Weekly Update: 01/09/17

Sheep Ireland Elite Multi-Breed Ram Sale

A very good sale took place last Saturday 26th Aug in Tullamore Mart. This was the biggest Sheep Ireland ram sale to date in terms of ram entries and is now the largest catalogued ram sale in Ireland. This largest ever entry of rams was matched by the number of buyers that attended on the day which made for a great sale. In total we saw an 84% clearance which is extremely high given the number of rams presented for sale. For breeders selling rams on the day, the average price of €540 (up from €525 in 2016) was very pleasing. For commercial farmers buying rams on the day the range in prices from €280 up to the sales highest price of €940 meant that there was a ram to suit all budgets.

This sale is a great promotion for sheep performance recording in Ireland and a reward for those ram breeders that are committed to breeding high accuracy%, high €uroStar rams for the industry. The Sheep Ireland sale is a becoming a target of commercial sheep farmers who wish to purchase high index animals across a number of different breeds in a single location. We hope this sale will continue to go from strength to strength.

We’d like to thank everyone involved in the sale including Sheep Ireland staff, Tullamore mart staff, our auctioneers, breeders who brought rams to the sale and indeed the commercial buyers who ultimately made the sale a success.

For the full sale report click here.

CPT ram selection 2017

The process of identifying our next batch of CPT rams has already started. We are currently contacting breeders with a view to sourcing rams for the month of October for our fresh semen AI programme. Rams will be housed in our CPT centre based on the UCD farm in Lyons Estate. Here rams are held in isolation and trained to provide semen. If semen quality is deemed adequate the rams are used to AI some of our 2,200 CPT commercial ewes.

The CPT is one of the most important elements of the Sheep Ireland programme. Using rams which have themselves or their ancestors have been involved in the CPT is highly desirable given the fact that the data generated on these CPT farms is independently collected performance data from grass based commercial sheep farms.

If any ram breeder would like their ram to be considered for inclusion in the programme, we would urge them to contact us as soon as possible. We are mainly looking for high index rams, ideally on the Replacement index, however all suggested rams will be considered.

Some images from the Sheep Ireland sale