Get a handle on Euro-Star system before buying a ram

THIS is the time of year that sheep farmers will be considering purchasing rams for the upcoming breeding season.

For farmers attending breed sales or buying a Euro-Star ram privately it is important that they have a good understanding of Sheep Ireland’s Euro-Star system in order that they can use it to identify rams suitable for their needs.

A catalogue page of a ram will list the owner and breeder of that animal.

A new development in this section is the inclusion of a DQI figure for the breeder. This is an abbreviation for Data Quality Index and it is a score of a flock’s data recording on lambs they have produced.

Data completeness and timelines are two criteria used for this figure – the higher the figure (which is stated as a percentile) presumably the more reliable the Euro-Star ratings for lambs produced by that breeder will be.

Hence a higher figure is more desirable to a purchaser.

The page will list the NSIS (Dept Tag), pedigree ID and pedigree name on the left of the three columns of the catalogue description.

The breed of the ram, its gender (obviously male in the case of a ram!) and birth type – whether it is a single, twin or triplet – will also be stated.

The page will also indicate if the ram has had his parentage DNA verified and his scrapie status.

Furthermore it will indicate if the animal has been M&F scanned – i.e. the animal is from a flock that has been muscle and fat depth measured that year with an ultrasonic scanner by a Sheep Ireland technician.

This is important in helping to predict the confirmation and kill out % of the animal’s progeny.

The pedigree/ancestry of the animal will be shown up to the level of grand sire/dam.

In the ancestry section it may state that the sire is CPT tested.

CPT is a short for Central Progeny Test which is a process involving progeny from AI’ed ewes being evaluated for performance.

CPT sires will have higher reliability of performance assessments, in other words better accuracy.

Having CPT evaluated sires in the pedigree is desirable for this reason.

Moving on to the Euro-Star section this area of the ram description displays Euro-Star indices for both replacement and terminal traits. Each star represents the ranking of each index in 20% per cent groupings with five stars being in the top 20 per cent profitability and one star being in the bottom 20 per cent profitability.

The higher the stars are - the higher the predicted profitability of that animal.

The €uro-Stars are allocated to two main traits - replacement and terminal.

If a farmer requires a ram to breed lambs both for slaughter and replacement ewe lambs then they should select a ram based on the replacement index.

However if a farmer desires a ram to breed lambs for slaughter only then they should select a ram based on the replacement index. All Euro-Star indices are currently based within breed. For this reason it is important that farmers should not directly compare the €uroStars of rams of different breeds against each other.