LambPlus Sign-up Forms 2018

• We have begun to circulate our LambPlus sign-up forms this week and by next week all existing breeders and new society breeders should have received one. If by some reason that a breeder doesn’t receive a form the relevant information will also be available on our website, which is available to download. As always our deadline for receipt of the sign-ups is Friday 1st December but we will be sending regular reminders to all current LambPlus members.
• The fee structure that was introduced last year will remain in place and is as follows:
  • €50 for breeders that are members of flockbooks who host their flockbooks on the Sheep Ireland database (Belclare, Beltex, Galway, Rouge, Texel and Vendeen).
  • €100 for breeders that are members of flockbooks that do not use the Sheep Ireland database to host their flockbooks.

Breed Society Meeting

Yesterday (Thursday 2nd November) members of the Sheep Ireland Board met with breed society
representatives. The meeting proved to be very positive in general with societies raising some of their
concerns with us. It is very encouraging to see all parties involved working together, striving for breed
improvement across all breeds. All societies were given the opportunity to put forward topics for
discussion; we would like to remind breeders that if they should ever wish to raise an issue we would
encourage them to contact Sheep Ireland directly or indeed Board members themselves. We have Board
members specifically that represent the Flockbooks and the LambPlus program. Any issues raised will be
up for discussion at the next Board meeting and will be dealt with accordingly, to see Sheep Ireland’s
current Board structure please click here.

Data to be recorded

• A reminder to flocks that you can still record mating’s for the 2017/2018 season; although this is not mandatory for all breeds we encourage breeders to record this information as it will speed up the process of recording lambing information next Spring. A useful report will be generated as soon as you do so. Although not incorporated in our DQI calculation at the moment, the DQI will be under review and may be included in the future.
• Pregnancy scans can also be recorded, but unfortunately at the moment this has to be recorded individually on each ewe. If breeders wish to send us a copy of their pregnancy scan results we would be happy to load them onto to the database and we can generate some statistics based on the results.