25% of all the labour on the average lowland Sheep farm throughout the year is used during the lambing period (A. Bohan, TLPM) making it one of the most demanding times of the year. Therefore any measure that could potentially reduce the labour required or time spent per ewe at lambing time should be followed.

In 2015, Sheep Ireland started collecting Lamb Vigour scores on the CPT flocks, and in 2018, made it possible for Pedigree flocks to follow suit and we now have over 100K Lamb Vigour records available. Lamb Vigour is scored on a 1-5 scale by the farmer (To watch how to record Lamb Vigour see here). With 1 being the lambs with the poorest Vigour, to 5 being the best. Huge variations were seen between different bloodlines. As with most other traits, we also found more variation within breeds than there is across breeds.

Lamb Vigour was found to be highly correlated to Lambing difficulty and Lamb survival, two key traits in the €uroStar indexes which is positive. This means by selecting for lamb Vigour, we will also be selecting for greater lambing ease and lamb survival at the same time.

Our research has shown that the new Lamb Vigour is 12% heritable, which means breeders that select on this trait with reasonable pressure should be able to make modest progress over the medium term.

The inclusion of the Lamb Vigour trait in the indexes is unlikely to cause many €uroStar movements, with the greatest movements seen in the lamb survivability sub-index. Sheep Ireland plans to make the Lamb Vigour trait available to farmers via the www.RamSearch.ie ahead of the sale season along with a number of other traits already included in the index.

The first Genomic Evaluation (GE) of 2022 to include this update will be March 23rd.