Web contact: https://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/animals-and-livestock/sheep/selection-and-management-tools

Simultaneous assortment was developed to allocate sheep into their most appropriate ‘meat’ or ‘wool’ groups according to individual information on the sheep, eg, fibre diameter (FD), body weight (BW) and/or fleece weight (FW).

Simultaneous assortment has three options for sorting sheep into wool, meat and/or cull groups.

• For the ‘wool’ selection option the sheep are ranked according to their fibre diameter. Those with the lowest FD are used for the wool flock, the highest FD are removed as culls and the remainder of the animals are used for the meat flock.
• The ‘meat’ selection option is calculated in a similar way. The sheep are ranked according to body weight. The heaviest are used as the meat flock, the lightest as culls and the remainder for the wool flock.
• The process for ‘dual’ selection is more complicated, but uses an index to allocate higher body weight sheep into the meat group and sheep with lower fibre diameter into the wool group. This selection option has two groups of potentially valuable animals, rather than a ‘select’ group and an alternative.

Users enter a list of RFIDs (electronic eartags) for the animals, with corresponding FD, BW and/or FW measurements. Then allocate the percentage of the flock to be removed as culls (if any) and allocate the percentages for the meat/wool flock split. The simultaneous assortment program will show a table giving the average FD, BW and FW for each flock. It also shows which animals would be selected into which flocks according to the three selection options.

This tool may be run on-line or downloaded and saved to your computer as a Microsoft Excel file.