Weekly Update: 22/07/16

Premier Sales 2016

Sales catalogues for most sheep breed premier sales are now complete or close to completion. The Vendeen premier sale took place on Wednesday 13th July in Roscommon where they had a very good sale with very strong demand for high index rams reported which is encouraging for the ram sale season ahead.

The remaining premier sales will come thick and fast in the coming weeks and one of the most striking things about all premier sale catalogues completed to date is the percentage of performance recorded animals present in each sale.

SaleDateCounty
Charollais PremierSaturday 30th JulyTullow
Belclare PremierTuesday 2nd AugustKilkenny
Suffolk PremierSaturday 6th August Roscrea
Texel PremierSaturday 13th
August
Blessington
Rouge PremierWednesday 17th August Tullamore
Beltex PremierWednesday 24th
August
Tullamore
Sheep Ireland saleSaturday 27th August Tullamore
Lleyn PremierSaturday 24th
September
Roscommon

 Prominence of Performance Recorded Sale Entries

Looking at the premier sale catalogues available to date the percentage of entries with genetic indexes is extremely high. 94% of entries in the Vendeen Premier sale came from recording flocks. For the Charollais Premier sale in Tullow on Saturday 30th July, just over 81% of all entries will have indexes available for ram buyers. 100% of entries in the Belclare premier sale on Tuesday August 2nd will have €uro-Star Indexes available. 73% of the Suffolk Premier sale on Saturday 6th August in Roscrea will be performance recorded. Texel Premier sale as an example just over 92% of sale entries are from performance recording flocks – the sale takes place on Saturday 13th August.

This level of genetic Index availability bodes well for commercial farmers attempting to source high index rams for their flocks. Demand from commercial farmers will be critical to maintaining this level of breeder participation in Sheep Ireland.

Additional information available to ram buyers in catalogues for 2016

Parentage Verification – 2016 marks the first year in which Irish ram buyers can purchase rams with DNA verified parentage. This information will be available for a proportion of lambs tested as part of a pilot project in high DQI flocks across a number of breeds. The pilot project was established to trial the process of taking DNA samples from young lambs and to attempt to have genotype results available in advance of Premier sales. We have successfully achieved this for 2016 and will hope to make genotyping available to all performance recording breeders.

Scrapie genotype – All pilot projects lambs will have a scrapie genotype available for purchasers and this genotype result will be display in the Sheep Ireland catalogue.

Breeder DQI score – The Data Quality Index is an indication of the quality of data recorded by performance recording breeders throughout the year. A high DQI score means that a breeder has recorded all the required data for his flock and has done so in a timely manner

Highlighting CPT sires in animal ancestry – Animals bred from animals that have previously been involved in the CPT are in demand from a lot of ram buyers. Up to now it was difficult for ram buyers to identify these bloodlines. There is a large amount of commercial farm data collected on our CPT sires and this will result in higher accuracies for the related bloodlines. Higher accuracy% is something that all users of the €uro-Star Indexes should seek out.

Catalogue Example