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The Australian sheep industry has made significant progress in its use of quantitative genetics technology since the late 1980's, beginning with the introduction of LAMBPLAN (Banks, 1994) and more recently MerinoSelect, both now delivered through Sheep Genetics Australia (SGA) which integrated several previous separate, smaller programs within Merinos (Brown, these proceedings). There has been steady growth in numbers of animals recorded on-farm within the terminal sire, dual-purpose and Merino gene pools, to the point where annual intakes of recorded animals are approximately 100,000, 25,000 and 100,000 animals respectively. Genetic progress has accelerated (Banks, 2005), most noticeably within terminal sires, where the rate of improvement in the index is 0.5 standard deviations per year, utilizing both within and across breed variation. |
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