Ram selection – making use of indices

With the ram sales underway, Ciaran Lynch is joined on this week’s OviCast by Eamon Wall from Sheep Ireland who discusses ram selection. Eamon begins by emphasising the importance of paying attention to ram functionality at the time of purchase. He then takes us through the basic of the Sheep Ireland genetic index explaining the Terminal and Maternal traits and the various individual sub-indexes. Ciaran and Eamon then discuss the across breed evaluation as well as the overall Euro value. Eamon highlights the importance of the DQI and accuracy figures. There is also a discussion on the move to genotyping and parentage verification and how this improves the accuracy of the evaluations. With the majority of the information included in the index coming from commercial flocks, Eamon emphasises the relevance of this in the evaluations for commercial producers. Finally, Eamon discusses this year’s multi-breed ram sale. For more episodes from OviCast, visit the show page at: https://www.teagasc.ie/animals/sheep/ovicast-sheep-podcast/