Innovative Sheep Breeding
Home of Performancelleyns and ProlleyNZ
Call us on 07970 773840 an 07780 687416
Prolificacy
Prolificacy: Do you want to adjust your lambing percentage?
Sheep from Performance recorded flocks can change your lambing percentage overtime in the retained ewes, by selecting rams with appropriate litter ebvs (estimated breeding value )
We are finding that the vast majority of customers want to increase their lambing percentage, so we have adjusted ours accordingly. (see the graph of lambs born against year below).In case your fecundity is beyond where you want it to be, there are always rams with lower litter ebvs.
Growth rates
Do you want faster-growing lambs?
In 2017 Signet showed that our very best rams were producing lambs that were on average 2.5Kg heavier at eight weeks of age that the more mediocre rams we were using. These lower indexed rams were still in the top 25 % of the breed.
Our growth rates have increased every year since. See the graph above of our average lamb eight-week weight ebv from 2014 - 2023. The total weights of lambs at eight weeks are the combination of the eight-week weight ebv and the maternal ebv.
Maternal ability
Do you want ewes with better maternal characteristics?
The maternal ebv is the element of a lamb’s growth to eight weeks of age that is influenced by the ewes breeding potential for milk production. If you combine this with the lamb's eight-week weight ebv, you can see the difference in actual weight that can be achieved by our improved genetics. Here is Growth Ratesour lamb’s average maternal ability ebv graphed against year.
In the last ten years, the average weight of our lambs at eight weeks of age has increased by over 3kg when you average out seasonal variation.
Remember these graphs are of average progress of the lambs born. The very best animals and that includes the breeding rams sold are way above that. Use of those animals in the breeding program is what drives the improvement of the genetic performance.
Functional traits
Do you want sheep with better practical attributes?
We cull ruthlessly. Culling without hesitation requires one thing, and that is a large supply of young females coming into the flock. To maintain an adult population of around 750 adult breeding ewes, we retain over 300 ewe lambs each year. That is a 40% replacement rate, which enables ewes to be removed equally for both practical and performance traits and thus driving the genes for profitability.
We lamb indoors, and this is something that is continuously under review. Lambing indoors has fewer looses but is far more expensive. The reasons why we lamb indoors are as follows:
Firstly being close to the coast we suffer from two extra aerial predators, Great black-backed gull and Ravens. The former is the largest gull in the world and an aggressive scavenger.
Secondly, we want to make sure that when we sell any of our sheep, the parentage and hence the figures are correct 100%. The only economical way of doing this at the moment is to lamb indoors and have 24-hour a day cover. These sheep need hardly any assistance lambing, but they do need to be managed when they give birth, so there are no mix-ups. In New Zealand, testing using DNA showed when lambing outside, there were around 10% parentage errors. Unfortunately, genetic parentage assignment is, at present, too expensive.
Thirdly it allows us to capture all possible data. Indoors the ear tagging of lambs at birth along with the correct link to the ewe is easy and 100% reliable. We are also able to capture birthweights, which are important in measuring lamb survival and ease of lambing.
Lastly, we have great facilities, leftover from when we kept cattle, which does make lambing indoors easy to manage.
Here at Innovative sheep breeding, we cull any sheep which experience difficulty lambing. We go to great lengths to make sure our sheep will lamb easily outdoors.
