South West Sheep Management Group

Six farms using implanted transponders, ruminal bolus and a range of readers and recording equipment. Over 50000 sheep were identified during the trial.

The South West Sheep Management Group (SWSMG) was set up in 1996 to explore Electronic Identification (EID) in sheep. The five farmers who joined the SWSMG represented a cross section of pedigree, hill, marginal and LFA farms. The trial was formed to evaluate the use of EID and also to set parameters that would allow such research to be of help for the UK to use when comparing with the IDEA trials into electronic identification that were taking place in Europe.

The aims of the project were:

  • To identify the areas of need for improvement within the individual sheep farm
  • To improve performance by recording

  • To identify the productive and non-productive animal

  • To improve the economic performance of the sheep

  • To monitor animal health trends

  • To improve the gross margin per hectare on member's holdings

  • To employ additional full time persons as a result of the project

  • To enable the farmers, their customers, the slaughterhouses, the processors and their retail customers to achieve total traceability from birth to slaughter and beyond

  • To Scrapie genotype stock rams with a view to elimination of scrapie from members' flocks

  • To use microchips as it would not be viable to record commercial flocks by way of visual ear tags. Chips allow automatic accurate data capture, whereas visual tags take longer to read and are impractical where tasks have to be performed in adverse weather conditions

  • To record electronically avoiding transcription errors

  • To evaluate the success and value of different feeds with varying %s of protein in cake and to assess the performance of other feeds.

Equipment used

  • FDX B Implant transponders

  • Handheld readers

  • Ruminal Bolus (from 1998)

  • Static readers (from 1998)

  • FarmWorks by SDL - Farm Management Software

  • Psion Workabout Hand held stock recorders - to capture livestock data sent from a reader or imputed manually