SHEEP GENETICS TOOLS & INFORMATION

National flock decline ...The Sheep CRC has recognised that the Australian Merino ewe flock is approaching a tipping point. It has to have critical mass: the ewe flock needs to remain large enough to meet future demand for breeders from both the prime lamb and wool industries. The Sheep CRC and our industry partners have identified the factors that will underpin how the critical flock size can be maintained, and this work has featured on MLA's latest Feedback DVD.

Please click here to view the DVD.

Download

MLA-Ewe-Management-brochure.pdf (516.59 KB)

To read the article written by RG Banks and DJ Brown titled 'Genetic improvement in the Australasian Merino - management of a diverse gene pool for changing markets' (published by Cambridge Press) click here.

Sheep Genetics
Sheep Genetics is a national genetic information and evaluation service for the meat and wool sectors of the sheep industry and has been developed jointly by Australian Wool Innovation Limited (AWI) and Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA), together with industry.

With performance records on more than two million sheep one million Merinos and more than one million meat sheep Sheep Genetics is the world's largest and most powerful sheep genetic information source.

Sheep Genetic's core product is the provision and maintenance of a national database for the calculation of performance breeding values. These breeding values will be released as a single national language, known as Australian Sheep Breeding Values (ASBVs).

ASBVs are designed to be used by ram breeders and commercial producers to compare the genetic potential of rams and ewes for a range of industry agreed traits, across flocks, independent of the environment and location.

The database and the newly available ASBVs will enable sheep producers to make the most informed genetic selection decisions ever possible and further tailor their breeding programs to suit their target markets and production systems.

The Sheep CRC have contributed some of the updated genetic parameters which are used in calculation of the new Australian Sheep Breeding Values.

Recessive Black Pigmentation in Merino Sheep - Fact Sheet