About Manofield Australian Whites
The Manofield Australian White Story
Manofield Australian Whites was founded back in 2019 by Ben Heinrich with support of his father Ken and wife Kerry. We had made the decision back in the mid 2000’s to change our sheep flock from a traditional self-replacing merino and cross-bred lamb enterprise to a fully clean skin flock, concentrating fully on meat production and do away with the wool. The easy care nature, reduced labour and improved animal welfare benifits of clean skin sheep helped make our decision. We experimented with several other shedding breeds before finally settling on Australian Whites in about 2015. By this time we had also developed our own branded lamb label Wunderbar Lamb, and with the Australian Whites being dubbed “the Wagyu of Lamb” we saw it as a natural fit to help our lamb obtain optimal eating quality.
The Manofield stud started with the purchase of 30 SIL stud ewes from Tattykeel, mated to three different sires, including “Long Chain” which gave us fantastic genetics to kick off with. Later that same year, we followed that up with the purchase of the top priced ram at the Gamadale on property sale with 180038, a large framed, well balanced ram. We had a couple years of natural breeding, mating the stud ewes every 8 months and the stud ewe lambs at 48kg live weight to increase our numbers as soon as possible.
From birth, our sheep undergo a thorough evaluation. We mother up, weigh and tag as soon as the lamb is born ensuring we have started the data collection process. We weigh the lambs at marking, weaning and at 9 months post-weaning to track and monitor the important data that we believe is vital for the selection of Australian White sheep. An eye muscle scan and DNA tests are undertaken to also ensure the best animals are selected.
In 2022 Ben & Kerry attended the Ardene on property sale, keen to secure some of the superior “Magnum” genetics (the previous world record priced AW ram of $53,000) of which we were successful. We walked away with Ardene 210027 "Son Of A Gun" and 2 other true to type stud rams. All of which have been used heavily in our current programs.
In April 2022 we embarked on our first ET program, with the aim of fast tracking our numbers with the best genetics we had available. We flushed 10 of our top stud ewes which had a mixture of Tattykeel, Gamadale and Ardene bloodlines. We selected one of our outstanding young rams “BULLET” and our Ardene son of Magnum “EGO” as our selected sires. These will be available in our October 2023 sale.