When an animal is created for the first time on the Sheep Ireland website it will be created with the breed “Unknown”. To add/edit the breed of the animal select the animal from your Flock Inventory. Then select the “Breed” tab highlighted below.

Once you get to the animals breed section you must enter the animals breed composition. An animals breed composition should always add to 32 parts (see below where 32 parts comes from).

See the three example scenarios below

Example 1: A purebred Texel animal (100%) should be 32 parts Texel only

Example 2: A ewe that is half (50%) Texel and half (50%) Suffolk would be 16 parts Texel and 16 parts Suffolk

Example 3: A ewe that is three quarter Belclare (75 %) and the rest is unknown (25%), this would be 24 parts Belclare and 8 parts unknown

Where does the 32 breed parts come from?

As you will see in the example below of an animals sire which makes up half the breed composition of its progeny when you go back 5 generations there are 16 relatives that all originally contributed to the breed make-up of that animal and the same occurs for an animals dam (16 + 16= 32 parts).