Look across your flock and you can read a lot at a glance: condition, frame, the standouts and the stragglers. But two of the traits that matter most to the future of your operation are invisible to the naked eye and, until recently, invisible to the scales and the spreadsheet too.

The first is efficiency: which animals convert feed into product with the least waste. Feed is the single biggest cost in most systems, so the efficient animals are the most valuable ones you own. The second is methane: which animals are your low emitters and which are your high ones, as emissions move from a talking point to a measured, increasingly valuable trait.

Here’s the catch worth carrying into LambEx, these two questions have different answers, and you can’t reliably read one from the other. The most efficient animal is not guaranteed to be the lowest emitter. Knowing one tells you surprisingly little about the other. The only way to know either is to measure it, on the individual animal.

That’s why C-Lock is bringing its GreenFeed system to LambEx 2026.

The trait you’ve been estimating

Methane output in sheep is heritable, and it varies considerably from one animal to the next. Importantly, that variation does not line up neatly with the production figures you already record, growth, carcase, condition. You can’t infer an animal’s emissions from how good it looks on the rail or how it ranks on weight. The number has to be measured directly.

GreenFeed does exactly that. It’s a free-choice, non-invasive system: the animal walks up to the unit on its own, drawn by a small amount of pelleted bait, and visits several times a day as part of its normal routine. While it feeds, the unit captures and measures its greenhouse gas output — methane and carbon dioxide, with oxygen and hydrogen available as options — at the level of the single animal. No masks, no chambers, no extended yard sessions that distort how an animal behaves.

The small ruminant configuration isn’t a cattle unit shrunk down. It can be run in the shed or out on pasture, and the same platform measures goats just as readily as sheep.

Proven, and already an Australian story

This is not a prototype. Hundreds of GreenFeed units are deployed worldwide, and the technology sits behind over 800 peer-reviewed studies. As low-methane traits work their way into Lambplan and the national breeding-value toolset, the limiting factor is no longer the genetics, it’s the volume of reliable, individual-animal measurement feeding them. That is the gap GreenFeed is built to close.

And because efficiency and emissions are separate questions, C-Lock builds the systems to put a number on both: GreenFeed for emissions, paired with individual intake measurement for the efficiency side. Measure the same animals for both, and you finally see the full picture instead of two educated guesses.

Better data leads to better decisions and profits

This is about making better decisions and making more money. The tools now exist to move from an average across the mob to a real number on each individual animal, so selection and management run on measurement instead of guesswork. Decisions built on real figures compound: sharper breeding calls, tighter feed costs, and efficiency and emissions numbers that are increasingly worth money in their own right.

Visit us at LambEx

We’re not at LambEx to tell you we already know which of your animals is the earner and which is the burner. We’re there because we make the instruments that find out — and we’d like to show you how they work.

Drop by the C-Lock stand at the Adelaide Convention Centre, 7–10 July. Bring your best questions about measurement, repeatability, trial design, and animal performance. Whether you’re building breeding values or simply want to know which of your ewes is quietly carrying the flock, the answer starts the same way: measure the individual.

Learn more at c-lockinc.com or visit us at LambEx 2026, Adelaide Convention Centre, 7–10 July.