The group of 40 included owner Alain Chazal, managing director David Burgy and nearly all the sales people who travel the company's catchment across the eastern half of France to sell its range of meat products to butchers, restaurants and catering contractors.

With Irish Country Meats (ICM) export manager Arnaud Clopin, they visited Jim Mason's sheep farm in Rathnew, Co Wicklow.

"This is an example of Irish farming," Clopin told visitors. "Small buildings, grass-based, lambing outside when possible, targeting 1.5 to two lambs per ewe."

He acknowledged market difficulties in France, Ireland's top destination for lamb exports, due to uneven demand for different cuts.

"Loins are selling very well, they are fashionable because of multiple television shows," he said. "But we have a problem with legs." While forequarters do sell under new forms such as kebabs, the hind legs are harder to move. "The big roast is no longer happening in smaller, less traditional families," Clopin said. And the sliced legs available in Ireland are unheard of in France. This has put pressure on the value of lamb shipments to the country.

Low lamb prices were at the centre of a farmers' protest at ICM's plant in Navan, Co Meath last week.

Origin Green and Irish branding

David Burgy, however, was upbeat about Chazal's prospects for Irish lamb after the visit.

"The team has new ideas to develop sales," he told the Irish Farmers Journal after the visit. He was impressed by a Bord Bia presentation on Origin Green and said his company would continue to promote beef from ABP and lamb from ICM, which it clearly brands as Irish. The company, originally a pork processor, branched into beef and lamb only six years ago and already imports €1m worth of Irish meat annually.

"We come here for the quality of meat and butchering, the consistency – there are never any bad surprises with Irish meat – and the commercial drive of our suppliers who never say no to an export opportunity," Burgy said. Limiting factors are some customers who will only buy French meat, and logistical constraints as Irish beef and lamb take two more days to reach customers than local products.

Fertility gene

Jim Mason explained that from a farmers' point of view, price is out of control, so lamb numbers and feeding efficiency are the only ways to improve margins. He uses Lleyn sheep, which he compared to Salers cattle for their rumen's superior ability to utilise fodder.

"Roughages are much cheaper than concentrates, so an animal that utilises fodder more efficiently is more profitable," he said.

As for prolificacy, Mason, who is a former professor of biochemistry at Trinity College Dublin, has been exploring the benefits of the Fec X g genetic mutation of the X chromosome. This gene is specific to Lleyn sheep, has been linked to increased fertility and offers the certainty of being transmitted from a ram to all of his female descendants. After breeding to retain ewes with the gene in his flock, he said they were now scanning between 2.06 and 2.2 lambs per ewe, compared with the Irish production average of 1.4 (1.7 in the general Lleyn population according to some studies in the UK).

"We now have a group introducing the gene in commercial flocks in Wicklow," Mason told the Irish Farmers Journal. "I want to see what happens when you put it in the low fertility Suffolk we have here."

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Sheep prices: positives hard to come by