Tool 9.3 How to calculate your current ASBV position

If you buy rams with ASBVs, it’s useful to understand the average ASBV of your ram team for traits important to your breeding objective to estimate the genetic benefit they are passing on to their progeny. 

Ram team average ASBVs are worked out trait by trait by adding up the ASBV figures for a single trait for rams that contributed to your most recent drop of lambs and dividing it by the number of rams that had the trait recorded, as shown in the example below.  

Ram Team ASBV average= Sum of ASBVs of all rams for traitNumber of rams with ASBV for traitRam Team ASBV average= Sum of ASBVs of all rams for traitNumber of rams with ASBV for trait

How to use the Ram team average ASBV template 

1. Record the IDs of all the working rams that contributed to your most recent drop of lambs in the ‘Animal ID’ column. 
2. Consider the traits that are important to you and included in your breeding objective. Write the ASBV trait codes for these traits in the table under ‘Trait 1’, ‘Trait 2’, etc. 
3. Search the rams listed on Sheep Genetics and enter in their most up to date ASBV for the traits identified. Only the ASBV is needed, the accuracy value is not required. 
4. For each trait, record the number of rams that have an ASBV for that trait and write in row N. 
5. For each trait, add all the ASBVs together and write in row S. 
6. Calculate the average ASBV of the ram team for each trait by dividing the sum of the ASBVs (S) by the number of rams listed with an ASBV for that trait (N) and write in row A. 
7. If you use an Index, do the same for it. 

Example Ram team average ASBV calculation 

Complete the example below, calculating the ‘Total’ and ‘Average’ for each trait in this example. 

Source: MLA BredWell FedWell 

Ram team average calculation table 

Source: MLA BredWell FedWell