Poll Dorset
The Stone Lea Poll Dorset flock 3682 was founded by Todd’s Great Uncle, Laurie Lamont. Established in 1987 originally as a Dorset Horn Breed and soon after switching to the more favoured Poll Dorset. By 2007 Laurie was well into his 80’s had decreased his stud ewe numbers down to around 30 and was finishing up ram breeding. At that Stage Todd had finished school and was returning home to the farm and was interested in continuing to breed a few rams. Laurie transferred the remaining 30 ewes over to Todd and the journey began.
The Ewe base Laurie had been breeding were very short to the ground, full of muscle but very little leg. At this stage in the industry there had been a push to have long, lean and tall Poll Dorset rams. These rams are what I would call ‘show’ rams. These particular style of Poll Dorsets had little muscle and fat cover and in a good season with plenty of good feed would produce excellent export weight lambs, however in anything short of a good season you would be left with a lamb that was all skin and bone and would resemble more like a greyhound. It was my breeding objective from the very beginning to breed a moderate size Poll Dorset that was packed full of muscle with early growth. This style of ram would give you the option of growing out the progeny to either trade weight or export sized lambs.
It only took to the third cross from the original ewes I started with to get to where I wanted to go. My genetics I was sourcing came from Gloroy. With the use of Lambplan data, breeding predictability became a lot easier. Our 2 major impact sires in the early days were Gloroy 13-0595 and Ivadene 15-0253. These 2 rams bred exactly as their data suggested and are the basis of what our stud breeds today. Now days we generally look at what we can fine tune in our stud and target a set of ASBV’s that will get us there. We don’t chase extremes because if you go too hard in a certain trait you will tend to loose another trait very quickly. For example if we chased muscle really hard and tried to get our rams over a 3 for PEMD then we would start to loose our early growth because the two traits are antagonistic of each other. At the moment we are trying to get our data to around to a minimum of 2 for PEMD, -0.5 for fat, 15 PWWT, 0.5 BWT.
We having been doing lambplan (ASBV’s) since 2009 and we are able to accurately predict the breeding of our Poll Dorsets and keep up with industry trends. I cannot stress enough if you don’t believe in data and measuring you’ll get left behind very quickly! Since we first started using Sheep genetics and creating ASBV’s the science has developed significantly and it is important that your stud breeder is measuring and recording all data points that you are interested in improving your own flock. Here, we tag at birth, we record sire, dam, birth date, birth weight and birth type. We wean at 100 days and record weaning weights. At 180 days we record our post weaning data which includes muscle depth, fat depth and weight. These are the non-negotiables in a terminal stud.