At the beginning of 2020 it was decided that the ramsearch needed an overhaul to make it more useful and user friendly for commercial and pedigree farmers alike to source their next stock rams. As part of that overhaul it was decided to add some new dimensions to the search by giving more options. These options were the addition of the Flockbook Search and Breeder search.

Firstly to the Flockbook search. Breeders and commercial farmers can now access the flockbooks of all 10 breed societies who run their flockbooks through the Sheep Ireland database. These societies are as follows: Belclare, Beltex, Blue Texel, Charollais, Galway, Irish Suffolk, Mayo Connemara, Rouge de lQuest, Texel and Vendeen. The main features of the flockbook search are that sheep farmers can search for animals based on the number of progeny they have, or they can search for animals that are genotyped. One of the main benefits of the flockbook search is it affords breeders the opportunity to search for pedigree registered females and look at their €uroStar evaluations. This function may be particularly useful when breeders are purchasing females privately or at inlamb sales where €uroStars may not be displayed.

The next addition to the search was the Breeder search. The main function of this search is for commercial farmers to find breeders in their own area. For example a commercial farmer could be looking for  Suffolk breeder in Galway, and they will be returned a list of all suffolk breeders in Galway. The breeder search also gives some extra information on all LambPlus Flocks for commercial farmers to make us of before deciding what breeder to visit. The information available is as follows, Flock DQI, Flock Linkage status, the number of ewes lambed in the flock in that year and the Average replacement and terminal Index of the flock.