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.
“Bryan Kingston (ICBF) explains the role of the national breeding programme in the Irish dairy Industry”
G€N€ IR€LAND® is the name of the national dairy breeding programme in Ireland and it forms an extremely important part of the Dairy Industry. (more…)
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 2020 Genetic Evaluations seen a lot of change for farmers. One such change was to the calving evaluations. (more…)
In light of these unprecedented times, we want to take this opportunity to first and foremost wish good health for you, your families, and your communities.
ICBF has worked proactively to mitigate risk and ensure business continuity, with top priorities given to the well-being of our colleagues, public health and seamless continuation of services. (more…)
There are now over 485 herds signed-up to the Dairy Gene Ireland Programme taking a total of 17,470 straws to date. There are still Dairy Gene Ireland straws available to order. (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…)
With the 2020 breeding season on the horizon, now is a good time to look back at the previous breeding season. Below, we display the top 10 AI bulls used in 2019 based on the data recorded on the ICBF database. (more…)