Why Meatlinc

Meatlinc have always strived to produce forage bred commercial rams with the goal to increase the profitability of our ram customer’s sheep businesses.

Our aim is to produce rams that:

Grow fast – Reaching target weight sooner from grass
Lamb easily with great vigour at birth – Reducing labour losses at lambing
Produce a good carcass – Easy fleshing with thick deep loins
Perform off grass and forage – Achieved through 60 years of forage based selection
Are active and live longer- Serving more ewes over their lifetime, reducing sire costs.

Case study – Ali and Claire Freeland-Cook, Scottish Borders

HRF 90012 bred by George Fell, Yorkshire Meatlinc, has become the leading sire for growth rates. His lambs finished 30 days quicker than the average on Mark Excelby’s organic farm with lambs finishing on clover lays.

Also in Ram Compare, Meatlinc have shown their muscling ability, with 7 out of the top 15 rams for muscle depth. Proving Meatlinc lamb flesh well on the loin when finishing.

“We use high index Meatlinc rams over 1400 outdoor lambing scotch mule ewes with the aim to start selling lambs from 12 week old off grass only. We also lamb 1300 Meatlinc X mule ewes in feb/march lambed indoors and then turned out to grass. Majority of these lambs are creep fed and are being sold from 10 weeks. The Meatlinc tups produce lambs that finish well on both systems, lambing easily with lots of get up and go, very few need assistance. The majority of lambs sold go to Woodheads and return excellent grade sheets with many getting premiums.

We buy grade 1 and 2 rams that never get any concentrate and last well. The tups only go out for 21 days, so the tups work hard. Using performance recorded tups help us get the most out of our system. We have been using Meatlinc tups for nearly 20 years and because of the index breeding they are always improving and we feel we get excellent value for money.”

Meatlinc

Meatlinc have always strived to produce forage bred commercial rams with the goal to increase the profitability of our ram customer’s sheep businesses.

Our aim is to produce rams that:

Case study – Ali and Claire Freeland-Cook, Scottish Borders

“My March 19th onwards born lambs were all sold by the end of August, off grass with no concentrates.”

"The Meatlinc lambs are fine lambing outdoors off the mule, even with a couple of inches of snow on the ground."

“Lambing is much easier, the lambs grow faster and better and more are hitting the top end of our target carcase specification. More than half are now achieving a U classification – previously this was more like 20%.”

“Almost all of them finish off grass and clover, and the Meatlinc genetics help them do this.

“We lamb from 1 April and start selling the singles ten weeks later. One third are sold before weaning – the rest are finished by the end of September, at a consistent 19-20kg deadweight. They all grade out at either R 3L or U 3L.”

"The lambs from HRF9012 were very thrfity at birth and weighed well at 8 and 12 weeks of age. We noticed at the time we were drawing lambs that there seemed to be plenty of MEatlinc sired lambs in the earlier groups when slecting finished lambs."