Will any ram do?

12/12/2011

The old saying "you get what you pay for" is certainly true when it comes to rams. Sure, sometimes you can get lucky and pick up a bargain but most of the time if you buy a ram from the saleyards you're buying someone else's rubbish or problems.

The "ram is half the flock" - and this saying is absolutely true. Every lamb gets half of it's genetics from the ram, so it should be at least as good as the ewes and preferably much better. Why? Because to find one good ram is much easier than to find a whole flock of good ewes! Think of it this way; if you have 100 ewes and 100 rams to choose 60 ewes and 2 rams, you'll have to pick at least 10 ewes that are below average but you can get 2 of the best rams!

You can improve your flock by buying good rams that are much better than your ewes and keeping their female offspring as future breeding ewes. If the rams are not much chop the ewes they produce won't be much chop either. Then what?

So get a good ram and you'll produce good lambs, whether it be for eating or breeding. The qualities of a ram for those purposes might differ, but either way it should be a well-bred ram produced by a reputable breeder that backs their claims up with data and pedigrees.

6 Comments

Charlie

25/9/2012 11:12:15 am

I have prolific sheep and have studied and observed multiple births (or lack thereof) for almost 20 yrs now. Twinning is not a very heritable trait....only 10%, in fact, by selection. http://www.al.gov.bc.ca/sheep/publications/documents/ewefactsheet.pdf
I learned that in actuality, it would take over 100 yrs of selection to increase twinning in any breed. Which is why I opted for Romanov sheep that ALWAYS have multiple births.
I also have Booroola sheep, which is not a breed, but a gene - A TWINNING GENE! It makes the ewe drop 1.1 more eggs per ovulation.
There are tricks, however to encourage the ewe to drop more twins, and they are;
- grain flush feeding from thin condition for 2 - 4 weeks prior to introducing the ram
-using a Teaser Ram (Vasectomized) for the last 10 - 14 days ONLY prior to introducing the ram
- keeping the rams away from the ewes until actual breeding time. This means the ewes cannot hear, see or smell the rams. This is called the "Ram Effect"
- breeding in HIGH season, ie. October - early December is when both the rams and ewes are the most fertile and produce the most multiple births. This is true with ALL breeds, even Romanovs.

For example Romanov sheep (the most prolific) routinely produce triplets at each lambing, but due to the different seasons, even though they are one of the few breeds that DO breed year round, their fertility is highest in the fall, rather than the spring or summer. So, if they were only bred in the fall, once a year, they will have 3 - 6 lambs with 4 being average. But when bred out of season, in March - August, they will mostly have twins, with some triplets and even the odd single.

Sue

25/9/2012 11:40:47 am

Charlie, thanks for your comments. Great tips for our readers.

Just to clarify, the use of a teaser has the effect of bringing the ewes into heat (like ram effect) and provided you use a harness or a raddle he tells you which ones have cycled so you can judge how "early" it is in the breeding season. On the 2nd cycle ewes will ovulate more eggs than on the first cycle (yes even Finns and Romanovs) and hence you'll get a higher twinning rate.

I should also point out that it won't take 100 years to improve twinning (fecundity) through selection. There are many traits with low heritability included in our modern selection indices. Each year improvement is made. What fecundity has going for it over many other low heritability traits is that the phenotypic variation (what we see/observe) is actually very high, and this makes genetic progress faster (let me know if you're interested in Genetics 101 and I'll write a few articles on that). Back in my former life in Canada we had Finn cross ewes that started out averaging around 180% on an annual lambing cycle. Over about 15 years we turned that into an almost 300% annual lamb production through selection - selecting the most fecund (twins, triplets, quads, etc) and those that bred out of season (lambing every 8 months).

Probably the biggest factor when your lambing rate is low is that you have such few females to select from, or you have to keep them all after you cull the poor doers. That only leaves selection on the ram's side, even that much more important to pick a good one. And if you don't use modern techniques (like Estimated Breeding Values and Multiple Trait Selection Index), what you see isn't what you will get. Selecting the good looking ones will mean in general that you go backwards in fertility and fecundity because those are the big singles.

So, yes, you can choose a highly fertile and fecund breed, like Romanovs or Finns, you can use the Booroola gene if you want to infuse it, in NZ you can also "vaccinate" to get twins, or you can implement a selection program within other breeds. Pros and cons to all of these choices and your choice will depend upon where you are, what you are trying to achieve, and your personal breed likes and dislikes. Happy breeding and lambing (going on now in NZ!).
Sue

31/10/2013 01:50:29 am

The main purpose of using a Teaser ram is to synchronize the ewes to have a nice tight lambing season, without all the long drawn out spread of birth dates, as well as increasing twinning. They can be used to identify which ewes are cycling early in seasonal breeds. I suppose they could also be used as a pregnancy detector....by putting them in with some ewes that were previously exposed to a ram, to see if they will stand for breeding again...thus calling them open.

The FinnX ewes you had, in selecting for twinning, you were simply selecting the higher Finn blood in them, I am sure. It was not a magical fast increase due to 'selection'. It takes longer than that in a purebred population of non-prolific sheep breeds, in fact, it is still ongoing with minimal increases shown.
ie. How much have they improved the SU and DO population's lambing %? Not much, in hundreds of years, yet people still continue to select for twins. Of all the traits to select for, twinning is the least heritable trait and is 90% affected by environment, rather than genetics.

Dave Brown

25/10/2013 10:12:15 am

I managed a flock of 700 Finn ewes here in NZ after they came out of quarantine ,and they dropped over 300% with no use of teasers etc.7 ewes had singles(1% of the ewes) ,8 was the largest litter,7 was the largest litter with all the lambs surviving.4's and 5's were common.The first lambers mostly had twins and triplets,after that they mostly had triplets or more.Frankly,it was a nightmare-we had lambs everywhere!!!

25/10/2013 03:11:09 pm

Hi Dave, that's excellent fertility and sounds like good survival, although you would have had a huge number of bottle lambs or fosters. Have you kept up with where they ended up (genetically I mean)? We have a handful of Finn/East Friesen ewes here and they regularly do triplets and quads with reasonable growth. It's a terrific gene pool to use over less fertile sheep to improve the weaning %.

31/10/2013 01:49:21 am

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Will any ram do?

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