Collinsville Stud Merinos

COLLINSVILLE RAMS ARE PROFITABLE

The vast scale of our enterprise also means we are often in a position to deliver you rams long after others have exhausted their seasonal supply. This has resulted in a stud that is geared towards serving the interests of both mixed and pastoral farmers—breeding for low maintenance, large framed and heavy cutting sheep that work hard and last the distance.

Collinsville stud is built on over 100 years of breeding success but we don’t rely on our heritage. Today, we’re focused on rigorous, modern, innovative, and carefully calculated breeding methods.

HOW DO WE DO IT?

At Collinsville we use both objective scientific measurement and visual selection to class and define our flock. All sheep within the stud receive an electronic ear tag, enabling us to accurately measure growth rates, fleece weight, wool quality and accurately record pedigree information on the sire and dam side. From this, we select progeny that have outstanding early growth coupled with heavy cutting and excellent quality fleeces. Unlike other studs which solely use electronic data to class and select progeny, we also place an emphasis on excellent visual conformation and constitution. This ensures we are retaining sheep with structural correctness, while retaining an excellent carcass quality comparable to a meat breed.

This visual assessment is also applied to wool quality—we only breed from sheep with white, nourished and soft-handling wools. This is why Collinsville’s rams are better.

In addition, our large flock size of 7000 registered stud ewes leads to a very high selection pressure, based on the above criteria. Due to our size and scale we keep the “very best” of our progeny thus ensuring rapid genetic gain. We use only the top 1% of our rams for future stud breeding and over 60% of our ram lambs are sold for meat.

Another way we preserve the superior Collinsville genetics is to pregnancy scan every ewe for singles and multiples within the stud and our pastoral operation. This occurs on an annual basis after joining, enabling us to identify non-performing genetics within our flock and thereby increase fertility.