WITH bodystrike and fleece rot a common sheep concern on Kangaroo Island, the Clark family at Parndana are hopeful this will be a thing of past through DNA testing of their Merino flock.
Nick and Penny Clark, with Nick’s parents Peter and Anne-Marie, run a 3000-ewe operation, with the wool averaging 19 micron.
In December they started DNA testing on a home-bred sire, six ewes and ten lambs.
“The ram looked pretty handy and I wanted to know how good he really was,” he said. “The testing has confirmed his parentage but his other details are still to come.
“The ewes and lambs were also tested to confirm parentage. DNA testing is a great way to ensure our manual mothering up is correct.”
Being a wool-focused operation, Nick is hoping the test will eventually include fleece rot resistance and even wool colour.
“Bodystrike is can be a big problem on KI,” he said. “That’s why we buy genetics from New England, NSW, because it’s a hard place for fleece rot because of their extreme summer rainfall.
“At this stage, there’s no Australian Sheep Breeding Value to tell us whether a ram has genetic disposition to fleece rot. But it is heritable, so testing will be a real win for us when we are selecting our base genetics. I believe they are working on it but they do not yet have enough genetic information.”
They are passionate about objective measurement.
They focus on profit-generating traits such as clean fleece weight, fibre diameter, worm egg count, and positive fat, while also generating staple strength and length, yield, curvature, standard deviation and coefficient of variation figures, with their samples tested at Riverina Wool Testers, NSW.
“But ASBVs are far from the only selection criteria,” Nick said. “They must be used in conjunction with subjective selection and soundness, and we use the visual style guidelines provided by MerinoSelect.
“But at the end of the day, it’s very hard to look at two sheep visually and know which one will make you more money without going a bit deeper.”
Nick said DNA testing took their measurements one step further by adding carcase traits, such as genetic value for fat and eye muscle.
“It also complements the raw data we already take for our ASBVs, making those measurements more accurate,” he said.
Nick said DNA testing also helped to identify better-performing rams earlier.
“We can get full ASBVs of a ram by eight-weeks-old, so if it’s a quality ram, you can use him before you have collected any raw data.” he said.