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« on: July 18, 2017, 07:45:25 am »
Welcome. What you are doing is roughly what we have done, only we did it with rams rather than AI. We really started out the wrong way, buying whatever hodgepodge ewes we could afford. They weren't all bad ewes but they were all over the place genetically. And our lambs were all over the place too. A good one here an there, a few bad ones and a lot of mediocre ones. It wasn't until we started tightening things up genetically that we really started getting some consistent quality in our lambs. We did this by using good rams, retaining ewe lambs from out best ewe families and culling hard. At one point a three years into this process, a good 75% of our ewe flock were all daughters of one ram, almost all out of half sisters themselves. This made it MUCH easier to find a ram that would work on our ewes. We really tried to find something that lined up well genetically and it worked. Since that time we have been focusing on the Composure line and it is paying off. Quality and consistency have been improving every year.
You can do the same with AI. The biggest risk I see with AI is the temptation to try a bunch of different rams. There are so many available! This may give you some good lambs but if you are trying to build a ewe flock, genetic consistency is very important. My suggestion would be to stick with just one or two rams from whatever genetic line you want to focus on. And then stick with it. Keep the daughters from the ewe families that line works with and sell the rest. Cull the ewes that don't work well with that line. And when you breed those daughters you keep, breed them to something lined up with them. We are to the point now that many of our lambs will have five or six or even more shots of Composure. It's back anywhere from three to seven generations, so they aren't so tight we end up with problems. But they are lined up enough that we now now what we are going to get from them and we know what kind of ram to put on them.
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