SIRE evaluation trials continue to gather interest if the crowd that turned out to the Merino Lifetime Productivity (MLP) Field Day at West Pingelly last week is anything to go by.
It was the second annual field day held at University of Western Australia’s (UWA) Ridgefield property and gave attendees the opportunity to view the ewe progeny groups and their results to date and speak with the site’s committee members, sire breeders and industry connections.
The Pingelly site is in its second year of joinings and currently runs 30 sire groups of 2016-drop Merino ewes and 30 sire groups of 2017-drop (nine-month-old) unjoined Merino ewes.
The 2016-drop ewes were naturally mated to Ridgefield maternal efficiency rams and commercial flock rams and are due to lamb in June.
The ewes are by AI sires from WA and Eastern States studs with some link sires used in all the sire evaluation sites and out of medium wool type ewes from four age groups at Ridgefield.
The latest selection of Ridgefield ewes were AI mated to trial sires over two days in late January.
Sires were selected as trait leaders for specific traits, industry impact sires, major show winners and representatives of all wool and skin types.
Raw and adjusted data was available for each sire group at the field day.
This included post weaning raw data for counts, rear type, weights, wool, visual score and professional classer grade for all ewes.
The 2016-drop ewes also displayed pre-joining adult raw data for these traits in addition to weights and weight gain and condition score from yearling, hogget and adult recordings and pregnancy scanning results.
These figures were given greater accuracy using adjusted sire means and flock breeding values (within site/drop).
Lambing and shearing in the coming weeks will deliver more results to be collaborated.
The Merino Lifetime Productivity Project (MLP) is a 13 million dollar funded project over ten years.
It is one of the biggest and longest Merino genetics projects ever undertaken with 166 sires used in five Merino sire evaluation sites across Australia set to produce more than 25,000 F1 ewe progeny over the lifetime of the project.
The F1 ewe will be assessed through its life while F2 progeny will be assessed up until weaning.
MLP Pingelly site chairman Brett Jones, Ejanding stud, Dowerin, said given the tough season, the presentation of the ewes were a credit to everyone involved and he was happy to see a good crowd in attendance.
He acknowledged the work of the site committee and UWA and Murdoch University students and staff for their efforts in presenting and penning the ewes, and thanked all sponsors for their support of the project.
“It’s early days for the trial and there are more questions than answers at the moment but we are breaking new ground,” Mr Jones said.
“It’s an exciting project and new technologies have made a project like this possible and we are going to learn bucket loads but it takes time.
“The combination of traits between wool, fertility, numbers of lambs weaned, is only going to get more accurate as more data is collected.”
AWI and MLP program manager genetics and animal welfare advocacy Geoff Lindon presented an overview of AWI’s on-farm research investment and the MLP project.
He said AWI spends 13 per cent or $2.2 million of its annual on-farm budget of $16 million on genetic research and is comparable to other R&D organisations.
MLP accounts for 60pc of these funds and Mr Lindon said considerable industry change over five decades led to the significant investment in MLP.
“There is less reliance of visual classing and greater push to class younger with the advance of genomics,” he said.
“Higher percentage of breeding ewes in the flock, body weight assuming greater importance, greater focus on wool and lambs, measuring productivity from per head to hectare and importance of welfare and resilience traits.
“This project is testing a lot of these changes and offers an assessment and ideas for the future.”
Mr Lindon said DNA testing and widespread automatic data collection has assisted with project costs.
“We need the 25,000 lamb records to tease apart some of the complicated interactions between lowly heritable and difficult to measure traits,” he said.
“A whole range of traits are being measured such as fleece value, carcase, reproduction, welfare and resilience and these are getting multiply measured through the lifetime of the ewe giving millions of data being collected.
“Are the current indexes well correlated with lifetime productivity?
“There is a reasonable amount of science behind this but we suspect there could be some fine tuning.”
Australian Merino Sire Evaluation Association (AMSEA) executive officer Ben Swain, Gunnedah, New South Wales, kicked off proceedings by describing the sires of each pen of ewes and how the ewe progeny measured against other sire progeny groups in the sire evaluation.
Later in the day Mr Swain also detailed some results at the Balmoral site in Victoria, focusing on some preliminary findings in regards to scanned fat score and its effect on production such as conception, lambing and weaning rates.
He said given it’s a new site at Pingelly, the good crowd in attendance was a show of optimism in the sheep businesses.
Mr Swain said it’s important to understand the results were reflective of the sire, not necessarily the stud, and the sires were selected for the project for a variety of reasons.
“Unlike a standard sire evaluation where entrants pick their best ram, in a lifetime productivity trial we went out to the whole industry and looked for rams that were as diverse from each other as possible,” he said.
MLP Pingelly site manager Bronwyn Clarke outlined operations at the site in regards to joining, weaning, shearing, classing, mid-side sampling, muscle and fat scanning, and weighing and collating all the data.
Ms Clarke also described how they improved the accuracy of the raw data by using adjusted sire means and flock breeding values (within site/drop).