This week, the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation (ICBF) announced details of an update to breeding values that drive or at least influence genetic selection on most commercial dairy and suckler farms. The big changes are twofold: a change in the economic values in the farm systems’ model that drives breeding evaluations, and a base change to account for genetic improvement.

Let’s take the base change first. Essentially, it’s a recalibration or a reset button to allow for genetic progress over time. If you didn’t change the base, you would be comparing evaluations to animals that were born and bred years ago, but in effect don’t exist, because the average breeding population is much better. It’s 10 years since ICBF completed a base change and some geneticists would suggest that a routine, five-year base change should be carried out.

The US and New Zealand have both completed base changes recently. The reset causes challenges for AI companies because they have already purchased a new crop of bull calves (potential AI sires) on genetic merit last spring. Now, at the press of a button, a reset could drop the genetic value of those calves below a threshold that could influence potential sales. Most AI companies will be waiting until this week to assess what they have before deciding what sires they want to market, push and indeed sex for next year’s breeding season.

Alongside the base change, the financials that drive the economic values in the models which influence the breeding scores have changed. Again, the intention here is to reflect what is happening or going to happen in the market. If milk fat or protein has increased significantly in price, if meat value has increased, then this needs to be reflected in the index that farmers are using.

On the dairy side, milk quotas were a limiting factor until 2015 – now land is the limiting factor. What number of stock you can hold on that land parcel is now the limiting factor and, as such, we are in limbo as to where that restriction will be in three months’ time. This is one of the great injustices to farmers and the industry right now. Farmers and industry professionals are effectively making significant decisions in the dark that EU policy could fundamentally change or at least influence in a short space of time.

Head of Teagasc Moorepark, Laurence Shalloo suggests even if we lose the derogation, the breeding policy is still on track and that fertility and milk solids on a grass-based system are even more important due to a requirement for much tighter cost control if stock carrying capacity was limited on-farm.

Others, including some of the co-op sector, take the view that land is so limiting, higher output per cow from fewer animals should be the direction of travel. We need to be very careful that past co-op investment decisions that need milk don’t influence future on-farm profitable breeding decisions or there could be even greater deficits in the supply.

On the beef side, if meat protein is more valuable, then animals that produce more carcase over a similar timeframe are more efficient. Meat price has increased, hence we see more Charolais and Simmental sires scoring higher in the top 100 beef sires and less Angus cattle. However, fertility is also important because there is a huge cost to poorer fertility.

Much of the farmer anger over suckler breeding index changes came from weanling producers who say they are achieving higher prices for one-star compared to five-star weanlings.

Teagasc’s Paul Crosson and Clodagh Ryan from ICBF analysed the top 20% of weanling sale prices through marts. They found one-star weanlings are making close to the same price as five-star weanlings. However, importantly, the calving interval of the one-star cows is 426 days versus 385 days for the five-star cows. That’s 41 days of cost to the suckler farmer with only one-star cows and a lot of calves not born.

It is critically important for farmers and the industry to now discuss, debate and analyse the breeding evaluations over the coming weeks. In that respect, the changes are timely. We have been fortunate to have independent evaluations in Ireland. Ultimately, the numbers decide and thankfully we are long gone from the days of importing unknown genetics, from a small gene pool, at high prices bred for a different production system.