Catalyst Sheep

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Development[edit]

The Catalyst® shedding sheep breed is a registered trademark of Clear Creek Pastoral Co. Pty Ltd, with development started by Andrew Freshwater in 2002 after visiting the Meat Animal Research Centre in Nebraska researching hybrid and composite animal breeding systems to develop highly productive systems.

The Catalyst® is an open composite breed, starting with Damara cross White Dorper ewes and utilizing White Dorper, Poll Dorset, Ultrawhite and White Suffolk sheep breeds. The goal of the breeding program was to create a sheep breed that was highly productive, fertile, and adapted to the changing climate while also having a low environmental footprint and low cost of production.

To achieve this goal, large-scale ongoing progeny testing was utilized. This involved breeding hybrid rams to a large number of dorper ewes, and subsequent hybrid and composite ewes to evaluate the performance of their offspring. By assessing the performance of the offspring, superior genetics lines were continually utilised. This process was repeated over multiple generations, resulting in a breeding program that was highly selective for superior genetics.

The use of progeny testing allowed the breeding program to focus on traits that were important for commercial sheep production, such as growth rate, meat quality, fertility, worm resistance and shedding ability. By selecting for these traits, the Catalyst® has developed to be a highly productive and adapted shedding sheep breed. Additionally, the use of progeny testing helped to reduce the reliance on frequent drenching and other treatments, resulting in a more sustainable and environmentally-friendly farming operation.

In addition to progeny testing, the breeding program utilized BLUP (Best Linear Unbiased Prediction) genetic analysis and subsequent genomic analysis to develop a proprietary genomics-based analysis, similar to what is used in the pork and poultry genetic systems. This involved collecting DNA samples from the sheep and analyzing them to identify genetic markers associated with desirable traits. This allowed selection of superior animals for breeding, even if they had not yet been performance tested themselves.

The use of genomic analysis has allowed the long term program to speed up the breeding process and increase the rate of genetic improvement. By utilizing a nucleus and multiplier breeding system, the production of large numbers of high-quality breeding animals has helped to ensure that the breed remained genetically diverse and adaptable to changing environmental conditions.

Overall, the development of the Catalyst® shedding sheep breed has been a long-term and systematic process that utilized a range of breeding techniques, including progeny testing, BLUP genetic analysis, and genomic analysis. The resulting breed is highly productive, climatically adapted shedding sheep breeding that has a low environmental footprint and low cost of production.

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