Innovative Sheep Breeding
Home of Performancelleyns and ProlleyNZ
Call us on 07970 773840 an 07780 687416
Welcome to Innovative sheep breeding.
- by John Peregrine Aubrey
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- 27 Dec, 2020
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Welcome to our new website
Welcome to our new website, Innovative Sheep Breeding. This is the new home for Performancelleyns. The reason for the change is the development of our additional offering, the ProlleyNZ. With one breed of sheep, it was possible to have the name as the URL. However, the addition of the ProlleyNZ meant that had to change.
Hence Innovative Sheep Breeding, because we breed sheep and we innovate! You may be familiar with our Performancelleyn, but the ProlleyNZ are undeniably an innovation and look to have all the qualities that would make them one of the best options for maternal sheep breeding.
Here are some of the scenarios that might apply to you and we have outlined how each breed can help to solve your problems and improve your flock’s performance:
- If your flock are Lleyns and you need to keep them pure, perhaps because you can sell your excess females at a premium. You would benefit from using a Performancelleyn, which is as pure as anything bought through the Lleyn sheep society, but with a substantial increase in performance and practical attributes.
- Do you need more vigour in your flock? Whether you have a pure breed or a cross-bred flock, you might need more Heterosis (genetic or hybrid vigour). If your flock’s breeding is unrelated to the Performancelleyn or the ProlleyNZ, you will gain genetic vigour from their use.
- If you have Innovis crosses such as Aberfield or Highlander, you might want to take your maternal flock in a new direction. You might need to increase the prolificacy of the Aberfield, or reduce the wool and improve the size and carcass characteristics of the Highlander. You have the choice of the Performancelleyns or the ProlleyNZ.
- Perhaps, you have New Zealand Romneys or another New Zealand Maternal sheep and like their superior practical attributes. However, you find that the ewes are too woolly and that the fat lambs do not kill out as well as they could, or grow as quickly as you would like. You could use the ProlleyNZ. You will still have 75% New Zealand sheep genetics in your replacement ewes, but you will gain positive carcass attributes and better growth rates while reducing your retained ewe’s wool growth.
- Whatever your breeding direction, you will see increases in growth rates with Performancelleyns or ProlleyNZ rams. Growth means reduced days to slaughter; a key profit driver. You will also see improvements in your retained ewe’s milking ability, which is a large component of the maternal ability ebv.
- Always remember when you are buying maternal sheep that positive traits get passed on in the retained ewes. All you need is a successful strategy for selecting your replacement ewes. Your maternal ram purchases are a form of capital or genetic investment. Abacusbio, the world’s leading genetic breeding consultants, have estimated that sires of maternal sheep breeds are worth up to seven times as much as terminal sires. This is due to the cumulative genetic gain that you can realise from retained ewes. It is just up to you to choose the best maternal sheep genetics to buy and then select the best replacement females.
- Feel free to ring 07970 773840 to discuss your sheep enterprise and how you might move forward into this new challenging era. Doing nothing is not an option.
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.
