THEY think they can beat us in rugby and now the Kiwis believe they can beat us at sheep breeding.

"New Zealand is five to 10 years ahead of Australia in breeding technologies," New Zealand Poll Dorset breeder Sarah Adams says.

She recently judged Romneys and White Suffolks at the Royal Melbourne Show.

Ms Adams said it was difficult to sell a ram in New Zealand without breeding "figures".

There was also an increasing use of computerised axial tomography scanning and of genetic profiling using single-nucleotide polymorphism chips.

CT scanning of livestock, sometimes call CAT scans, was developed in Australia.

It has been used for several years in New Zealand to analyse bone and meat yields at various sites on a lamb carcass.

Ms Adams is also the marketing manager for Pfizer, which sells the Sheep50K chip.

It uses or SNP, which is genetic profiling of a ram.

This DNA test, which analyses traits relating to multiple lamb births, resistance to worms, weaning and carcass weights, was released last year and costs NZ$500 ($394).

Ms Adams said testing for other traits would become available once validation work was completed.

So far, she said, Sheep 50K applied only to Romneys and the Romney-derived Perendales and Coopworths.

To be effective, SNP tests had to be used in conjunction with traditional estimated breeding values.

New Zealand's SNP is a copy of technology being developed by Australia's Sheep Co-operative Research Centre and Sheep Genetics.

Sheep Genetics general manager Sam Gill said he knew of the New Zealand product.

He was confident that Australia would soon commercialise its own technology.

Unlike the New Zealand technology, which concentrated on the Romney breed, Australian research had involved many more breeds and many more traits, he said.

The Sheep CRC was in the second year of field testing. Participating breeders were paying $50 for a test.

Mr Gill said the SNP technology offered big advantages. It would improve the accuracy of breeding values.

It would also help assess hard-to-measure traits, and would allow traits to be assessed in a lamb soon after its birth.