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Abstract

One of priority objectives of the State program for development of agriculture and regulation of markets for agricultural product, raw materials and food until 2020 is to provide conditions for accelerated development of livestock production with sheep breeding being its branch. In order to restore the branch, increase production in sheep breeding and improve quality, it is required to carry out the full range of activities prescribed in the above program. Managers of sheep farms, students, practitioners, farmers, and also graduates of higher educational institutions of agricultural profile must possess the most modern practical skills in the field of sheep breeding, methods and techniques of sheep zootechnical evaluation.
Success of breeding work largely depends on the ability to determine the breeding value of animals in the most possible objective way. To obtain competitive sheep of Belarusian generation satisfying the variety of meat-and-wool and wool-and-meat indicators of productivity, selection by set of traits (origin, typicality, measurements, exterior, fertility, offspring quality) is required, which has not been used at breeding enterprises and sheep breeding farms so far.
During transition from score to index assessment in our country, necessity to develop new complexes for assessment of economically useful traits of sheep of semi-fine-wool breeds is dictated by time, and today is highly relevant. New techniques and methods for assessing the breeding value of sheep have not been developed in the republic yet. The authors of the paper propose to consider a separate element of determining the breeding value of sheep of semi-fine-wool breeds due to transition to index assessment, namely, for the first time developed scale for ranking sheep ewes and producing rams in the future, correlated with breeding value indices.

References

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