Innovative Sheep Breeding
Home of Performancelleyns and ProlleyNZ
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Performancelleyns and ProlleyNZ
If you would like to find out more information about Innovative Sheep Breeding's Maternal Performancelleyns, go to our explainer video.
If you would like to find out more information about Innovative Sheep Breeding's Maternal ProlleyNZ, go to our explainer video.
See Perfomancelleyns and ProlleyNZ for our Lleyn Sheep for sale
Our primary and overriding objective has always been to breed the best dual-purpose/ maternal sheep for the commercial sheep farmer, who is as interested in replacement ewes as he is in fat lambs.
Our Philosophy here at Innovative Sheep Breeding has always been to put more money into the pocket of the commercial sheep farmer through the sale our improved genetics focusing on the Lleyn as our starting point. If we can generate extra revenue for our customers, we can justify charging our customers some of that money. It is the only way it can work and the idea that every deal must be mutually beneficial is part of our heritage.
In our quest to use all available modern breeding techniques to breed the best dual-purpose maternal sheep, we have produced two distinct sheep brands, Maternal Performancelleyns and Maternal ProlleyNZ. These, we believe, tick as many boxes as is currently possible.
Firstly, there is our long-established
Performancelleyns. We started with a pure Lleyn flock over twenty years ago, sourced from the highest performing and most hardy pedigree sheep available at that time. It has now become, through selective breeding for both performance and practical traits, the highest performing flock of Lleyns in the UK. A flock that fully justifies the name Performancelleyns.
Let me be clear and say we do not register any Performancelleyns with the Lleyn sheep society. Breed societies tend to forget who they should serve, and that is the end-user, the commercial sheep farmer. The self-serving and conservative nature of breed societies leads inevitably to lower-performing sheep with questionable functional traits and rams stuffed with cake for society sales.
The second
is our
ProlleyNZ. A somewhat newer name and concept. The Lleyn is arguably the best dual-purpose/maternal sheep breed native to these Isles, and the Performancelleyn is the top performer within that breed. However, it is more than possible that they might not be the best sheep in the world. There is only one country where there are probably better sheep than in the UK, and that is in New Zealand. So, we have crossed our very best Performancelleyns ewes with some recent high figured Tefrom imports. The objective being to breed a top-performing middle wooled sheep with functional characteristics and performance that will surpass the best of the Lleyns, setting a new benchmark in sheep performance.
In terms of ranking between the two offerings, Performancelleyns and ProlleyNZ, it is still too early to be sure of the relative performance and functional characteristics. They are both being continually evaluated and compared. One thing is for sure; there are no options for breeding pure Tefroms at the moment, as there are only three rams in the British Isles, and that is insufficient genetic variation.
The ProlleyNZ will give our repeat customers the opportunity of using a partial outcross. While for new customers, this may well be the opportunity to use a complete outcross.
So, if you are looking to breed fat lambs and replacement ewes and you are not in a LFA (less favoured area) or are only on the margins, our two sheep offerings would be the leaders in the field. They would be especially appropriate if you don’t want too much wool or are concerned about the compromise in performance that is associated with wool-shedders.
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Innovative Sheep Breeding. How does the flock look?
How do our breeding sheep look?
Well, here is a video of some ewes and lambs taken on 26/05/2021.
The sheep are just about to be sprayed with fly control treatment.
The Lleyn (Performancelleyn) ewes were winter shorn and will not be summer shorn. All they need is Clik extra to carry them through the summer, which means we do not have to shear them with lambs at foot, and we do not need to get them back down the road to our buildings and the hot and bothered shearers.
The lambs are a mixture of Performancelleyns and ProlleyNZ crosses. They are an average group of sheep, not just the elite sheep. The lambs were born over 6 to 8 days and are, on average, 82 days at the time we took the video.
These sheep have been grass-fed only. Also, there had been only one period of rain in mid-march before we weighed the lambs in May.
The lambs were all weighed on 10/05/21, which would be an average of 66 days, and the average group weight was 27.25 kgs. The average daily live weight gain for the lambs was 340 grams per day since birth. The maximum daily gain was 488 grams per day. This individual weighed 40 kgs at 66 days of age and is the animal highlighted in the video with an arrow. He is a ProlleyNZ cross. These are exact figures as we record the birth date and birth weight of all these lambs.
We upload all this data to Signet Breeding Services, who process the data to get Performance figures for the individual sheep.
As any sheep farmer knows, there is a lot of variation between individuals. If you capture enough data and process that correctly, you can improve the performance and quality of your flock’s genetics. The clever thing that Signet Breeding Services would do is remove the environmental effects from the raw data.
If you want to improve the performance of your maternal/dual-purpose flock, you need to buy performance recorded stock from the best performing flocks.
We have the highest average indexed Lleyn flock in the UK and work solely on the ethos of supplying you, the commercial sheep farmer, with the best genetics to improve the profitability of your flock.
The Performancelleyns are a purebred Lleyn, while the ProlleyNZ combines our best Lleyns with the best New Zealand genetics. The ProlleyNZ combine the best of both countries advanced breeding strategies to capture hybrid genetic vigour while keeping wool levels to UK acceptable levels.
The best way to benefit from all the years of our breeding and our unique genetic position is to purchase our Performancelleyn or ProlleyNZ rams.
You can find out more on our website innovative-sheep-breeding.co.uk and enter a competition to win a shearling ProlleyNZ ram.
You will not be disappointed.
Here at Innovative Sheep Breeding, we tup all the suitable ewe lambs that we retain to put back into the flock.
As a sheep breeding enterprise, looking to produce continually improving performance, we change over a third of our breeding ewes every year. Breeding sheep from ewes lambs shortens the intergenerational interval enhancing the rate of genetic gain in our sheep.
In this video, we are moving our ewe lambs back to the shed for pregnancy scanning. We need to know which ewe lambs are pregnant and how many lambs each sheep will give birth to.
There are three classes of ewe lamb in this video. There are our performance recorded Lleyn ewe lambs, which we call our Performancelleyns.
There are ProlleyNZ ewe lambs. These are our composite sheep, a combination of our superior Performancelleyns and elite New Zealand maternal sheep.
Also, there are New Zealand Suffolk and Sufftex ewe lambs, which are more terminal in nature but can be used very successfully in maternal sheep breeding.
An interesting point is you cannot tell the difference visually between the Performancelleyns and the ProlleyNZ ewe lambs. Lleyn sheep and the composite sheep. Which means we should be avoiding any problems in the variation of physical characteristics. An issue that Innovis have had with some of their composite sheep.
The ideal scenario would be that from every ewe lamb put to the tup/ram we would get a pregnant ewe lamb with a single lamb. However, it does not work like this, unfortunately. Mated ewe lambs will not all get pregnant, and many will have twins.
The question is always how to manage those extra lambs. You can remove them and hand-rear them, but that tends to create work and no profit unless fat lamb prices are very high. So, I favour letting the ewe lambs rear doubles but carefully managing them. Nutrition and worm burden being the main areas of concern
At Innovative Sheep Breeding, we favour mating ewe lambs for our customers, as long as they are big enough to tup and they can be managed correctly. Lambed ewe lambs make far better mothers as shearlings, and it is more profitable than waiting for the second year. Just remember management is the key to success.
There is a helpful series of articles from the AHDB about sheep breeding and ewe lambs here. There is a series of links to articles on breeding ewe lambs at the bottom of the page.
We have Lleyn ewe lambs for sale in September, and we may have ProlleyNZ ewe lambs in the future. So, contact us early as they are highly sought after.
However, the shearling Performancelleyn rams and the ProlleyNZ rams we sell, offer a better value solution if you can retain your breeding sheep.
