JD-Kid
Member
- Location
- Akaroa.. New Zealand
yea know were yer coming from on hills here and would be good to ID the best ewes but DNA is a bit out of reach price wiseRunning a pure Nch Cheviot flock, I would like to be selling draft ewes at 4 crop which should leave good value in them, but keep a portion of the very best of them another year to breed tups from, using them before selling them as 2/3 shear.
These ewes would obviously still be A1 on their feet/udder/teeth and look the part, but with a lifetime of simple but accurate performance recording behind them you could be sure that you really were keeping the best of them.
Id love to be able to look at each of them and know exactly how many and what weight of lambs they had weaned each year. All I would need to do this would be a dna tag put in at marking and a weight taken at weaning, it would be a lot of extra info for next to zero extra effort
do use EID alot with hog scanning 2 and 4 tooth scanning avg of all scans etc etc lambs mostly kept out of ewes scanning 1.75% avg
looking at records ewes that had single as 2 and 4 tooth tend to be lower all there life so going to look at them harder looking at records the 2's single/single vs 3 or 4 single /twin ..twin/twin is about 30+% diffrence in scanning but you are guessing realy if they rased just a single or nothing come weaning
from what I have seen hogget lambing not realy much diffrence in outcome with hoggets that did not get to weight to mate there life time scan avg same as ones that did 2 and 4 tooth avg showed up more
but yes would be great to know what rams leaving best off spring weight gains etc etc thats were DNA testing would come in