As levy payers all sheep farmers have funded the Central Progeny test and the SIL-ACE follow up which adds grunt to genetic information. The question to ask is what percentage through their ram breeders are using this service and what advancement has been achieved in breeding terms.
Industry sheep performance has improved immeasurably over the past 10 years and focused breeding goals can take some credit for this although 23 rams a year being evaluated does not seem enough to maximise this genetic improvement system.
With once again sheep returns struggling to reach sustainable levels all efforts to improve efficency and performance will be needed for this sector to survive. Should ram breeders spend less time showing sheep and more in using systems and technologies such as these to improve the nations flocks?
A quote from a prominent ram breeder rings true" Its not about breeds anymore but all about genes". Your views?
Ten years ago, no one envisaged just how valuable Beef + Lamb NZ’s Central Progeny Test would be to NZ’s sheep industry reports Voxy. Launched in June 2002, the CPT, as it is widely known, helps farmers identify rams that are superior for traits important to their operation. The "how" behind the CPT is surprisingly simple: compare rams by running their progeny in identical environments. In that way, differences between progeny performance can only be due to their genetics, not their environment.
B+LNZ Geneticist Mark Young says the CPT was revolutionary when it was launched, but has become even more important to the industry in the past seven years, since the establishment of SIL’s Advanced Central Evaluation (SIL-ACE). "During the past 10 years, farmers have become a lot more savvy about how they choose rams. The CPT has played a big part in that change. It’s responsible for terms like ‘meat yield’, ‘FE tolerance’ and ‘number of lambs born’ becoming part of our everyday farming vocabulary.
"And now, through SIL-ACE, we’re able to extract genetic information we’d only dreamed of generating back in 2002. We can find out which flocks are recording different traits - through SIL’s FlockFinder tool - and compare the genetics of animals in different flocks - through SIL’s RamFinder tool. This makes SIL-ACE an incredibly powerful resource for farmers. However, it can only do this thanks to the good old CPT providing critical connections to join up a large number of flocks. Without that, SIL-ACE would be nowhere near as grunty as it is."
Over the past decade, 234 rams have been evaluated, with about 20 new rams entering the CPT annually. Ram breeders nominate rams for inclusion and these animals and their progeny are then farmed across three controlled locations: Poukawa in Hawke’s Bay, Ashley Dene in Canterbury and Woodlands in Southland. Every year, the CPT publishes a list of the top 25 rams against key breeding value traits and indexes of overall economic merit.
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