College research key to Sustain Sheep project

Livestock experts from around the world have been working together to try to reduce the environmental impact of sheep.

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Staff at Scotland's Rural College (SRUC) - which includes Dumfries' Barony Campus at Parkgate - and the Texel Sheep Society have teamed up with partners from New Zealand, Ireland, and three other key sheep breeding nations to provide a platform for national and global comparison of methane and carbon dioxide emissions.

It is all for the purpose of selective breeding for lower-emitting animal - with the research due to run to 2027.

Sustain Sheep is carried out under the Green ERA-Hub, a Coordination and Support Action (CSA), funded through the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation (R&I) programme.

It builds on research from New Zealand which suggests that, by exploiting the natural variation in methane emissions between individual sheep, selective breeding could reduce emissions by 1-2 per cent per year, without compromising genetic improvement in other traits.