Terminal White Suffolk Rams
Terminal White Suffolk Rams on grass.
Mount Ronan Ram
Mount Ronan Ram
Magnificent prime lambs
2017..
New Initiatives in 2019
We are continuing to wool test our Maternal sheep, employing the services of The Micron Man, and for the 2018 drop we selectively mated 60 ewes to two, highly accurate, wool and carcase sires.
Four years of wool testing of our Maternal sheep has demonstrated that they are up to 4 microns finer than most other composite maternal types. We wish to maintain this advantage, and because of the muscularity and resilience of our sheep genotype, we have selectively mated the above Maternal ewes by artificial insemination to two specially selected Merino sires which have been well evaluated on MerinoSelect (LAMBPLAN for Merinos).
There are 12 rams included in the Maternal catalogue this year which possess 50% Merino genetics. They LAMBPLAN scanned extremely well and will develop better ASBV accuracies over time through improving genetic linkage within our Maternal flock and between others.
We have been very impressed with the quality of the first generation offspring. Two of these young rams were chosen to mate selected Maternal ewes for the 2019 lambing and the early results are very positive. Some of the resulting ram lambs will be offered at our Summer Sale at the end of January 2020.
The MCP+ index caters for wool attributes, so the incorporation of Merino genetics into part of the Maternal flock will not have a detrimental effect on data quality relating to carcase characteristics and we are confident that we can maintain the commercial prime lamb performance of the young sheep we are offering.
The price advantage achieved by restricting fibre micron is obvious, especially in times of higher wool prices.
Our main emphasis, however, continues to be on the provision of high, early-growth genetics for maximum prime lamb profitability. Modern Mount Ronan White Suffolk and Maternal sheep are the result of selection for constitutional strength, muscling, lambing ease, mothering ability, and high-profit lamb production over the past 51 years.
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MURDOCH UNIVERSITY RESEARCH PROJECT
Mount Ronan is involved in a project which is investigating embryo loss in young ewes and ewe lambs between the time of pregnancy scanning and lamb birth.
The research team have been regularly collecting blood samples and measuring body weight, condition score and pregnancy status. Dead lambs have been collected for autopsy, and full pedigrees, birth weights etc have been recorded.
Mount Ronan contributed 203 ewe lambs to the project, which also involved other breeding flocks around Australia. The Murdoch project will be continued for the next 3 years.