Beginning - SIREMAX™ was conceived by a group of sheep producers at the Iowa Sheep Symposium in November 1992. Soon after, we were advised by geneticists that it would take at least ten years of data analysis and selection before we could make any claims for a new composite sheep. We sold our first ram offering in the summer of 2003. We currently have yearling rams and 2008 ram lambs available.

Goal - The goal of SIREMAX™ is to produce composite terminal sires that are superior to established terminal sire breeds in lean growth, fitness and longevity, and whose selection is based on objective performance recording and BLUP (Best Linear Unbiased Prediction).

System - SIREMAX™ is a gene pool and system for documentation of superiority in economically relevant traits. Although our seedstock flocks are managed (fitness tested) as commercial sheep, we put additional effort into ensuring data quality at the following times:

· Single sire group selection

· Data recording at lambing, weaning, and post-weaning gain

· Ultrasound measurement of backfat and eye muscle depths

· Use of BLUP technology to analyze these data to rank all lambs in order of estimated breeding value

 

Some seedstock producers ultrasound a few of their lambs, some only the stud rams they use. We scan every healthy, known parentage, ram and ewe lamb born on our production farms. We have scanned between 200 and 400 lambs, annually, for more than a decade.

SIREMAX™ isn't just the 300 ewes that lambed this spring. It is the nearly 4000 database records that have accumulated over the last 14 years; every record representing a sheep that has been through the system, adding to the accuracy of the selection process.

Results - SIREMAX™ sheep have become much bigger, leaner, and more muscular than the original base flock. There is still obvious variation, but variation is important in a closed flock. To minimize inbreeding, we keep the genetic pot stirred with hand picked breeding groups, and exchange top stud sires between SIREMAX™ flocks. Every sheep offered for sale, be it ram lamb, yearling ram, or older ram, will have an Expected Progeny Difference (EPD) for 'market' weight, fat depth and eye muscle depth. So has every ewe in the flock. No sheep is a SIREMAX™ sheep unless it has a current retrievable record in the SIREMAX™ and Lambplan databases.

We look forward to hearing from you.