All roads lead to Carnaross Mart this coming Thursday (December 29) for the North East Texel Club’s Twilight in-lamb sale.
The sale is set to kick off at 6:00p.m, with viewing from 5:00p.m.
A total of 76 in-lamb pedigree-registered Texel hoggets will be on offer – as well as a twin carrying embryo recipient for charity.
The sale will again include ewes with ancestry and pedigree from the top genetics of the Texel breed on these islands. Some of the top-performing sheep at shows and sales in the past year came from flocks that are exhibiting at this sale.
At the national Premier Sale at Blessington, both the Champion Female and Reserve Champion Female came from flocks that have animals with similar ancestry in this sale.
Likewise, three of the flocks that sold ram lambs from €5,000 guineas at the Texel Premier in Blessington have siblings and relations at the Twilight sale.
A feature of the sale this year will be that all animals entered will have been fully €uro-Star-evaluated with Sheep Ireland and many are the top-performing animals in the LambPlus Scheme.
All animals have €uro-Star evaluations displayed on the catalogue. Over 70% of the females have €uro-Star evaluations that equal or exceed the threshold for the new Sheep Improvement Scheme (SIS).
Likewise, 90% of the service sires used on these ewes have exceeded the €uro-Star threshold for the SIS.
All service sires are DNA-sampled and genotyped so that all offspring from the sale ewes can be sire-verified. This should ensure the male offspring will be eligible to fulfil the criteria for the SIS.
Sale of scanned twin embryo for charity
Michael McHugh of the North East Irish Texel Club said that all proceeds from the sale of a scanned twin embryo will be donated to Crumlin Children’s Hospital, kindly donated by David Craig and Clive Craig (Abbeyview and Clonard Texels).
Dam of the embryo is a Haddo ewe KWJ1801561 which was purchased in Scotland while the sire of the embryo is the 42k Mullan Armani.
The sale is being held in association with Carnaross Mart. Online bidding is available through the Carnaross LSL app alongside ringside bidding.
Potential online bidders must register prior to the commencement of the sale by contacting Carnaross Mart.
To see some of what will be on offer, check out the club’s Facebook page here.