In the coming days, letters will be rolling out to farmers in the Beef Data and Genomics Programme (BDGP) with a list of animals for tagging as part of this year’s genomic run. Indeed, some have already received theirs.

It’s important to note that farmers can make changes to the list, ie select the animals that they want to genotype themselves.

Reference number

One of the requirements of the BDGP scheme is that a fixed number – 60% of the number of females that calved in 2014 – are genotyped every year during the programme.

A herd with 35 cows calving in 2014 must genotype 21 animals each year. Animals can only be genotyped once.

Genotyping uses DNA to paint a more accurate picture of an animal’s genetic potential – improving index reliability. It provides the equivalent of roughly an extra 10 progeny records.

Which animals?

Genotyping any animal will help the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation (ICBF) to improve the index accuracy both for themselves and their relatives.

But for our own benefit it is logical to avoid selecting animals that we do not plan to breed from.

One farmer contacted the Irish Farmers Journal last year asking why he was being requested to genotype two Belgian Blue beef heifers.

The advice to him was to log on and change these for current or future breeding animals in his herd. These lists are not a means of advising farmers on their breeding strategies.

Safety

On the other hand, if the farm is fragmented and there are better handling facilities on one block, it is logical to select animals there from both a practical and a safety point of view.

Males can be selected for tagging.

Any cows for culling should be swapped out of the list.

If the list contains a lot of older cows that won’t be around in the latter half of 2018, it might be best to swap these for younger animals as these will be the ones that matter in terms of hitting the required targets this year (20% of reference females having four or five stars on replacement index on 31 October 2018) – particularly in herds just about, or not yet meeting the targets.

How?

To make changes to your 2018 genotyping list, log on to ICBF Herdplus (cannot be done on the site’s mobile version).

Click "Services" on the top of your homepage, then "Beef Data and Genomics Programme", "Genomic services" and "self-selection".

There is also an option to defer animal selection until April. However, many animals will have gone to grass at that point and rounding them up for genotyping may be an inconvenience.

Those who do not select the “defer” option will receive genotyping tags via post in the coming weeks.

Self-selection is open until 11 February.

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