Sampling of fleeces for yield, staple length, and crimps per inch measurement.

Abstract

Samples of wool from 26 Merino sheep at Trangie Agricultural Experiment Station were taken from 27 sites over the right side and a composite sample from the left side. Gradients in staple length, crimps per inch, yield, and per cent. vegetable matter are demonstrated. The correlation between yield of 25-30 g samples and yield of a composite sample from the opposite side of the fleece is at a maximum of approximately 0.92 along the shoulder-midside-hip area. The correlations between yields of samples of 5, 10, 20, 40, and 75 g from the midside and composite samples from the opposite side are 0.73, 0.86, 0.91, 0.94, and 0.94 respectively. Therefore there does not appear to be any advantage in taking samples larger than 40 g from the midside. When yield is calculated so as to remove the effect of vegetable matter, correlations between positional samples and composite sample are mostly slightly higher, but the general findings are not altered. For staple length and crimps per inch the correlations between site value and mean sheep value are at a maximum along the shoulder-midside-hip region, similarly to yield. Mean values for crimps per inch, staple length, yield, and per cent. vegetable matter for left and right sides do not differ appreciably. For these characters correlations between values for individual samples from the same position on the two sides are of the order of 0.9.