of other farmers in their region, based on breed group. 

WoolDrift Farm has been a pioneer of the GenOvis EBV system. "We have been using Genovis since starting in sheep," Chris says, referring to GenOvis's meat program. "We made about 10 years of milking data available to the programmers to develop lactation curves and establish the foundation of today's GenOvis milk program." This information has become invaluable as the system develops. 

WoolDrift Farm’s Data-Keeping Journey

When asked why they started gathering data about their sheep, Chris replied, "We feel that if you have no data, you have no foundation for flock improvement." Chris and Axel have always been data collectors, and so it was natural for them to want to quantify their journey through these genetic improvements. 

WoolDrift Farm uses EweByte as their daily management and record-keeping tool, as they've done since it was developed in the '90s; but supplementing EweByte with GenOvis has given them more power in their selection and breeding data-led decision making. "GenOvis has taken over the analyzing part and is much better at filtering out environmental influences," Chris says, which allows WoolDrift Farm to make better comparisons - and better decisions. 

The GenOvis rankings make it easier to choose between animals, Chris says. "We sell milk by the liter, so total production is our main focus, but we do keep components in mind and if the choice is between two similar animals, we will pick the one with higher component numbers." She explained that WoolDrift Farm highly values the volume criteria, because milking one animal rather than two for the same volume of milk makes more financial sense.

WoolDrift Farm uses their GenOvis data for more than just culling decisions. They also use the system to select replacement sheep and to price rams for sale as breeding stock. "The better the genetic values, the higher the price," Chris says. It's a truism that most farms use, but with GenOvis, they're able to collect the data to back those prices up. 

"All decisions that are not driven by necessity (e.g. mastitis) are made based on data. We establish selection lists based on the Genovis numbers and pick maybe 20% more than we want to keep. We then only look at those animals to pick from and weed out the ones with structural defects… This prevents you from keeping the one really pretty sheep at the bottom of the list that will be a crappy producer."

WoolDrift Farm is no stranger to managing their flock's health through the use of data. In the late 1980s, their first flock became infected with OPP or maedi visna. The flock needed to be culled entirely, and when Chris and Axel started over, they focused on rigorous health testing and monitoring. This data collection allowed them to achieve negative OPP status, and their flock has tested negative since 1992. 

Records, Growth, and the Future of Sheep-Keeping

As a result of WoolDrift Farm’s participation in GenOvis, their measured production has improved on average from 166 kg to 357 kg per ewe over a 200-day lactation. "The beauty of GenOvis is that you can have a somewhat strange way of managing your ewes, and (they) can still be compared to others with a more conventional system.”

When asked about pinch points and any issues with the program, Chris and Axel offered a few suggestions to other users. Because GenOvis is "a genetic evaluation program and not a general management program… I feel that you still need a management program to record a lot of the flock data," Chris said. Health events, vaccinations, and birth scores were singled out as important pieces of data that aren't recorded within the EBV program.

One key feature, Chris said, would be "the ability to upload milk data from a management program… and to have better online access." Ewe-Manage, a sheep flock management software based in Canada, is currently the one program that allows for this kind of data transfer. 

As more sheep farmers utilize GenOvis’s EBV program, more data is added to the collection. With more data comes a greater understanding of a flock. The more genetic links and points of data that are established in GenOvis’s database, the more accurate the genetic predictions become, leading to higher confidence and greater trust in the system.

For over three decades, data collection has allowed WoolDrift Farm to manage, analyze, and nurture the betterment of their flock. GenOvis's EBV program, along with diligent record-keeping, gives Chris and Axel the ability to make decisions about everything from genetic diversity to pricing their breeding stock.