RamCompare is a major partnership that enables the UK sheep industry to drive genetic improvement forward through the inclusion of commercial data in genetic evaluations.
RamCompare is a five-year project involving partners right along the food chain. Nominated Signet-recorded rams are taken from various terminal sire breeds and used on nine commercial farms in the UK.
By the end of Year Five the project has tested 283 rams from 11 breeds with over 18,500 of their progeny. It is one of the largest trials of its kind.
The RamCompare project involves partners from right along the UK sheep industry supply chain. It is financed by AHDB, Hybu Cig Cymru – Meat Promotion Wales (HCC), Quality Meat Scotland and Agrisearch, with support provided by the Sainsbury’s, Randall Parker Foods, Dunbia and Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC).
Phases
The first stage of the project involved developing a network of six commercial farms that will use artificial insemination (AI) and single-sire mating to produce a crop of over 500 lambs per farm per year. In the UK sheep industry, the sire of slaughter lambs is not usually known, so this approach has enabled sire information to be collected.
67 rams from five breeds – Texel, Suffolk, Charollais, Hampshire Down, and Meatlinc – were tested across these flocks over the 2016 and 2017 lambing seasons. The rams were representative of the top 20 percent of their breed based on their estimated breeding values (EBVs) and the AI sires had good genetic linkage to other pedigree flocks.
Data from their lambs were collected from birth through to slaughter. This data was evaluated to see whether its inclusion in the rams’ genetic evaluations identifies genetic differences between sires and improved the accuracy of genetic predictions. A ranking of the tested rams, based on commercially important traits, was generated at the end of the first stage of the project in November 2017.
The second stage of the project increased the number of farms involved, the breeds involved and enabled the geneticists to spend time assessing data collected on carcase primal weights and shear force. The number of rams nominated and selected increased, enabling a greater diversity of breeding lines to be assessed. The project now includes Blue Texel, Bleu du Maine, Shropshire, Beltex and Poll Dorset rams.
Results for year five of the project are expected in May 2021.
Phase III of RamCompare has been announced. With the launch of Phase III, the project is looking to widen the reach of the research, testing more rams and moving to a position where including abattoir data in genetic evaluations becomes routine.
RamCompare measures the performance of recorded rams across all terminal sire breeds for growth and carcase traits. New carcase trait performance measures have been developed, so that industry can make better breeding decisions and ultimately improve farm profitability. To find out more about the rams click here.
