Sheep breeders are embracing RamSelect Plus in droves, with close to 4000 rams from 60 different studs listed on the site since the start of July.
And there are already over twice the number of registered users than there were at the end of the 2015 ram-selling season.
Sheep CRC chief executive James Rowe said the early-season figures were a strong endorsement of the need for easy-to-use applications that provide personalised sheep breeding and management advice.
“Sheep breeders have really voted with their feet in embracing www.ramselect.com.au as a powerful source of accurate advice for selecting genetics which meet their individual breeding objectives,” Prof. Rowe said.
“And it’s great to see that the stud breeders are responding to this demand for objective information with an increasing number of ram catalogues being listed on the site.
“Last year 6% of the national ram market was listed on www.ramselect.com.au and on these trends we are confident of exceeding that figure by the end of the current ram-selling season.”
Prof. Rowe said ram buyers were looking to take advantage of the new functionality that had been added to the app during this year’s upgrade, prompting the Sheep CRC to offer a series of webinars to assist producers to take full advantage of the powerful new benchmarking and monitoring tools.
Among the new features available in RamSelect Plus is the ram team manager that provides an easy way to examine the characteristics of the current ram team in order to ensure that it was well-aligned to the breeding objective and to see how the team matched up with the attributes of the latest rams listed for sale.
The other feature that is proving to be popular is the ‘filter’ function that allows buyers to focus on traits of significant importance to them such as a poll rams or rams with good worm resistance. Other buyers are enjoying the more detailed benchmarking of the sale rams against industry means for a range of traits.
Amongst the Terminal rams the increased availability of information on meat eating quality traits in new indexes incorporating these traits is also attracting interest.