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Weekly Update: 13/03/2015

New Sheep Ireland data recording screens

In recent weeks the number of breeders entering data onto the new Sheep Ireland website has increased significantly. The number of breeders recording their flock data by paper is at its lowest level ever, with just 26 breeders choosing to do so. The remainder of our 600 breeders are recording their data via our recently upgraded website. Many breeders are making a big transition from paper recording to recording online and we would encourage these breeders especially, to give us a call to get them started. We are getting lots of queries in relation to the new screens and we should remind breeders to have a look at the ‘Help’ section which can be found on the ‘Lambing Management’ page. We welcome any queries that breeders have and acknowledge that the new screens will take a bit of getting used to over the coming months. Throughout the year there will also be a range of additional screens and reports being made available to breeders.

CPT lambing 2015

Our CPT lambing continues to progress very well. Some of the flocks have now finished lambing with the other flocks in the home straight. Our focus will now be on collating this data to provide feedback to each of the flocks involved in the programme and also to the breeders that submitted rams to the CPT last autumn. Each year we extract some extremely interesting data from these flocks and we expect this year will be no different. The stand-out message from previous years data is that the variation within individual breeds is greater than that between different breeds – emphasising the need for a strong performance recording programme to help identify the top performing bloodlines.

A happily tagged new born CPT lambs from UCD this week.

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