Sheep 2015 – Athenry Sat 20th June

We are now in the home straight in terms of preparations for this major event for the Irish sheep industry. This weeks Irish Farmers Journal contains a detailed supplement on the showcase. Sheep Ireland will have a significant involvement in the day.

We will be found in both the ‘Sheep Breeding Village’ and ‘Hill Sheep Breeding’ Villages which will be located in close proximity to the breed society showing areas. Hourly interactive workshops will form part of all the villages. These workshops will begin a 10.00am and repeat on the hour every hour, until 5.00pm in the evening. Sheep Ireland will be partaking in one of these workshops to explain how to interpret the €uroStar evaluations and how best to use them.

Sheep Ireland will also have a stand on the day, with involvement in a seperate Ovigen stand which will detail what is involved in this exciting sheep genomics research project. In terms of Hill sheep breeding, Sheep Ireland will be on hand in the Hill sheep breeding village to explain the merits of hill sheep breeds maintaining a flockbook for their breed. There will be performance recorded Mayo-Connemara sheep and performance recording hill sheep breeders on hand to help explain to hill farmers what is involved in the process.

Map of Sheep 2015 site

CPT Update

120 day weights will be collected from all CPT lambs in the coming days. The process to identify potential CPT rams for next Autumn CPT is beginning already. Our ambition to invite very high Index rams into the programme in order to build their accuracy%. The end result will hopefully be that for the breeds participating, there will be a selection of high index, good accuracy% rams available to breeders and breed societies. We will be requests the involvement of breed societies in the selection of these CPT rams. The aim will be to find rams that tick all the boxes from a visual point of view will also meeting a high criteria in relation to the Indices.