LambEx26 showed that producers are willing to embrace new technology, but its value depends on the support available to them as they put it to the test.
LambEx is Australia’s biennial global conference for the sheep, lamb and wool industries. The 2026 event was the largest in its history, bringing more than 1,300 delegates and 80-plus speakers together for four days of program at the Adelaide Convention Centre under the theme Telling Our Stories.
Taskforce Chair Jamie Heinrich noted that the delegates in the room represented over 3.8 million sheep, and that close to half were aged under 40. It is a snapshot of an industry that is young and optimistic about sheep production. The program was heavily dominated by the East Coast, but progressive Western Australian producers featured among the panels and speakers, representing producers innovating and looking forward at a changed industry showing good signs of vibrancy.
Why we went
Maddison McNeil, Project Manager at the Grower Group Alliance (GGA) and Doug Hamilton, Innovation Manager, attended LambEx26.
Doug had three questions in mind, with each tied to the work of GGA and the South-West WA Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub (SW WA Hub):
- What’s in the research pipeline that Western Australian grower groups should know about?
- Do the assumptions underpinning GGA and the SW WA Hub’s extension and adoption work align with what producers are saying and experiencing?
- Where are the clearly defined problems a challenge-led program could help solve?
Three programs shaped their thinking:
- Smart Grazing, Stronger Lands, a rangelands adoption project
- Muster, the industry-led live-export transition extension initiative aiming to build best-practice knowledge, confidence and capability across Western Australia’s sheep and wool industries
- PropaGATE, a challenge-led agtech program.
The key message taken away was that the technology supply side is in good shape, and producers are willing to adopt new approaches. What is less evident is a well-resourced pathway between a research result and a producer confidently putting it into practice on their own farm. That pathway is precisely what grower groups, Smart Grazing demonstration sites, Muster Points and the SW WA Hub aim to build.
Measurement you can trust
The strongest cluster of technology that was discussed sat around measurement and decision support, the area most directly relevant to Smart Grazing, Stronger Lands.
Optiweigh (presented by Bill Mitchell) is a portable, automated in-paddock livestock weighing system. Optiweigh now has roughly 2.8 million head of livestock in its in-paddock animal weight dataset. A 50 kg sheep can vary by around 3.2 kg across a single day, so the value lies in the trend across a mob rather than any single reading. Optiweigh earned producers’ trust after they had watched its readings track their mobs over time, at which point they had built the confidence to run their own ration experiments with paired units.
LiDAR pasture biomass (presented by Dr Everard Edwards, CSIRO) is a forage assessment technique that sits between low cost-but-coarse satellite imagery and accurate-but-laborious plate meters and plant cuts. It comes with an honest limitation: LiDAR cannot yet distinguish between green (live) plant matter and dry or dead plant matter, which impacts feed quality value. Accuracy does improve when LiDAR and satellite (NDVI) data are fused, with correlation increasing from around 0.79 to 0.83 (the closer to 1 meaning more accurate). It is still early stages for this research project, but the ability to increase both the accuracy and scalability of pasture quantity and quality assessments is exactly what better data-driven grazing decisions need.
Virtual fencing, and what really gets a trial started
Virtual Fencing Technology (VFT) recurred across the conference program, and it is worth being clear about why producers are interested. The drawcard is agronomic: precision grazing, rotational grazing, and the pasture and productivity gains that follow.
However, agronomic benefits alone aren’t enough to move producers from trialling VFT to adopting it. Providers also need to demonstrate that it is easy to use, offer practical support, be upfront about the risks, and show how the technology gives producers options they didn’t have before.
New Zealand producer Chloe Butcher-Herries spoke to two benefits she has found in using VFT: she was able to move cattle to higher ground during an overnight rain event remotely; and found she is now running weaners with cows for longer because they pass outside the virtual fence, increasing weaner weights. These convenience and production benefits were found through use, not designed in advance.
Which is the point: most of the value of a technology only shows once a producer takes the plunge and trials the system, and that first step is where support matters most. Shared trials, group-run demonstrations and honest peer accounts are what lowers the risk and cost of adoption. For Smart Grazing, Stronger Lands, that means adapting the technology to the realities of Western Australia’s rangelands: not keeping stock off waterlogged pasture, as in high-rainfall New Zealand, but managing the impact of grazing on biodiversity and around water points.
While virtual fencing for sheep is used overseas, Australia is still assessing the technology’s animal welfare implications before determining whether, and under what conditions, it could be permitted for sheep and goats.
Containment as resilience infrastructure
One of the most valuable sessions at the event was the containment feeding breakfast. Sammy McIntyre (Nuffield Scholar) positioned containment feeding systems as resilience infrastructure rather than a drought reaction. Her key point was that maximising the benefits of containment feeding goes beyond providing adequate feed and water. Addressing animal stress behaviours, such as wool-biting and scratching, which can indicate boredom, is equally important. Simple fixes can help: added topography, straw, timber to climb, and roughage that makes sheep work for their feed. One benchmark worth noting: ewe lambs at 40–45 kg in containment achieved around 70% conception, but by feeding longer and bringing the ewe lambs weights up to 50 kg, the conception rate climbed to 100%.
Water quality was an unexpected finding. Larry Walker (Southern Scientific Services) showed how bacterial and mineral loads compound at each step, from dam to tank to trough, with biofilms building inside pipes. It is a low-cost, high-return issue that is rarely tested for. Producer Nic Economou shared a concrete example: after moving into containment on salty groundwater, his sheep began behaving oddly around water. A simple inline chlorine dosing set-up, a pump, 12V charger and water meter for less than $2,000, resolved it. For Western Australian mixed farming systems it is a practical addition to dry-season planning, and a natural fit for the Muster Points network.
The technologies no single business can adopt alone
This was the least comfortable and most important observation of the week. Several of the most compelling technologies are area-wide or system-level. However willing an individual producer is, they cannot adopt these alone.
The Sterile Insect Technique for blowfly project (Adelaide University and SARDI) involved breeding, sterilizing and releasing Australian blowflies at large enough scale to collapse fly numbers and stop fly strike on sheep. The practice was proven to work effectively in the Kangaroo Island pilot, costing approximately $7-8 per hectare to implement. The science is well established. Getting enough neighbouring farms behind the project across large, connecting areas to justify the costs is the challenge to adoption.
WormRisk (Rebecca Farnell, Federation University, and Coles Trailblazers winner) uses worm-species sequencing combined with climate modelling to forecast worm risk up to six weeks ahead. The forecast is only as good as the number of neighbours contributing data.
There is no market mechanism that solves neighbour coordination across a landscape. What solves it is a body capable of aligning producers across a defined geography, which is a fair description of a grower group. If the highest-value tools are the ones no single business can take on alone, coordination is not an optional extra on top of extension. It is what makes adoption possible at all. That thinking underpins PropaGATE, which flips the traditional technology exhibition model: rather than starting with a technology and looking for a problem it can solve, producers define the challenge and the program scouts globally for solutions that have already been developed.
SARDI researcher Bianca Agenbag presenting on virtual fencing. Photos: LambEx
Closing the loop between the paddock and the hook
The Australian Meat Processor Corporation (AMPC) Carcase Showcase was the largest analysis of lamb eating quality ever run in Australia: more than 5,300 lambs from 52 producers, graded by the MLA Meat Standards Australia team for intramuscular fat, lean meat yield and carcase weight, then combined into an MSA Sheepmeat Index. This is the sheep equivalent of the beef grading model that has run for nearly 30 years, validated against consumer taste panels and built so processors can segregate meat by eating quality rather than to serve as a marketing badge. It matters for Western Australia that WAMMCO, Katanning, got involved in the project, so the 17 Western Australian entrants did not have to truck stock interstate.
Two findings should change how we talk about dry seasons. Feeding lambs longer and to heavier weights did not reliably lead to better eating quality: some heavy export-weight lambs scored in the lower percentiles while lighter domestic lambs expressed their eating quality genetics well. In a dry year, feeding sheep longer to obtain high meat quality is an expensive assumption to carry. No breed or finishing system stood out, with grassfed, grain-assisted and feedlot lambs producing a similar spread.
What makes improved access to genetics on eating quality more usable is that the feedback loop to the producer has closed. Gundagai Lamb is the first Australian processor to link individual carcase results back to the animal’s on-farm eID tag, after a four-year project funded by the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry and AMPC and delivered with NSW Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development. One producer used that feedback to identify a $22.86 per head margin difference between paddock and feedlot finishing, which is exactly the kind of information needed to judge whether containment feeding pays in a dry season. When feed is short, the costly decisions are which animals to feed, how long, and when to sell. This is the first time most lamb producers have had evidence rather than judgement to answer them.
The market is now paying for the story
Two market signals matter for how technology gets framed. On provenance and consistency, Damian Storie (Classic Fine Foods, UAE) was blunt: premium Middle Eastern customers want the story of the lamb, the breed, how it was reared and who produced it, and they pay for consistency and traceability rather than chasing the lowest price. QR-code provenance is a genuine differentiator in fine dining.
On input exposure, it is easy to watch only the meat price. A large share of Australia’s nitrogen fertiliser arrives through ports beyond the Strait of Hormuz, and sea freight from Melbourne to Jebel Ali has stretched from around 28 days via Suez to between 42 and 50 days via the Cape of Good Hope. Input-price exposure is a drought-resilience issue even though it does not look like one.
What producers said about change
The producer panels were the most quietly instructive sessions of the week.
- Sophie Barnes (NZ) described how her podcast, Head Shepherd, translates science to the paddock to improve outcomes for the global sheep industry.
- James Kerr (Buckleboo Station, SA) told a standout rangelands story: 100,000 ha fenced into six paddocks, each given 15 months of recovery, stock numbers reduced and goats removed, alongside a carbon project that generated 223,000 ACCUs following audit, sold at a unit price in the low $30s per ACCU. It took six to seven years, and it worked because there was consistent monitoring via satellite imagery and soil-moisture probes. James shares his numbers and before-and-after photos openly.
- Angus Whyte (Wyndham Pastoral, NSW) was explicit that farming systems groups are how producers uncover new ideas and gain perspective, and that the change he wished he had made earlier was getting better at communication.
- Sam Winter Cooke (Murndal, VIC) was honest that learning from paper does not always translate to the paddock. He did not see the growth response he expected from rotational grazing and had to adapt the pasture varieties and systems, as well as how he was using data and statistics to improve his decision-making. His candour about learning and adapting is worth more to the next adopter than a polished success story.
Sam Winter Cooke, Chloe Butcher-Herries and Angus Whyte joined Claire Taylor for the final Telling Our Stories panel at LambEx26, sharing the ‘2 percent’ decisions helping their businesses grow, adapt and improve. Photos: LambEx
What it means for agriculture
If there is one through-line, it is that Australian agriculture does not have an innovation supply problem so much as a translation problem. Producers are not short of appetite. What they are short of is time, and the support to absorb the risk of going first.
This reframes what capability-building is for. Confidence is built through repeated, supported exposure rather than a single field day, which is the logic behind Muster Points as ongoing local touch points. The feedback loop matters as much as the demonstration: a producer needs to see results on their own country, using their own numbers, within a timeframe still connected to the decision they made.
A closing thought
The most quietly radical idea at LambEx26 came from the medicinal-feedbase work with Indigenous partners on the on-farm tour: think about Country like a community, where each plant has a different characteristics and roles within the community; examples include medicinal plants that heal country and people and also fire resistant plants that help protect sensitive areas from fire damage.
The technology is ready and producers are willing. How well the industry adopts it will depend less on the next device than on the networks we build around the people going first.
Further reading and related programs
- Muster: a $4.75 million industry-led extension initiative led by GGA focused on strengthening best-practice knowledge, confidence and capability across Western Australia’s sheep and wool sector.
- Smart Grazing, Stronger Lands: a project led by the SW WA Hub helping pastoralists and land managers throughout Australia’s Southern Rangelands to adopt proven climate-smart decision support tools and technologies.
- PropaGATE: Western Australia’s first ever agtech focused landing pad, led by Beanstalk Agtech with support from the SW WA Hub and FIPWA. The program provides access to innovative technologies to tackle key challenges in agriculture and food production – especially drought and climate change – through a collaborative, challenge-led approach.
- Dry-season, virtual fencing and containment resources from the SW WA Hub:
- Livestock nutrition in dry seasons with hay, silage and containment feeding
- Benefits of confinement feeding and deferred grazing
- Managing livestock health and disease during dry seasons
- Use of virtual fencing to build farm resilience
- Virtual fencing for improved drought resilience on South Australian farms
- Virtual fencing and drone monitoring: enhancing rangeland management through AgTech
- Virtual fencing: breaking down boundaries in livestock grazing
- Containment feeding to boost business performance and resilience
- Resilient Futures: Western Australia’s Study Tour Across Victoria and Tasmania