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Sheep Ireland Technicians Michael O' Neil (Mayo) and James Kelly (Kildare) getting trained on the new Ultrasound machines

New Ultrasound Scanning Machines to Capture Lamb Muscle and Backfat Depth

Our current scanning machines were simply too old, prone to breakdowns

and are no longer serviceable. The new machines will be a major improvement and will hopefully contribute to capturing more accurate data, due mainly to far greater scan image quality.

In the picture below you can see Sheep Ireland scanning technicians on the UCD Research farm at Lyons Estate to completing training on how to use a set of new Ultrasound scanning machines. These machines will be visiting our LambPlus flocks throughout the summer to record muscle and fat data. This data is very valuable to the €uro-Star evaluations and collecting it annually will remain a focus of the LambPlus programme.

Sheep Ireland Technicians Michael O' Neil (Mayo) and James Kelly (Kildare) getting trained on the new Ultrasound machines
Sheep Ireland Technicians Michael O’ Neil (Mayo) and James Kelly (Kildare) getting trained on the new Ultrasound machines

Important Requirements for Scanning this Year

We will be insisting that LambPlus breeders carrying out scanning this year present all performance recorded lambs to our scanning technicians when visited (males & female lambs). While we will not be insisting that all lambs are scanned, we will weigh and score all lambs for a number of health traits. Our plans to launch a new €uro-Star health index in 2017 is completely dependent on our ability to collect data from our LambPlus flocks. Collecting a weight on all lambs will also help to maximise each LambPlus breeder’s Data Quality Index (DQI) score. The DQI will appear on all €uro-Star sales catalogues this summer.