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.
Sale | Date | County |
---|---|---|
Charollais Premier | Saturday 30th July | Tullow |
Belclare Premier | Tuesday 2nd August | Kilkenny |
Suffolk Premier | Saturday 6th August | Roscrea |
Texel Premier | Saturday 13th August | Blessington |
Rouge Premier | Wednesday 17th August | Tullamore |
Beltex Premier | Wednesday 24th August | Tullamore |
Sheep Ireland sale | Saturday 27th August | Tullamore |
Lleyn Premier | Saturday 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.