Alloon Belclares have been nominated for the highest achieving LambPlus flock in 2019. Eoghan Barrett established Alloon Belclares near Ballymacward, Ballinasloe, Co. Galway in 2015 and has been performance recording with the LambPlus programme ever since. Alloon Belclares is the second of three flocks to be nominated for the award with the third flock to be announced in the coming weeks. Eoghan is a very active member of LambPlus, recording all data from mating and pregnancy scanning to lambing and  health traits, and this can be seen from his high DQI score of 91%. Eoghan stated that his aim of collecting high quality data isn’t to achieve a high DQI but rather to improve his flock’s genetics as much as possible.

Eoghan lambs his replacements as ewe lambs and the whole flock is managed in a commercial grass-based system to produce commercially robust sheep. Eoghan has a very strict breeding policy to drive genetic gain and improve each animals’ indexes and accuracies. Eoghan will cull breeding females as young as two-year olds if their first or second litter of lambs are not performing sufficiently. When selecting new stock rams or replacements to retain Eoghan will look at the €uro-star value and the €uro-star percentile rather than the star rating as it allows him to rank animals more precisely and select the best genetics available to him. Selecting the top Belclare animals in the replacement and terminal indexes has resulted in Eoghan’s 2019 lambs having an average replacement index value of €8.69 and an average terminal index value of €0.73.

Eoghan also pointed out that although the animal’s replacement and terminal index are very important it is also critical that the animal is correct, functional and able to perform in a commercial setting. Eoghan is actively involved with the CPT and RamPlus to increase index accuracies and ram linkage and the benefits of this can be seen as the flock average index accuracy is an impressive 46%. Eoghan uses the Sheep Ireland inbreeding checker when planning his breeding to ensure bloodlines are kept open and to avoid any inbreeding depression which Eoghan stated could be an issue in the Belclare breed due to a relatively small gene pool. Eoghan aims to use many rams and to use new genetics frequently in order to have many blood lines in his flock.

There are many influential sires used in the Alloon flock with a ram from the Knockcroghery flock (MY1102301) having the largest number of progeny in the flock with many daughters retained due to his excellent replacement figures especially daughters milk. Other rams with many progeny in the flock include Kilmeany Charlie, Violet Hill Bã©la, Violet Hill COED, Foras Cadell, showing the spread of genetics utilised in the Alloon flock. Eoghan has also bred some of his top sires such as Alloon Bernie (Top 9% for replacment), Alloon Dynamite (Top 8% for replacement and Top 5% for terminal) and Alloon Duncan (Top 4% for terminal) highlighting the quality of animals Eoghan is producing.