Sheep Ireland at the National Ploughing Championships

• Final preparations are now being put in place for the Ploughing Championships in Tullamore next week. Similar to the past number of years, Sheep Ireland will have a presence at the Irish Farmers Journal livestock demonstration stand. This is a fantastic showcase for Sheep Ireland and the sheep €uro-Star indexes. In past years the number of sheep farmers that we have engaged with through our involvement in the IFJ stand has been huge and no doubt 2016 will be no different. We encourage all ram breeders to call into the IFJ stand over the three days.
• The basis of Sheep Ireland message at the ploughing will be the potential to improve maternal genetics within a commercial flock. While Terminal (growth) traits are very important, it’s probably on the Replacement (Maternal) side that the major profit gains can be made. Over the course of livestock demonstration next week, we will display a group of ewe lambs that have been selected for breeding by one of the Sheep Ireland CPT farmers, Andrew Moloney. This group of lambs were sired by two different sires and their future predicted performance looks very different as a result.
• The board above will form the centre of Sheep Ireland message in Tullamore next week.

CPT Ram Selection

• We are currently busy contacting ram breeders to fin
  d this seasons CPT rams. The first rams will be assembled in UCD (CPT central base) from Wednesday 28th September and will remain in the ram shed until the end of October. This one month period is necessary in order to put all CPT rams through a period of isolation, veterinary inspection, training to jump and provide semen and to actually provide semen to facilitate the AI of our 2,500 commercial CPT ewes.
• Rams will be selected based on their Replacement Index, with the intention of increasing the accuracy% of each ram’s genetic evaluation. These rams will then hopefully be potential candidates for AI in the future. Dispersing high index genetics as widely as possible in the future is a critical step if Irish commercial sheep farmers are to benefit from the genetic improvement being made by our sheep breeds.