Sheep Industry News August 2024

time-consuming. Incorporating dozens of weights and data points into NSIP, we can monitor a lot of valuable production metrics. By combining these traits into indexes, I feel our selection process has produced a well-rounded sheep adapted to our environment and management. The Western Range Index is a good start, but we also use some Merino and SAMM indexes, as well. This doesn't mean we can’t im prove, and we are constantly looking through the data to find animals expressing traits to improve our operation. Without NSIP EBVs, this would not be possible. I have a lot of confidence in breeding values and now look at the sheep as if it had bar charts on it showing me the positives and nega tives of its production potential. Oftentimes, we’re surprised by the appearance of a sheep compared to its actual production history. We have found that trusting

derived from the Spanish Merino in the past. The Australian Me rino – as we suspected – helped us add length and weight to our fleeces, but were inferior to our Rambouillet in meat production and prolificacy. The South African Meat Merino was a slightly larger and coarser breed than our Rambouillet, but I feel we did gain some growth and milking genetics from that breed. The Dohne breed was very similar to our dual purpose Rambouillet and I feel like that breed helped us add outside genetics increasing hybrid vigor. In the last 20 years through selection and line-breeding, our flock is now in termingled and includes the best traits that we found from our inter national project. The traits we incorporated into our flock improved staple length, fleece weight, milk production and lamb growth. SGUSA: You have been recognized as a leader in the use of EBVs generated through NSIP. What encouraged you to start with that program and what are the major differences you feel you have seen in your flock through its use.

the data and selecting mainly on production traits has helped us improve more rapidly. The per fect Helle Rambouillet ewe would be a 19-micron, 3.5-inch staple, raising two lambs on rangeland weaning her body weight in 120 days for eight years. SGUSA: Looking to the future, what are the genetic advance ments you still would like to make in your flock and what mechanisms do you envision you will need to use? JOHN: During the last 40 years, production data has al lowed us to get our sheep to a point where we are happy with the production. One thing we’ve noticed through the years of

JOHN: We have always been eager to try new technology to help better our sheep operation. Using computer records since the early 1980s gave us a huge data base that allowed us to join NSIP with a good start. In 2000, the computer program I was using became obsolete, which forced me to learn MS Access and write my own data collection program. At the same time, I took my pedigree information going back into the 1980s and entered pro duction data from the year 2000 on to propagate our NSIP start. With this pedigree and large data, set we were able to start receiving accurate EBVs right away. I would encourage people

selecting is that you start pushing one trait up usually at the cost of other traits. So, we found that a well-rounded approach – avoid ing single trait selection – has allowed us to maintain our progress consistently. There’s always something that we feel we could improve on and hopefully by incorporating the use of genomics we can continue to work on improving our flock. One thing I’ve visited with numerous academics and producers about is the trait of immune function. I think some of the traits that we would have a hard time measur ing are those that are going to become important in the future. The sheep’s ability to fight off disease and parasites without antibiotics and pesticides will become more important in the future.

to look at using NSIP, as we have found it very useful. NSIP doesn’t work as well without a large data set, so entering data as far back as you can helps bring your accuracies and make that tool more useful. SGUSA: You use a complicated procedure in your selection and breeding decisions. Will you describe the basic concepts that go into that procedure?

JOHN: By using EID technology and better handling equipment, recording weights and data points has become a lot easier and less

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