Teagasc National Hill Conference

The Hill conference took place in Westport on Wednesday. Frank Campion spoke about the potential benefit of using performance recorded rams in the years to come. With preliminary results from one of the BETTER farms showing substantial differences in lamb mortality between Lanark rams used on the farm, this highlights the opportunity that performance recording has to offer. We continue to engage with hill breeders and we encourage any hill farmers that are interested in performance recording to get in touch. We send out lambing notebooks and lambing sheets to interested breeders each year. To incentivise hill breeders to performance record this service has been offered free of charge for 2018.

To see the online publication from the event please see here.

CPT Lambing Preparation in its final stages

With only a week to go before the first of our CPT lambs start hitting the ground, preparation is in full swing! We are putting the final touches to our labour rota and we can now focus on having everything in place for next week. Contained in the pictures below is the information we will be collecting from ewes and lambs over the coming weeks. These will be placed on large boards which will be present on each farm to make it easier when we are recording. We also place a small board on each lambing pen where we write this information. This can be easily wiped off and be ready to be used again for when the next ewe enters the pen. The CPT farmers find these boards very useful to write down any issues that an ewe/lamb may have.

An example of a board that is placed on the pen with the traits we record.