Head Shepherd

Bea Litchfield is Managing Director of Hazeldean, a sixth-generation family seedstock business running both Merino and Angus studs alongside commercial operations. 

Hazeldean is a large-scale seedstock business, and they produce around 600 Angus bulls and 400 Merino rams each year for clients across all kinds of environments. Their tough environment allows their stock to be put to the test and their rigorous focus on ferti...

Join Mark and our guest this week, Dr Shane Thomson, to discuss some key points around reproductive performance in cattle. 

Shane is a veterinarian and partner at Holbrook Vet Centre in southern New South Wales, leading a team of 10 vets across a practice that's roughly 90% beef production.

Cattle reproduction work is at the core of what Shane does daily, and in this episode, he and Mark cover pretty much everything. Including b...

This week on the podcast, Professor Wayne Pitchford joins Mark Ferguson to discuss all things cow condition. 

Wayne has spent more than three decades at the University of Adelaide working across animal breeding, genetics and livestock production, and is currently Director of the Davies Livestock Research Centre.

Wayne and Mark discuss his recent research on the relationship between early body measures and adult traits like fertility ...

This week on the podcast, Mark (Ferg) catches up with Andrew Kennedy (Ox) and Darren Gordon (Cat) to reflect on their early years together as well as the career and influence of Dr Andrew “Thommo” Thompson. The episode is part of Podcasthon, supporting efforts to raise awareness for brain cancer research.

Ferg, Cat and Ox reminisce about the early days of the Lifetime Ewe research project and the realities of running a large-scale s...

Choosing replacement heifers shapes the productivity of a breeding herd for years to come.

This week on the Head Shepherd podcast, James Starling joins Mark Ferguson to discuss the 'Optimised Heifer Selection' project, which focuses on combining genomic tools with visual assessment to improve heifer selection. 

Based on the Limestone Coast in South Australia, James runs a self-replacing Angus herd alongside a prime lamb ent...

This week on the podcast, Shannon Donoghue joins us to talk about why she's so passionate about telling the story of wool. 

Growing up on a sheep property in South Australia, Shannon started off in the industry as a wool classer before stepping into her current role as an industry relations officer with AWI. Her work now involves helping producers better understand where levy investment goes and ensuring their feedback shapes r...

How much do you hate daggy sheep? Well, what started as a frustration with daggy sheep ended up reshaping this week's guest’s entire farming system.

This week, Allan Richardson explains how his determination to eliminate daggy sheep ultimately led to three decades of organic farming and the adoption of regenerative principles.

He began by wanting to select for low dag score, but a local vet encouraged him to focus inst...

Tune in this week on the Head Shepherd podcast to hear Ferg discuss the 2025/2026 ram sale period across Australia and New Zealand. He explains his approach to selecting the right ram team and the decisions breeders have been facing when producing rams for sale in an increasingly data-driven market.

Ferg discusses the breeding values gaining attention, as well as buyer behaviour when information is available AND when it is missing. 

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Are you heading to LambEx26? This week on the podcast we have LambEx chair, Jamie Heinrich, on the podcast to discuss one of the sheep industry’s largest gatherings, bringing together producers, researchers, service providers and supply chain leaders from around the world.

Held at the Adelaide Convention Centre, the event covers productivity, profitability, genetics, sustainability and the future direction of the sheep and lamb sect...

Our guest this week, Angus Street, has worked across journalism, global agricultural marketing, Asian supply chains and livestock trading before stepping into the role of CEO at New Zealand Merino. In this episode, Angus reflects on taking on the role and guiding the organisation through a period of ongoing change across wool markets and supply chains.

He and Mark chat about New Zealand Merinos’ role in connecting growers directly w...

How do you breed sheep that thrive in wet coastal hill country without routine drenching? What traits actually matter when you're selecting for challenging conditions? This week on the podcast, Mark is chatting to Fred Gane, who runs Kaituna Ridges, an 800-hectare farm near Havelock and the Pelorus Sound in the South Island of New Zealand, alongside his wife Nikita.

Kaituna Ridges comprises a mixed grazing operation that includ...

Ever wondered about farming New Zealand sheep in the UK, or considered farming UK shedding genetics in Australia? In this episode of Head Shepherd, Ferg speaks with Ian McDougall, a veterinarian whose career - and sheep - have taken him across Australia, New Zealand and the UK.

Ian grew up on marginal country on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula before moving into veterinary work and artificial breeding. Over the past four decades, h...

Growing up in Western Sydney with no connection to agriculture, Samantha Wan’s path into the wool industry was anything but typical.

In this week's episode, Sam talks with Ferg about finding agriculture through high school ag, building confidence without a family farming background, and the role mentors and community played in shaping her career. 

She and Mark discuss her work across the wool value chain, including auctioneering...

How can commercial producers use breeding values without recording full pedigrees? This week, Mark chats with Carel Teseling, Chief Operating Officer at Angus Australia, to find out. 

Carel's career has taken him from South Africa's regional performance recording programs to 14 years of developing genetic tools for Angus Australia, a decade leading Australian Wagyu Association's genetics, and now back to Angus again, ...

Ferg shares his thoughts on genetic gain in the sheep and beef industries. He has often said that we should be seeking to achieve a minimum of 2% genetic gain, but the top operators we deal with here at neXtgen Agri are consistently achieving 3-4%. Ferg explains how they’ve achieved that with the use of selection accuracy and the compounding effect of disciplined breeding decisions over time.

Ferg also talks about what that genetic ...

What if measuring worm resistance didn't require high parasite burdens and ALSO delivered double the heritability of egg counts?

Sarah Preston, Lecturer at Federation University and cofounder of Swabtec, explains the development of their saliva-based test designed to measure immune responses to gastrointestinal worms in sheep, allowing resistance to be assessed without relying on high worm egg counts.

She and Mark discuss why eg...

What limits ewe productivity in current sheep systems?

Our guest this week, Tara Dwyer, is the breeding manager at Headwaters Genetics and a farm manager within the Lone Star Farms group. Her work covers stud breeding, commercial supply chains, and large-scale sheep systems. And, in amongst all of that, she has found time to do a Kellogg report, 'A New Fleece on Life: How the Sheep Farming Sector in Aotearoa Can Halt Terminal D...

Gus Rose shares the recent results from the 'Genetics of foot health in Merinos' project, which is looking at footrot and foot structure in sheep in Australia. Gus shares what the data shows on the heritability of foot shape and its relationship with footrot, as well as other foot structure traits. 

Gus Rose explains how the dataset is being built, which traits are proving to be correlated, and where the current limits sit...

On this week's episode, Tim Gole shares how sheep farmers can increase their profits by shifting from responding to problems to preventing them in the first place.

Tim runs ForFlocksSake, a vet-based sheep consultancy company. After a lightbulb moment during the drought, Tim became a self-confessed sheep fanatic.

With both Tim and Mark clearly in their element, they spend nearly an hour talking all things sheep. They discuss lif...