Analysis carried out by Teagasc and presented at last Wednesday’s Sheep Ireland industry meeting shows that farmers can significantly improve the profitability of their system by using five-star genetics. An economic model comparing a typical 100-ewe flock using either one-star or five-star genetics was conducted by Alan Bohan of Teagasc and presented by Fiona McGovern in her presentation regarding the validation of genetic indexes.

The model shows that five-star genetics achieved superior performance across a number of parameters. This included a lower lambing difficulty and associated reduction in labour, increase in lambs born and reduced morality, lighter ewes (ability to operate at higher stocking rate) and heavier weaning weights. When combined, the model showed five-star genetics deliver the potential to generate €217/ha net profit compared to a €7/ha net profit contribution for the one-star flock.

Regarding validation of the €uro-Star indexes, Fiona said this is being carried out on an ongoing basis to ensure that genetic evaluations are delivering on their predicted performance. Fiona and Noirin McHugh of Teagasc analysed data from Sheep Ireland’s Central Progeny Test or CPT flocks and the Irish and New Zealand Across Country, or INZAC flocks as they have become commonly known.

Table 1 details the performance of one- and five-star animals in CPT flocks. As can be seen, five-star animals achieved higher performance in all traits with the CPT flocks utilising all the main Irish breeds in commercial ewe flocks.

Table 2. details the performance of elite five-star genetics and low-genetic merit one-star Suffolk and Texel sheep in the INZAC flock. These animals are pedigree sheep which is also beneficial in evaluating the index in a pure breeding context. Again, five-star animals achieved greater performance than the one-star animal.