Out at Holbrook in New South Wales, Georgia Cluff and her three kelpies have spent hundreds of hours in the paddocks counting sheep — lambs to be more specific.
The station's five-month lambing season has come to an end, and it has been its biggest year yet with 10,000 lambs tagged at birth.
Ms Cluff, the breeding manager at seed stock business Lambpro, said it had been a big effort by the team.
"It's definitely quite a few lambs, lots of busy days.
"We run four different breeds here, and across those four are 10,000 lambs to tag."
Lambpro owner Tom Bull said he believed it might be a record, even outside of Australia.
"I don't know anyone else in the world who has tagged that many," he said.
"I know New Zealand studs max out at about 5,000."
Tag team
Mr Bull admitted it had been a massive job.
"The whole team — Georgia, Rozzy, Corey and Daniel — have all done an amazing job tagging that many.
"We've got 140 paddocks and that's plenty of ewes lambing."
He said a big thanks should also go to their dogs.
"It's very handy having a good tagging dog that helps speed it all up, so full credit to the dogs.
"It is a big job, but it's all about accurate data, and you do get really good data by being in the paddocks.
"It's a really good process opposed to going off just DNA where you don't get that same information."
Great lambing season
Among the 10,000 lambs tagged this year, Ms Cluff said there were around 20 sets of quadruplets and plenty of triplets and twins.
"We've had a really good season; weather-wise it's been pretty mild and we haven't had too many adverse conditions," she said.
With lambing season finished, the team moves on to preparing for auction.
Lambing will start again in April and the team is looking at going even bigger.
"Ten-thousand is definitely a record for us, but we are building flock numbers and so next year we should hit 12,000."
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