04/10/2025
Are you in the dark about what top quality maternal genetics can do for your flock? Doris here was…….
Anyone can feed an animal to look good but to really create good maternal genetics you need to test your animals and record the results.
Its even more important that the ram you are buying comes from a system which tests its stock. Why? Enter anti-fragility and epigenetics. Anti-fragility is an immune like response that bodies go through in environments of challenge. Be it cold, disease, reduction in food quality and quantity. The result can be a bounce back or a net gain in ability, so when that animal encounters that challenge again they are physiologically more capable to deal with it. Then comes epigenetics, changes in dna sequences that regulate gene expression. Essentially, this is real time changes in the genetic makeup of animals based on the environment that they encounter.
So if a sheep has been exposed to a less favourable environment and maintained production, not only will it be more conditioned to that challenge but so will its progeny.
This is why the system where your breeding stock comes from is so important. The last thing you want to see is a perfect growing environment free from challenges. That should be your focus as a commercial farmer.
We record a million and one things. But the most important thing we do I feel is stress testing the stock, in particular using worm challenges. We want to a degree a high worm challenge to see who is still thriving and who isn’t. This time of year we are collecting a lot data, from back fat scans, weights, dag scores, individual lamb fecs. That data is always more valuable if animals had to work because finding the best performers becomes easier.
