LambPlus Regional Meetings

Three LambPlus regional meetings took place this week in Mallow, Navan and Tuam. There are two
remaining meetings, both taking place on Monday 27th November at 7:30pm in Jacksons Hotel,
Ballybofey and in the New Park Hotel, Kilkenny. There are some very interesting messages for farmers
to take away from these meetings and the level of audience engagement has been very encouraging. While the level of understanding amongst breeders of how the €uro-Star indexes work is still not at the optimum level, a definite increase in understanding can be seen in the past few years, and we will continue to work with breeders to improve this.

Sheep Breeders Round Table

• Last weekend a number of the Sheep Ireland staff attended the Sheep Breeders Round Table (SBRT), this is an international conference which is held every two years and covers a range of topics, from genetic evaluations, ram health and future lamb markets. There were over 30 presentations over the three days, one of which was from Dr. Noirin McHugh (Teagasc) who presented on “How to accelerate genetic gain in sheep”. This presentation was extremely well received and resulted in a lot of discussion from the floor.
• As part of the SBRT, Posters were submitted to help highlight some of the areas of research/work that is taking place by some of the delegates at the conference. There was 40+ posters on display. Sheep Ireland submitted two posters. One on how Sheep Ireland is using the central progeny test data to make Irish genetic indexes more robust which was presented by Shane Randles. The second poster presented by Ciara Long covered the topic of how genomics are soon to be a reality for Irish Sheep Farmers.
• We would like to congratulate Ciara who won a prize for the best poster, which is a great achievement.

• To see all the presentations and posters from the conference click here.

Sheep Ireland November Board Meeting

On Thursday 23rd November the Board of Sheep Ireland representatives met. A number of topics were discussed at this meeting including;

• Across breed evaluations.
• LambPlus sale entry criteria.
• Communication methods between Sheep Ireland and Breed societies.
• CPT Ram selection.
• Genomic evaluations.
• Genetic evaluations developments.

Reminder LambPlus Deadline is Fast Approaching

The deadline for the receipt of LambPlus sign-up forms is one week from today 1st December. Due to new data protection rules that are due to come into effect in May 2018 it is necessary for Sheep Ireland to receive a signed LambPlus sign-up form, from all breeders wishing to partake in the LambPlus program in 2018.