LambPlus Regional Meetings

Two of the five LambPlus Regional meetings have now been held, there have been some good discussions taking place, with feedback on all the various aspects of Sheep Ireland, including the CPT and the genetic evaluations. The remaining three meetings are being held next week.

One area that did cause a lot of discussion at the Kilkenny meeting was, across breed evaluations. These breeders felt that commercial farmers wanted these evaluations, to better aid them in selecting the best ram for their purpose, regardless of breed. A test across breed evaluation is compiled each year to investigate, if it is ready to be deployed to the public. This will be done again between now and next year’s evaluations and depending on the results, some across breed evaluations may be published.

Another topic that is causing some debate is the DQI, with breeders giving some feedback on what they think should be included in and how it is displayed. Hopefully this level of breeder interaction will continue for the remainder of the meetings.

Central Progeny Test Rams

All the breeders that submitted rams into the CPT this year have got a letter this week updating them with how many ewes the ram was used to serve, how well the ram jumped, the quality of the rams semen and whether or not the ram successfully had semen frozen and how many doses is available to the breeder.