![Glendemar Multi-Purpose Merinos stud principal Ben Duxson. Glendemar Multi-Purpose Merinos stud principal Ben Duxson.](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-agfeed/1429222.jpg/r0_0_420_280_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
ELECTRONIC identification and the Sheep CRC’s Pedigree Matchmaker is helping the Glendemar Multi-Purpose Merino Stud to find its top performing ewes.
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Glendemar MPM principal Ben Duxson said electronic tags and the matchmaker technology has helped the stud more quickly and accurately match lambs to their mothers for the past three years.
“It’s a huge labour saving system,” Ben Duxson said.
The ewes are lambed down in their sire groups and then the mothers with their lambs are encouraged to walk past electronic tag readers on their way to watering points, with hay and licks as extra incentives. One mob of 340 twin ewes with about 170 per cent of lambs at foot would normally take about two weeks to manually match mothers to progeny.
“This way once we are set up we just let them go for it.
“It has been going since Saturday and this morning I had just over 7000 reads,” Ben said.
Being able to more accurately match the lamb to the sire enabled Glendemar to implement more accurate sire selection.
“It gives everything a more even playing surface with the Australian Sheep Breeding Values.
“Knowing a twin out of a maiden and comparing that to a single out of a three or four-year-old ewe is huge,” he said.
“You can’t do it physically looking at the sheep, because the maiden having a twin and a three or four-year-old having a single they are going to be different animal,” Ben said.
“We are finding out which are the better animals genetically by doing all that mothering up.”
Glendemar MPM also had 40 rams going into the CRC’s genomics Pilot Project II; 20 rams from its Marnoo flock and 20 from the Western Australian operation.
“The biggest thing we are looking for with the genomics with matching the progeny is that we will find the best ewes.
“So picking the best sheep at four months of age is really difficult; they all look similar,” Ben said.
“The way we will go about it is to look into our ewe base and find the ones that are genetically better – with better ASBVs for all traits – and then performance as well.
“We’d be looking for the ewes that are moderate in weight, but have huge production; turning twin lambs off at high weights and as early as possible, with the ewe still in good condition.”