ICBF is celebrating its 20th anniversary and to mark the occasion, Tim and I traveled to a high-powered conference on genetics that was held in Athlone.

I’m old enough to remember ICBF’s inception. I recall when Brian Wickham from New Zealand came to Ireland to head up ICBF and when Cork Liquid Milk Producers had him in to address the group. He had great plans for the breeding federation and farmers were also anxious to capture the data on our own farms.

In the early days, we had a notebook for milk recording. Tim would call out the milk yields and I’d write them down.

Registration of calves was done by returning little postcards, and paths were worn in and out to the District Veterinary Offices for movement permits. Over time, the farm computer became the hub of busy farms.

So much has been achieved in those 20 years. Now all farm data is integrated and at our fingertips through the ICBF website and app. Reports can be collated and printed at the press of a button. Lists for drying off, weighing, health events, medicine records, calving dates and herd events are all available.

What is super evident is the tremendous partnership that exists between Teagasc, the Department of Agriculture, the co-ops and ICBF. I remember how hard the farm organisations worked for this in the early days. Sean Coughlan, the CEO of ICBF, acknowledged the spirit of partnership that drives ICBF’s success. The basis is science and evidenced, independent research. It’s all about data – big and small.

Cartoon by Clyde Delaney.

EBI has delivered

Dr Pat Dillon gave us a historical tour on the development of EBI. Increased EBI equates to increased profitability. He said that he travels the world and there is no data set anywhere to equal what the Irish stakeholders have done. This is a success story. But Pat warned that “we need to start talking about where we need to be”. He had several answers that encompassed climate change, better farming and the dairy/beef calf.

There was serious genetic expertise throughout the day, including Prof Roel Veerkamp from Wageningen University in the Netherlands; Prof Dorian Garrick from Massey University in New Zealand and Dr Tim Byrne, Abacus Bio, Scotland. The screen displayed complicated graphs outlining data. I’d be telling a fib if I said I understood it all. But for the most part I was learning.

The right phase

Throughout the day there was a lot of talk about farmers’ licence to farm and that it is public perception that allows us to farm. How scary is that? I believe that we need to be very careful about our language and how we move forward. Another term used is freedom to farm.

Let’s be positive and inform the public of what we plan to do under the guidance of Teagasc – that is to farm sustainably and to do everything in our power to reduce GHG’s for future generations. Farmers care about the environment and their animals. Catch phrases like the above are dangerous. Let’s find one that is positive for farmers. The parameters are morphing and that is more about change and how that prospect always scares us. We only have to look at how farmers have embraced the collection and collation of data and participated fully in the ICBF systems to know that the industry can, with the right emphasis, deal with challenges.

Prof Donagh Berry, Teagasc, did not mince his words when he told us that he was very confident that we could indeed select for better calves from the dairy herd for beef farmers. His reasoning was logical and based on science: “We’ve done it before.”

EBI has been tweaked before and can be again to move in the right direction for the industry.

ICBF has been a wonderful success story. Kevin Downing, ICBF, presented the suite of data available to farmers. It was a day filled with technical and farmer-friendly information.

As Dr Margaret Kelleher told me when she was doing her presentation on C.O.W. v2 (cow’s own worth), she wanted to keep it technical but still accessible to farmers.

To be fair, all of the speakers managed to do that in the highly technical field of genetics. It isn’t often that I’d like to hear the presentations again, but I would.

Happy birthday ICBF.