Ram Hoggets Eye-muscle Scan

Steve came in recently to do the annual eye-muscle scan on the ram hoggets, which I start into selling to the commercial flock market late Jan/Feb 2013. Measuring muscularity is an indicator of meat yield and heritability of the trait is quite high.
I use Ian Walsh's Falkirk scanning and indexing system, Steve, his local area agent, comes over from Taranaki to do mine.
The results are always something you look forward to, but this year marks the first progeny crop of a sire ram I like a lot, (we breeders all have our from-time-to-time favourites). This year its Waione 75/08, a bigger type of sheep with a good thick carcase. He and his twin brother have dominated DPG growth index from their hgt days.
Falkirk put out an index summary based on the usual combination of live-weight, eye muscle width and depth, and rib fat depth. It dosent have the sophistication of heritability included as do SIL index values, but at least you know the h2 of around .30 applies equally to all the hgts.
They also do a sire summary, assessing % of progeny falling into 5 progressive grades of excellence.
75/08 heads the bunch with nearly 68% of his progeny falling in the top 2 grades.