Resource flock
Objectives
- to establish a genetic resource flock for research into developing genetic breeding values for traits that are difficult and expensive to measure such as carcase traits, breech strike resistance and lamb survival rate
- to demonstrate the benefits of using sheep breeding values in industry (stud and commercial) sheep breeding programs.
Activities
- Resource flock
- completion of recording lambing and growth measurements of the annual lamb cohorts and upload to national database (March 2018)
- generation of data on meat and disease traits from fully pedigreed animals in industry flocks.
- recording measurements of the annual lamb cohorts
- continue to evaluate the progeny of industry sires for meat and disease traits to estimate genomic breeding values.
- Economic analysis of the benefit of the resource flock to the WA sheep industry and cost of operating the resource flock (March 2016).
Outcomes and achievements
In conjunction with support from MLA, progeny testing of industry sires for the development of genomic breeding for meat quality traits was completed.