The CEO of the Sheep CRC Prof. James Rowe received an offer from a tag company that produces a rather large tag (similar to the Sydney to Surf tag) to trial their tag. James contacted Centre Plus as a collaborating flock with the Sheep CRC to think of a purpose for using a tag that has the ability for many tags to be read at the same time.
Mark Mortimer decided that a tag like this might allow the tracking of ewes and lambs as they walked through a gateway or opening and he would be very happy to do a trial to test the theory of capturing pedigree this way. These tags were big and would have been difficult to attach to a sheep.
After planning the trial, the tag company involved withdrew the offer to trial their tags.
As the idea was so appealing we and the Sheep CRC decided we would continue with the trial forcing the ewes and lambs to walk single file through an opening which would enable the standard e-tags already in ewes to be used in the trial.
Centre Plus use a drift system to capture full pedigree on our elite animals where the lambs are carefully mothered up in the yards when six days old. To run the trial we only needed to put the e-tags in the lambs at this time and once we had built a large enough group of ewes and lambs the trial could start.
As the Sheep CRC and NSW Ag had been working on walkover weighing technology Steve Semple and Bill Murray (NSW Ag) were able to bring out and set up a short race with an Allflex hoop reader installed. Two batteries charged by a solar panel were used to power the hoop reader and TrueTest data collector that was used to collect the tag reads.
The trial started using lambs ranging in age from 6 to 14 days old and continued till nearly weaning age. This was done to find, if by looking at the data in two-week intervals, whether the accuracy of pedigree got better or worse as the lambs got older.
Fortunately lamb age did not seem to influence the result. This allows the lambs to be given an e-tag at lamb marking time, virtually eliminating any extra labour and handling requirements.
Length of time data is recorded has the main influence on Pedigree accuracy. The accuracy improves daily for the first two weeks and then tapers off after that.
Once the data is captured (tens of thousands of reads) it has to be analyzed to extract the pedigree information.
As Mark was collecting data from the trial regularly he wrote a program to analyse the information. The results of the analysis gave an excellent result when compared to the already known pedigree information..
At completion of the data collection we were able to send all the collected data along with the program Mark had written, to the NSW Ag / Sheep CRC people in Orange.
At this time we were able to tell them the trial had successfully achieved the results we had hoped for. The Sheep CRC crew in Orange, Kevin Atkins, Jessica Richards, & Steve Semple, did their own analysis and came up with the same result as Mark’s analysis.
Steve Semple wrote a program to do the commercial data analysis for the sheep Industry.
The Sheep CRC / NSW Ag team at Orange named this Pedigree recording system and program Pedigree Matchmaker.