Dorper and Suffolk breeding sheep imported by Boaosi Company. [Photo/epaper.kelamayi.com.cn]

The first 100 Dorper and Suffolk breeding sheep were brought to the mutton sheep breeding base of Boaosi Technology Service Co on September 26. Since then, specialists from the Institute of Xinjiang Academy of Animal Husbandry have been carrying out embryo transplant operations on nearly 1,000 Xinjiang local ewes to breed premium mutton breeding sheep.

This marks the first-stage project of the breeding base going into operation. The base, which cost nearly 10 million yuan ($1.6 million) to complete, is located in the Runhe Breeding Base of Baijiantan district, in Karamay, in Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. It covers nearly 270,000 square meters, and has 6 standard sheds in total.

According to Liu Shouren, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and an expert at the Institute of Xinjiang Academy of Animal Husbandry, the Dorper and Suffolk are of the top quality among mutton sheep in the world nowadays, and are globally praised as “diamond mutton”, each selling for 150 to 300 yuan more than an ordinary sheep.

“We will introduce 2,500 premium breeding sheep from abroad, and it is expected we will reach a scale of four to five thousand in a couple of years after the base completely comes into service next year,” says Huang Tao, general manager of Boaosi Technology Service Co.

The embryo transplantation technology refers to the process of taking out a fertilized ovum from a premium breeding sheep, and putting it into an ordinary sheep (with low reproductive ability) to produce high-quality offspring. This kind of technology accelerates the breeding of purebred premium mutton sheep and breeding sheep.

The birth rate from embryo transplantation is generally over 60%. It is expected to produce more than 600 purebred Dorper and Suffolk breeding sheep next year, which will meet the requirements to improve the quality of mutton sheep in the breeding base, while the ewes will continue to reproduce the premium mutton sheep, according to Liu Shouren, who has devoted himself to breeding premium mutton sheep for Xinjiang for a couple of years.

Mutton sheep breeding base put into use

(From China Daily, 2014-10-21)