Ram Breeder Workshops

This week marks the final week of our ram breeder workshops. On Monday evening (11th July) we visited the flock of James and David McKane in Killygordon, Co. Donegal. The McKanes are breeding Charollais and Texel sheep and have been involved in performance recording for a number of years now. Again there was some excellent discussion at the workshop from those in attendance. Our final workshop takes place this evening (Friday 15th July) on the farm of Michael Murphy in Tuam, Co. Galway.

In general we feel that these workshops were a worthwhile exercise. At each event we circulated feedback sheets to be completed by those in attendance and the feedback has been excellent. The messages at each workshop have been simple and breeders have definitely gone away with a better understanding of how the indexes work. If we decide to organise such events in the future we will need to look at ways to get better attendance as it is critical that breeders understand the basics behind the €uro-Stars. As mentioned before, LambPlus ram breeders will interact with far more commercial farmers than Sheep Ireland will so by educating ram breeders, hopefully this will help to educate commercial farmers.

Ultrasound Scanning

A total of 150 flocks have been scanned to date. Last week 33 flocks were visited and ultrasonically scanned and had all lambs in the flock weighed. All lambs being ultrasonically scanned need to be tagged with the official NSIS tag. It is very important to have your scales in good working order on the day. Full requirements for the scanning visit were circulated to all breeders by letter a number of weeks ago.