Proofs for Dairy AI bulls have today been published. For this evaluation new information has been incorporated for the fertility and calving sub index. These are the traits which have the most available extra information since the January evaluation. An additional 400,000 records have been included in the calving evaluation while, an extra 244,000 records have been included in the fertility evaluation.
The means correlation between the new and December evaluation for 693 active AI sires is provided in Table 1 below. For traits that were not updated the correlation is 1 i.e., there is no change. The correlation for the fertility sub index is 0.994, while the correlation for calving sub index is 0.987. This indicates that there is very little change in the ranking of bulls based on the new evaluation
Overall only 7 bulls out of 693 have moved by more than €20 with no bull moving more than expected based on the 95% confidence interval for EBI. The additional information resulted in an average 1.5% increase in reliability for fertility and an increase of 2.1% for calving sub index. Depending on the amount of information received individual bulls will have increased significantly more than this. For example, the largest increase in reliability was 28% for fertility and 43% for calving. As a result, more bulls are now eligible for the active bull list as they now have a progeny based calving evaluation.
Table 1. Means and correlations for 693 Active AI bulls between January and March genetic evaluations
Impact on Top 75 Active Bull List
The average EBI of the ICBF Active Bull Listing continues to improve, with the latest listing being €28 ahead of last year’s listing, up from €229 in Spring 2017 to €257 for the current listing. Once again the listing is dominated with young Genomically Selected (GS) bulls, with a total of 52 of the total 75 bulls being these young GS bulls. In addition the listing is once again almost completely dominated by Irish bred bulls, reflecting the very significant investments that Irish owned AI companies have made in the national breeding program over the past 8 years, since the first introduction of genomics in 2009.
Summary
Overall this proof run has seen minimal impact on bull proofs. The correlations are very high for traits where new information has been incorporated. As a result of this 9 bulls that previously were not eligible for the active bull list are now eligible for the list.
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Please note:
- This run is for Active DAIRY AI BULLS ONLY
- Updated figures will still be displayed as Dec 17 evaluation as the only animals that were updated were the 693 active AI bulls
- This is not a full run – Only 693 active dairy AI bulls have been updated