The federal government is providing almost half a million dollars to support productivity in sheep and goats.

The project, through the Canadian Centre for Swine Improvement, will develop a Canada-wide integrated genetic services system to help sheep and goat farmers improve productivity.

Farmers will be able to use the new service system to access new developments and industry information on livestock genomics to improve breeding and increase supply of high quality products from sheep and goats.

The integrated system will include services on traits like growth rate, milk yield, genetic evaluation, research and training for farmers to adopt new technologies.

Sheep and goats offer growth opportunities in meat, dairy and fibre.

There are more than 1.2 million head of sheep and goats in Canada on 15 thousand farms with over 250 million dollars in annual cash receipts.

The number of goats has more than doubled in Canada in the last 30 years.
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