European Innovation Partnership for Agriculture Productivity and Sustainability

This week Sheep Ireland attended a workshop on EIP-AGRI (European Innovation Partnership for Agriculture Productivity and Sustainability). EIP-AGRI will fund a large number of innovative projects in the Irish Agricultural industry over the coming years. This week’s workshop was organised by the Department of Agriculture and the National Rural Network. The aim of the workshop was to speak with the Operational Groups of each of the successful projects which made it through the very first funding call for Irish EIPs. Sheep Ireland is a member of the Operational Group involved in OviData – a project aiming to increase sheep genetic gain in Ireland through commercial data capture. OviData was one of 12 projects that were accepted for funding after submitting a full project proposal in December – see DAFM press release here. For more information on EIP-AGRI visit the NRN (National Rural Network) here. Some images from this week’s workshop are below.

CPT Lambing

Next week marks the start of one of the busiest times of the year for Sheep Ireland as our 4 CPT flocks will begin to lamb down. Tomorrow will be 141 days since ewes were AI’d on James Naper’s farm and we would expect lambs on the ground from then on. We provide 24-hour cover for the flocks over the course of the lambing period. We hope the cold spell we are experiencing now will have improved as we approach the peak of lambing. When ewes lamb down they are penned individually, lambs are then weighed and tagged once strong enough (normally after 12 hours). Once all the relevant data has been collected ewe’s and lambs are left out to grass at 1-2 days later, so pens can be very scarce throughout this period. We will be posting regular updates on Facebook and Twitter so be sure to keep up to date with us!