Ireland is one of six of the main sheep-producing nations in Europe that have come together, along with Turkey, to partake in a new project called SheepNet. The aim of SheepNet is to harness information and a better understanding of sheep production within each country and use this to improve productivity and profitability of sheep enterprises right across the EU and Turkey.

The initiative is being taken to stem the decline in sheep production. While current EU sheep numbers are in the region of 85m animals on 830,000 farms, this represents a sharp decline, with the ewe flock falling by about 15%, while 50% of producers have exited the sector since 2000.

Turkey’s interest in the project is driven by the fact that like France, Ireland, Italy, Romania, Spain and the UK, it is a major sheep-producing country with a national flock of about 20m ewes or a total of 31m sheep across 127,000 producers.

Table 1 lists the size of the ewe flock in each country, the number of sheep holdings and the organisation leading the project in each country.

Tim Keady, Teagasc, is the Irish national facilitator in the three-year project. He says: “The EU is only 84% self-sufficient in sheepmeat, with a deficit of about 140,000t. There is huge potential to grow sheep production with an increase in the average litter size of just 0.22 lambs per ewe capable of closing this deficit.

“Sheep play a vital part in the management of less favoured areas and are a key part of economic and social activity. Therefore, the decline in numbers is a worrying trend for the future of these areas.”

The three main target areas being addressed are reproductive efficiency (reduced barren rates), gestation efficiency (reduce embryo mortality, abortion, etc) and lamb mortality, all of which affect your profitability (number of lambs reared per ewe joined to the ram).

“SheepNet aims to produce a wealth of information by exchanging scientific and practical knowledge in a bottom-up, top-down approach by collecting and sharing information from researchers, advisers, farmers and the relevant industry stakeholders. This will form a resource which can be used by everyone to help address the challenges identified that are currently limiting output.”

Each country has established a scientific and technical working group around the national facilitator, with the members of the Irish group pictured above. Updates will be available at www.sheepnet.network.

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