Felix Rams is a mixed farming business at Greenethorpe in Central West NSW, focusing on the production of high-performance Poll Dorset and White Suffolk rams.
Felix Rams is a leading supplier of meat sheep rams and markets upwards of 400 flock rams annually, including through our annual on-property sale on the first Thursday in September (moved from the first Tuesday after 2020, when the Cowra lamb sale day changed).
Our business and breeding program are very commercially focused, with selection based on measured performance, ASBVs and visual assessment. Nothing is left to chance with our performance recording. We take advantage of available technologies, such as electronic tags, DNA technology, abattoir measurements, and database record-keeping and mate allocation, to make sure the performance data we collect is as accurate as possible and our breeding selections achieve the best genetic gain.
In addition, the business produces grain, oilseeds and prime lambs.
Our objective is to breed flock rams to produce lambs that help producers increase their profitability, that fit processors’ specifications and that meet consumers’ expectations.
We don’t aim to breed “stud rams”. Our many successful sires rise to the top from the group of flock rams because of their performance and their structural soundness.
We select for structurally sound, early-maturing, high-performance animals using Sheep Genetics ASBVs. We have successfully improved growth rate while maintaining moderate birthweight ASBVs. All our relevant performance information is collected before the animals are seven months of age. This helps us to continue to meet our early maturity goal.
Selection for early maturity and muscling means that, unlike many breeders, we don’t aim to produce “great big rams”, but rams that produce lambs that grow to market weights exceptionally quickly and that have enough fat cover to finish. We would much rather a ram that was 50 kg at 100 days than a ram that was 150 kg at 18 months. Great big rams are for egos, not for efficient lamb production.
All our performance information is measured based on pasture growth. The only time we use feeders is to finish cull lambs to take them out of the pasture rotation, or in exceptionally tough seasons to present rams for sale.
We individually sample all ram lambs after a post-weaning worm challenge to provide data to produce ASBVs for worm resistance.
Over the last decade we have invested in DNA testing for eating quality and yield, recognising that eating quality is paramount to consumer satisfaction. There is evidence that selection for high-yielding, fast-growing animals alone leads to a poorer eating quality outcome. DNA testing has allowed us to bend this curve and continue to improve performance while maintaining (and gradually improving) eating quality. We have also been selling our cull ewe lambs (fully recorded, including scanning for eye muscle and fat) to Gundagai Meat Processors to gain data on intramuscular fat, lean meat yield and dressing percentage. As ram breeders and lamb producers, we cannot ignore eating quality, despite limited markets rewarding it.
At Felix Rams we are committed to highly accurate data collection. We run large groups of rams and ewes under commercial conditions to enable their performance to be compared. We firmly believe active performance selection, aided by tools such as Sheep Genetics LAMBPLAN across ASBVs, gives a level of genetic improvement far outweighing that possible from a “showring” selection method or selection based on raw measurements. This doesn’t mean that we ignore structural soundness in any way.
Data collection is in our DNA!
