Improved sheep meat and wool production-income

Summary

The project objectives embraced sheep meat and wool productivity improvement, identification of sheep enterprise profit drivers, development of sheep farm economic production indices and comparisons of sheep enterprise profitability. Positive genetic parameters found for meat and wool traits in the 27 Merino flocks monitored mean both traits can be improved simultaneously. Body weight was highly heritable and eye muscle depth moderately. The meat traits were moderately positively correlated. There were moderate to high correlations between body weight and both wool and meat traits. However there were some unfavourable correlations between eye muscle depth and both fleece weight and fibre diameter. Use of a weighted selection index can allow eye muscle depth and fleece weight to be increased while fibre diameter is held or decreased