STAP
Today marks the deadline for STAP task completion which means there is a huge amount of activity in the Sheep Ireland office. For STAP purposes in 2015 the €uro-Star ram task had a double value for farmers involved in the programme.
All farmers were required to complete two tasks within the STAP year, so the €uro-Star ram task was a very popular choice this year. This task is verified by Sheep Ireland and facilitators and/or farmers are required to provide Sheep Ireland with evidence of task completion. A huge amount of this information has been submitted to the Sheep Ireland office this week and will be processed as quickly as possible.
All STAP facilitators can check the status of all STAP participants in respect of the €uro-Star ram task on www.sheep.ie using their personal access password.
CPT Progress
This week 1,465 were sponged across the flocks of John Large (Tipperary), Andrew Moloney (Offaly) and James Naper (Meath). In association with sponging these ewes were also weighed, condition scored, lameness scored and dag scored. This data will be very valuable for the development of a future health Index for our sheep breeds.
During all visits to our CPT flocks we place a major emphasis on ewe IDs. All ewes are doubled tagged, with one tag being an EID tag as per legal requirements. Any ewes with missing or damaged tags are retagged with new IDs carefully correlated to the previous ID on the Sheep Ireland database. It is critical that any ewe missing a single tag is retagged as soon as possible to eliminate the risk of total identity loss.
Sponges must remain in all ewes for 12 days at which point sponges will be removed and ewes will receive 500 IU of Folligan PMSG. On day 14, ewes will be artificially inseminated with fresh semen from the rams that we have collected from around Ireland. The CPT rams are currently being collected and dropped to Lyons Estate, UCD, Co. Dublin and the majority of rams will be assembled by today Friday 2nd October.
See below some images from this week’s CPT work. On Wednesday 30th September just over 300 ewes were sponged on the farm of Andrew Moloney.
The images below show Andrews ewes post sponging after being weighed, condition scored, lameness and dag scored. Also below are some images of the first rams to arrive in UCD. Rams are held in an isolation shed for a period of three days. Once they are thoroughly checked by a vet, the rams are moved to the main ram shed where they are trained to jump and provide semen over a number of days before they are required for AI.
Animal Sales Card
As part of continued development of www.sheep.ie LambPlus breeders can now download and print off an animal sales card in same format as our €uro-Star sale catalogue. Breeders and farmers have always been able to print animal €uro-Stars from the Sheep Ireland online ram search, but the format of this print out has been different to the sales catalogue format which commercial sheep farmers have become very familiar with in recent years.
We continue to encourage all LambPlus breeders to provide each ram customer with an up to date print out of the €uro-Star evaluations for the animal in question. We continually come across cases where farmers are not provided with any €uro-Star information when they purchase a ram. We also come across cases where the €uro-Star information provided is out of date (an old evaluation). While all ram buyers can check their ram evaluations on www.sheep.ie, not all farmers will have ready access to this facility so it is important that an up to date physical copy of the genetic evaluation accompanies the ram. The new sales card facility will help breeders to supply this information very easily. To access the sales card, simply click on the required animal ID in the ‘Inventory’ section of your Sheep Ireland profile, the ‘Sales Card’ option will be visible from here – See image below.
