Welsh sheep farmers are being urged to nominate rams with top-performing traits for the next phase of the RamCompare project.
This research venture is the UK-wide progeny test for terminal sire breeds, funded by the levy board Hybu Cig Cymru – Meat Promotion Wales (HCC), sister bodies the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) and Quality Meat Scotland (QMS) and Agrisearch in Northern Ireland, working with other partners across the food chain.
Nominations are open for Welsh sheep farmers to select rams believed to have good lamb-growth characteristics, carcass weight and conformation for use within the RamCompare programme.
The aim is to encourage uptake of the new set of breeding values created from RamCompare which farmers can utilise when selecting rams.
This will lead to more commercial lambs hitting target carcase specifications and reaching slaughter weight sooner, thereby reducing the carbon footprint of UK livestock farming as well as improving the profitability of sheep farms.
Each year nominated rams are selected from a range of terminal sire breeds and used on commercial farms across the UK.
On the project to date, 313 terminal sire rams have been on test producing over 30,000 lambs from commercial ewes.
Alwyn Nutting, who farms at Glascoed near Newtown with his son Dylan and the rest of the family, is one of the Welsh farmers already involved in the project. He encouraged sheep breeders to get involved:
“I would encourage pedigree ram breeders to get involved in the Ram Compare project as it’s important for the research to have a wide range of breeds represented. In past years of the project rams from Welsh breeders have scored very highly.
“Ram breeders can only benefit from being part of the RamCompare programme, seeing how the performance of the offspring from their rams compares with the performance of other breeds, reared together under the same management conditions on commercial farms.”
The project is primarily looking for rams with Estimated Breeding Values (EBVs) in the top 20% of the breed.
The natural service sires should be shearlings or older and have a known, high health status.
Nominations of fit and fertile, older stock rams are also welcome.
Frozen semen is also being purchased in batches of 30 straws for use via artificial insemination.
