Sheep Ireland’s David Coen visited one of Sheep Ireland’s commercial farmers in County Galway this week. Barry Healy has been recording with Sheep Ireland for over 3 years and runs a flock of 100 plus commercial ewes. Commercial breeders can performance record and get genetic evaluations producing €urostars for their animals for free! So there is no excuse not to start recording today!
Benefits of performance recording your commercial flock are:
- Generation of the €urostar profile for animals in the flock
- An inbreeding checker – Inbreeding occurs when closely related animals are mated. By using this inbreeding checker this will allow you to control the levels of inbreeding within your flock
- Generation of a mating report – this allows you to assess your ram team looking at ram usage, ewe mating statistics, ewes that were not mated and the details of the ewes that were mated
- Generation of a lambing report after every lambing season – this breaks down the number of ewes lambed/aborted/barren and unaccounted for ewes, number of lambs recorded as well as percentage mortality, lambing difficulty and variation on birth weights
- The ability to genotype any animal in the flock inventory, this then generates a genomic results screen
See below video of Sheep Ireland’s David Coen out on farm in County Galway this week.
Where to Start?
Contact Sheep Ireland today on 023 882 0451 or email at [email protected]
A LambPlus sign-up form should (contact Sheep Ireland for a sign-up for the relevant year). Flock inventory sheets can be downloaded here. These forms should be filled out and sent to:
Sheep Ireland,
Highfield House,
Shinagh,
Bandon,
Co. Cork.