How to breed tender, meaty Merinos

摘要

In the past, the prime lamb industry was considered to be an appendage of the wool industry. Unfortunately, the development of the lamb industry has been hampered by the opportunistic nature of much of the meat production from Merinos. Lambs are notsupplied in any controlled way because they are a cash crop when wool prices are low. This exacerbates the most serious problem for lamb marketing - the irregular supply and the associated difficulty of building markets in an orderly way. The lamb industry is now worth close to 2 billion dollar. It is impossible to determine how much of this comprises lambs from wool-producing flocks - either pure-bred Merinos or first-cross ewes. But on a national basis the MLA Lamb Survey suggests there were about eight million second-cross lambs produced in 1999, and in the same year nearly 16 million lambs were slaughtered. This suggests that about 50 percent of lambs slaughtered are from specialist secondcross lamb producers. The remainder come from wool-growingewes.