Saturday, March 30, 2024

In a word – quality

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Peter and Marion Black’s philosophy is straightforward when it comes to breeding sheep – quality. Peter says three things determine the size of a sheep farmer’s bank balance at the end of the year: the number of lambs weaned, their weaning weight, and lamb growth rates. That is where they are placing the most selection in their Blackdale sheep flocks. Peter and Marion farm at Ermedale, north of Riverton, in Southland. “The more lambs you have at weaning and the heavier they are offers more options including bigger numbers of lambs off the property earlier, either to the works or as stores,” Peter says.
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Other user friendly attributes such as free lambing, good feet, tolerance to parasites as well as saleable meat yield all have an economic value, but they are “add-ons”, he says.

“At the end of the day, it is production per hectare that pays the bills.”

The couple get tremendous enjoyment from producing outstanding sires, but even greater satisfaction from seeing their clients successfully using their bloodlines.

“We have great respect for the farm management skills and animal husbandry expertise of New Zealand sheep farmers, who have lifted the overall productivity in terms of kilos of meat sold per adult ewe by 86% in the past 20 years.”

Using judgment 

Peter Black spent his first four decades trying to influence breeders to use performance-based selection.

John Nicholson tries to grab a Blackdale Texel ram hogget.

Peter says as fertility levels in the NZ ewe flock have lifted so has the importance on many farms of getting more lambs away in early drafts to ease summer and autumn grazing pressures. As a result, growing numbers of farmers are running “B” flock systems for mating less desirable ewes to terminal sires.

While Texels can do this well, Peter says several clients prefer using a colour-marking sire to make drafting off these lambs easier. For this reason, he and Leon have developed a Suftex (Suffolk-Texel) recorded flock, retaining a black face and points while at the same time getting maximum growth rates and good muscling.

The interbreeds of this cross allow incorporation of the Texel myostatin muscling gene (T+T+ and MyoMAX Gold). Use is also being made across all Blackdale recorded flocks of Lincoln University’s footrot gene marker test to breed for footrot resistance in the 1.1 to 1.3 range.

Peter says one interesting finding of being involved in Ovita’s development of the 50K and 5K SNP chip technologies is a number of animals in their composite flocks showing the possible presence of a high fertility gene –believed to be similar to one found in Norwegian White sheep.

With some Texel strains in the Blackdale flock regularly bearing triplets, Peter believes if the gene does exist it probably found its way to Blackdale through the Finnish “Petsala” Texels, originally imported by MAF.

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