Genomic evaluations are ready to be incorporated in Sheep Ireland genetic indices. This was the message delivered by ICBF and Sheep Ireland geneticist Thierry Pabiou at Friday’s genetics conference held in Portlaoise.

Thierry said that significant testing has been carried out in recent years to ensure that genomic evaluations are accurately predicting performance. This analysis was carried out using data from 34,172 genotyped animals with a genomic pedigree.

Same evaluation process

Thierry said the genomic evaluation process is the same as the current genetic evaluation process and will deliver information on the same key production parameters.

This index can be broken down into four main areas: growth, lambing, health and litter size.

These can be further expanded upon with the growth goal traits including days to slaughter, carcase quality and ewe live weight.

For the lambing index, the goal traits are lambing ease and lamb survival, while for health, the key production criteria are dag score and lamb and ewe lameness.

Lastly, for litter size, the measure is obviously number of lambs born.

In another presentation delivered by Noirín McHugh, she said analysis has been carried out on the optimum litter size to avoid sires with excessive prolificacy levels, with the optimum litter size identified as 2.18 lambs per ewe.

Jump in accuracy

Thierry said that genomics will increase the accuracy of predicted breeding values for all of these traits. He presented data for genotyped ram lambs from the main breeds participating in LambPlus and this is outlined in Table 1 on both the terminal and replacement index.

Thierry also presented data to validate that predicted performance from genomic evaluations will add more daylight between one and five star animals. This is detailed in Table 2.