26/05/2026
Worm 🪱 Resistance!
We have had a big couple of days here collecting 💩 samples from 378 ram hoggets – all Quarterbred, Poll Merino and Stabilised Halfbred ram hoggets were sampled. It was very satisfying to get to that last one today
It’s taken us a while to get to this point – with the young fellas refusing to succumb to a worm challenge.
They were drenched on 28th January, and then regularly monitored as we tried to get their worm counts high enough to conduct individual sampling. This proved challenging, with counts bumbling along on the 200’s for over 90 days post drench, prior to jumping in the last 2 weeks.
This worm challenge data will provide us with information on how our ram hoggets have handled a worm challenge without being drenched for 118 days! ⏳We are pretty chuffed with that.
They have been challenged on multiple counts, as we were also trying to get a footrot 🦶challenge going over the same period – this took a while to happen to, and we were finally able to score them all last week.
All this has happened in a season that well and truly wetter 💦 than usual, with ideal conditions for worms to thrive and footrot to take off 📈– but it hasn’t.
These are traits that aren’t “add on’s” for us – they are inbuilt.
