Genotyping – a step forward this season

With the rams sales season kicking into high gear, Dr Alan Bohan from Sheep Ireland joins Ciarán Lynch on this week’s OviCast to discuss how genotyping has improved the genetic information available to breeders and farmers alike. Alan discusses the increase in the number of animals genotyped this year and explains the process and costs involved in genotyping. He then discusses the benefits of genotyping animals from parentage verification to scrapie genotyping. Genotyping also provides a genomic evaluation which improves the accuracy of the index and Alan explains why this is a major benefit to farmers. Finally, he discusses this year’s Sheep Ireland multi-breed sale and the use of the ram search tool to find rams and pedigree breeders in your own locality. For more episodes from the OviCast podcast, visit the show page at: https://www.teagasc.ie/animals/sheep/ovicast-sheep-podcast