Relationship between growth performance and subsequent productivity in Horro Sheep
1998
Solomon Abegaz (Bako Research Center (Ethiopia))
A total of 1399 lambing records of Horro ewes collected over a 15 years period (1978-1993) were analyzed to estimate the relationship between ewe growth performance, as measured by weaning (WWT), six month (SWT) and yearling weights (YWT), and subsequent productivity at adulthood as measured by number of lambs born (NLB), and numbers of lambs weaned (NLW) per ewe, kg of lamb weaned per ewe (KGWL), kg of lamb weaned per kg body weight (KGKG) and per kg metabolic body weight (kg 0.73) (KGKGM) of ewe. Simple correlations between the growth performance indicators and measures of productivity were calculated. WWT had no significant relationship (p greater than 0.05) with any of the productivity parameters, while SMW had highly a significant relationship with NLB (p less than 0.01), but not with the other parameters. YWT had significant relationships (p less than 0.05) with all productivity estimates except NLB. The results indicated that YWT was significantly related with most productivity parameters and may be used for selection of replacement ewes. But the low coefficients of determination (R equal to 3.9- 8 percent) observed in all analysis and the low correlations (r equal to 0.02-0.22) imply that use of early life growth performance to select individual ewe replacements may not bring much improvement in production performance. Therefore, the use of growth performance should be geared towards management of a group of ewe replacements.
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This bibliographic record has been provided by Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research