Australian Wool Innovation Limited (AWI) has launched a $2 million five-year research project to determine if selective breeding programs can produce breech blowfly-strike resistant sheep.
AWI is funding the project with research to be undertaken by Department of Agriculture Western Australia (DAWA) and CSIRO Livestock Industries.
AWI Wool Production General Manager Ian Rogan said the project was part of the company's comprehensive push to find alternatives to mulesing, in line with the sheep industry's commitment to phase out mulesing by 2010.
'AWI is exploring all avenues of research to find alternatives to mulesing and better solutions to breech fly strike prevention and control,' he said.
'They expect that at least one alternative to mulesing should be available as early as 2007 but they are pushing ahead with a range of options for producers - this project however is a longer term measure for producers.'
'This project aims to clearly establish the degree of resistance that can be bred through selection, the impact on other traits and the most efficient ways to breed such sheep.'
The project will involve intensive, long-term monitoring of two flocks of six hundred breeding ewes, one in winter-rainfall Mt Barker, WA and the other in summer-rainfall Armidale in NSW.
DAWA researchers Dr Johan Greeff and John Karlsson said while they believed it was possible to breed sheep less susceptible to breech flystrike, there was little hard information available.
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