Ram Sale Season About to Commence

Sheep Ireland are busy preparing for the first ram sales of 2017. A number of small sales have already taken place but the flagship Premier sales of each breed will be taking place in the coming weeks. Our priority is to have Ultrasound scanning complete for all relevant breeders in advance of Premier sale catalogues being prepared.

Upcoming Events to Note

Suffolk Open Day – Tomorrow (Saturday 8th July). Flock Open Day on the farm of Eamonn Duffy, Ethelstown, Kells, Co. Meath. Eamonn who is a major supporter of the €uro-Star Indexes has won the award of Suffolk flock of the year for 2017.

Vendeen Premier Sale – This sale takes place in Roscommon on Wednesday 12th July. A full catalogue can be found on the society’s website and there are some very high indexed animals available on the day. It is great to see rams for sale sporting high accuracy% and CPT back ancestry, originating from flocks with high DQI scores and carrying out ultrasound muscle and Backfat scanning.

Other Important Premier Sale Dates

Pallaskenry College Ultrasound Scanning

Today Sheep Ireland visited Pallaskenry Agricultural College to Ultrasound scan progeny from CPT rams which were used on the farm last Autumn. Finding additional sources of commercial farm data is hugely beneficial to the €uro-Star evaluations and we are building the volume of commercial data entering our database on an annual basis. We are continually trialling new ways of collecting on farm data and today in Pallaskenry we tested the use of a tablet device to collect a number of phenotypes from each lamb. The use of a tablet on farm has the potential to make data collection for ram breeders and commercial sheep farmers much easier.

Some images from Pallaskenry today.