The SX Fine Wool Sheep Breeders Group use every technological tool available to them in their quest to produce this new generation of fine wool sheep.

• All animals are EID tagged and pedigree recorded.

• Weighed at weaning, post weaning and as a yearling.

• Ultrasound scanned for muscle depth and external fat.

• Challenged for parasites and individually faecal egg sampled and dag scored. They’re also challenged for footrot and each individual foot assessed and scored for footrot.

• Fleeces are weighed, sampled and measured for weight, fibre diameter, staple strength and staple length.

• Ewes are also scanned for pregnancy data.

All this data is entered into the Sheep Genetics database which generates Estimated Breeding Values to inform sire and female selection.

AI has been used heavily in the past to utilise the best genetics available in Australasia. Some of the semen used has been sourced from within the breeding group and some has been imported from studs in Australia, under the guidance of neXtgen Agri.

With the ever-present threat of facial eczema (FE) moving further into the South Island there has been trial work done exposing SX Fine Wool rams to Pithomyces chartarum, the fungus that causes facial eczema, to see how they perform. The results have been surprisingly good and further work will likely be done in this space.

SX Fine Wool group members are guided by the newly developed EBV for footrot resistance (FR), rather than relying on an environmentally influenced footrot score.