Pregnancy Scan recording is included in the overall DQI score.

Recording pregnancy scans is important in determining how many embryos each ewe has, which will then help to decide the management and nutrition plan of ewe’s in the latter stages of pregnancy. It’s also important to check and record the body condition score (BCS) individually at this stage.

Breeders are scored on completion of recording the pregnancy scans as well as the timeliness in recording it. Therefore its important that these scans are uploaded before ewes begin lambing down.

In order to get full marks for timeliness, you need to record pregnancy scans on the Sheep Ireland database at least 21 days before each ewe lamb’s down.

Watch this tutorial video about how to record pregnancy scanning though the Farmer homepage – online services:

Recording the number of embryos and comparing this to the number of lambs born will give indication of the rate of embryonic loss and allow a breeding value to be developed in the future.

Breeders have the ability to see the level of barren ewes as well as the percentage of each birth rank by looking at the pregnancy scan report.

It is important to record all pregnancies. If some ewes are scanned in lamb at a later date, their pregnancy scanning record should be updated.

The fastest way of recording pregnancy scans is by using the Sheep Ireland LambPlus App, but scan date cannot be backdated. By defect the App considers the date of the recording as the date of scanning.

Please take a look at the video below where 6 ewes pregnancy scores were recorded in 18 seconds, that is 3 seconds a ewe meaning you can record 100 ewes in a whopping 5 minutes (provided ewes are in their respective groups according to their embryo number- as illustrated in the video).