Sheep Ireland Elite €uro-Star Ram Sale Report

• Our annual €uro-Star ram sale took place last Saturday in Tullamore Mart and it went very well. A full sale report is available from our website or by clicking here. We had our largest ever ram entry which made us fearful about finding homes for all rams, but the attendance at the sale was the largest yet. This large buyer attendance was particularly encouraging given that the incentive to use €uro-Star rams as part of the DAFM discussion group programmes is no longer in place. This sale improves year on year and we will strive to make it an even better sale in 2017.
• We would like to thank the mart, the breeders that entered rams and the commercial farmers that came to buy rams at the sale.

Ram Progress

• High Index Texel frozen semen is now available to all LambPlus breeders. Some breeders have been carrying out AI this week and orders for this semen are increasing daily. To place an order for this semen, just call our office on 1850 601 901. Click here for some more information on the programme and a summary of the Texel rams which are available.

CPT

• AI 2017 Another year has passed and we are back selecting rams which we would like to enter the CPT programme for AI this coming October. The selection objectives will differ slightly for some breeds. For the breeds that are most established performance recording breeds, the objective will be to identify the highest Replacement Index rams possible. The objective of this approach is to allow us to increase the accuracy % of these rams. We would then hope to invite a number of this high index, high accuracy rams to take part in RamPlus 2017. High accuracy, high index rams can only benefit the wider industry if they are used by breeders, and in turn commercial farmers.
• For some smaller breeds and/or breeds which are in the early stages of performance recording the objective of the CPT will be slightly different, in that improving genetic linkage will be the number one focus. Linkage is critical to providing good genetic evaluations – click here to see why.

CPT Ram Selection

• There are many criteria to consider when selecting our CPT rams. Replacement Index is the first selection consideration. We want to select rams that are 100% physically correct also. For this reason we want to identify high Index rams which are currently being used by pedigree ram breeders. This means two things; that the ram is good physically and that there is a good chance that other pedigree breeders will use the ram, should he be invited into RamPlus next season.
• Over the coming weeks we will be contacting all breed societies to get help in selecting these rams.