Proximity sensors provide an effective, accurate and cheap alternative for measuring dam pedigree of lambs in Australian sheep flocks

Breeding sheep for improved production traits can be achieved more rapidly if we know their parentage. Parentage of lambs is expensive and laborious to measure so we used proximity sensors to count the interactions between ewes (dams) and lambs to determine their parentage. The sensors provided a rapid result that was 97% accurate compared to DNA (Paganoni et al. 2021). In this article, we report briefly on these results and on the economics of different methods of measuring dam pedigree on-farm.