A beef heifer’s natural ability to mature quickly, show heat and go in calf will undoubtedly influence how profitable she will be in an Irish Suckler herd. This natural ability (or not) to be able to calve down at 24 months of age, amongst other things, is influenced by genetics.
ICBF has today published the March 2020 genetic evaluations. This has seen the EBI & Euro-Star indexes for all cows, heifers, stock bulls and AI bulls updated. The Animal Search, Active Bull Lists, Stock Bull Finder, sales catalogues and all online profiles have now been updated with the new evaluation figures.
The March 2020 evaluation figures will be available for all dairy and beef animals tomorrow, March 24th. The ICBF Animal Search, Active Bull Lists and Stock Bull Finder will all be updated. (more…)
The 2020 Genetic Evaluations seen a lot of change for farmers. One such change was to the calving evaluations. (more…)
ICBF has recently issued ‘Weaning Performance Reports’ to all herds that participated in the Beef Environmental Efficiency Pilot (BEEP) in 2019. Farmers weighed suckler calves and their dams and submitted the data to ICBF as part of the pilot. These reports have been generated on the back of this weight data. (more…)
Pat Donnellan, ICBF talks through some of the reasons why BEEP is worth its weight in gold.
‘Getting them all in to weigh will be some dose, are you home this weekend to help?’, ‘Well, have a guess, what weight do you think she is?’, ‘I can’t believe how heavy he is!’. All of these and many more like them could be heard on suckler farms (more…)
The May Evaluation will be published on 26th May. The final date to have any DNA samples (hair/tissue/AI straws returned to ICBF in order to have genomic evaluation published in May, is 11th March. (more…)
‘Mark Waters, ICBF goes through the next step for animal traceability’. In 1996, Ireland became world leaders in the traceability of cattle from birth to factory when the Cattle Movement Monitoring System (CMMS) was introduced. This system required all farmers to apply identification tags to each calf at birth and register this unique number in the Animal Identification and Movements (AIM) database. (more…)
ICBF and the programme partners, have recently launched the exciting new Gene Ireland panel of high replacement index beef bulls for Spring 2020. (more…)