What’s new and cool among the commercial trade show exhibits at this year’s LambEx event in Adelaide?

Sheep Central took a wander through the trade stand display area…..

Lamb Tallow

Tassie Lamb Tallow turned up on the Australian Meat Processor Corporation stand; a ‘new’ product endorsed by the industry organisation … and generations of chefs.

AMPC’s David Carew said: “What’s old is new. Ancestral diet seems to be creeping into everyone’s vocabulary. If you look on social media people are talking about the benefits of eating tallow over seed oils.

Jade Burge shows off a tub of Tassie Lamb Tallow on the AMPC stand

“We’ve always known in the red meat industry that tallow is a power-packed nutritional bonus and it’s only now that consumers are getting their heads around the fact that bio-availability of nutrients are more important than just putting something in your mouth for the sake of it.”

AMPC’s extension and adoption manager continued: “From a chef’s point of view, tallow is great because it lasts twice as long a seed oil in deep frying. It’s a lot more stable and you’ve got a flavour benefit from it.”

While he said clean-up from tallow was more complicated than seed oil “but I think in hindsight, the flavour development and the longevity of the product far outweigh that negative.”

He said Tassie Tallow has seen the trend emerging. “Where AMPC is sitting at is the understanding that a trend is a trend and if you don’t nurture it, you lose it. We’re trying to influence industry to say ‘make it a Vegemite’. If people can’t find it in their corner store that trend will fall away.”

Gallagher scanner features connectivity advances

A new high-speed scanner debuted at this year’s LambEx, the Gallagher HR0 is designed to make EID tag-reading easier.

Gallagher’s Justin Cooper with the new HRO wand reader

Justin Cooper, area manager for Gallagher Animal Management said: “This is predominantly used to connect to a mobile app to read both sheep and cattle tags. It loads the EID numbers straight into the app and their via direct transfer to the NLIS database. It also connects to our other hardware products like our weigh-scales.

“No connectivity to report it uses a simple Bluetooth connection to your phone and once you get back to cellular service you have the ability to share the data files.”

Powered by a rechargeable and replaceable lithium battery, the high-density fibreglass reader can run for up to eight hours and can read around five tags per second.

Justin said: “This product is really designed towards the sheep producer because it is so high-speed. You can fill a race of sheep and race along scanning very fast.”

The product comes with online training, a full year warranty and Australian-based servicing and a six-person technical support team.

Barenbrug Seeds showcases new Lucerne varieties

Partnerships with SARDI has brought two new powerful Barenbrug seed offerings to this year’s LambEx.

Reese Hardwidge with one of Barenbrug Seeds’ new lucerne releases

The Marshall sub-clover and BAR Seven S3 lucerne are due for release in Autumn 2027 and Spring 2027 respectively.

Sheep and beef-centred Marshall is suited to areas of 450mm+ rainfall and in heavy to medium soils of 4.8 to 8pH. It has recorded up to 24pc total yield improvement over Clare and 19pc over Mintaro varieties and has been bred for improved early vigour, cool-season and spring-forage yield.

The lucerne is suited to areas of 400mm+ rainfall and well-drained soils of 4.8 to 8pH.  Its features include improved yield in dryland and irrigated systems across a diversity of Australian conditions. “It’s got built-in grazing tolerance, high DM better curves in autumn into spring – so better growth at both ends of the season,” said Reese Hardwidge, sales manager Northern Victoria/southern NSW.

Commander Ag shows remote-controlled crush

Among its displays of feed wagons and shearing set-ups, Josh Devenish of Commander Ag shared news of the company’s latest offering, a remote-operated hydraulic crush capable of one-person drafting.

Josh Devenish from Commander Ag with video images of the new remotely operated hydraulic crush

“Previously two people were required – one operating the race and the other operating the crush – now one person can be doing both,” he said.

The first model has just been installed on a property at Albany, WA. The back-slider, the side-squeeze and head bail is all hydraulically operated, guided by a hand-held remote which can operate within about 15m.

“It gives a lot of flexibility of being able to work the race as well as be drafting, and you can be away from the animals,” said Josh.

“It’s a plug-and-play system; it comes with a hydraulic power pack with everything on it. You can just plug it into 240 volt and it’s all ready to go.”

The crush is adaptable to all breeds and can handle girths from 450mm out to 750mm. There is also a manual lever control option.

FeedTech feeding systems are fully-automated

A fully automated feeder is the newest offering from Feedtech. “We’ve still got our standard controller, that’s the one we’ve had since 2017. But what we’ve just released is our new advanced controller,” said Feedtech feeding systems general manager Dave Collier.

“The whole idea is that the operator can select – either by smart phone or on-screen – if they want to ad lib feed to fatten lambs, containment feed or induction feed. The user can select how many head they want to feed and select the time frame to feed between.

“The user would have already calibrated the unit so they know how many grams per second it’s putting out.”

“And when doing induction or containment feeding we’ve got an option feed control system, which closes the trough over while it’s actually filling, so the hungry ones don’t get the bulk of the feed.”

Connected to wifi or Cloud platforms, users can specify how long they want to feed, for example up to 14 days for induction feeding. The inbuilt technology allows multiple units to be operated from one location.

Dave said: “We wanted to move forward with our auto-feeders and we know that a lot of farmers these days want data and simplicity.”