Happy New Year

Happy new year to all readers of this weekly update. We look forward to the next performance recording season with a lot of optimism and hope that we can continue to develop the €uro-Star evaluations in association with our LambPlus breeders and other industry partners for the benefit of all sheep farmers. There is some exciting times for the year ahead as the DNA from the Ovigen project is starting to be analysed in the lab, and no doubt this will also generate lots of challenges for the year ahead.

Lambing Season 2016

For a lot of breeders they are currently in the middle of lambing or wrapping up their early lambing ewes. We would encourage all breeders to get their lambing data loaded onto the website as quickly as possible to ensure they get a good flock DQI and so that if any issues araise with what has been noted down then it will be easier to remedy if it is still only shortly after the event. All farmers should have received there lambing notebooks by now and these can be used to aid you through this busy time. We would definitely acknowledge this is a busy time of year but if the laming information is regularly updated then it should not take that long to upload. It is recommended that all breeders refresh themselves with what is the required fields to be recorded. You can find this information in the front of the lambing notebook. The most common traits that breeders forget to record is:

1. Dead lambs & their weights
2. Fostering information
3. Pet lambs / Bottle reared
4. Ewes that aborted or Barren
5. Variation in Lambing Difficulty

This is no easy task and hopefully commercial sheep farmers will continue to recognise the benefits of buying rams from these breeders which will help to justify their efforts.

Some breeders have already stared entering their laming information so they are putting their best foot forward with regards to achieving a good flock DQI.

System Updates

Sheep Ireland and ICBF are in preparation for a major upgrade of the computer hardware on which all of its services are hosted. This is a major undertaking and while every effort has been made to minimise disruption to our users, some downtime is unavoidable. The expected schedule for the upgrade is as follows:

• From Friday 15th January at 4:00pm to Monday 18th January at 9:00am: The upgrade will be implemented. The website will be unavailable on these dates.
• Monday 18th January at 9:00am: Services will resume although there may be teething problems.

This upgrade will not change how screens are presented, only their performance.

We would recommend that if you have anything of urgency to process using the Sheep Ireland website that you do this before Friday 15th to ensure you do not run into difficulties.

The upside of this upgrade is that we will have the very latest infrastructure on which to run the Sheep Ireland systems, which means it, can work faster for you and have enough capacity to expand in the years to come.