Breeders set up national progeny testing trial

The Perendale society has set up possibly the largest single breed progeny test in the New Zealand hill country.

Large scale progeny testing, as has been started by the Perendale Society will be huge benefit to the sheep industry, as it endeavours to respond to market signals and improve  its efficency and profitability into the future.

As cows dominate the easy country, and sheep have been pushed back into the hills, this breed with its easy care and robust attributes will have a lot to contribute to faming, and the Perendale Society are to be congratulated for such an ambitous project. Country-wide has a full report, and here is an exerpt.

With meat companies increasingly yield scanning lamb carcases at the time of slaughter and paying a premium for high-yielding lambs, the Perendale sheep society believes it is imperative to identify rams with superior growth and meat yield characteristics.

"The aim of the trial is to identify the rams with top carcase attributes and to get their genetics distributed as widely as possible to our breeders which will ultimately benefit all commercial farmers using these proven Perendale genetics in their flocks" says North Otago Perendale breeder and progeny trial committee chairman David Ruddenklau.

"With the market being prepared to pay such a significant premium, farmers will be rewarded for using rams with these proven meat value attributes - we want to assist them in identifying those animals."

The Alliance group will slaughter all male progeny each February and use their Bioscan to assess the overall meat value of each carcase and AgResearch Invermay will analyse the tenderness, shelf-life, pH and meat and fat colour.

Semen will be collected from the top performing rams in the progeny test and be made available to registered breeders in their own stud.