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The Irish Cattle Breeding Federation reported a surplus of €42,000 in its 2017 accounts, down from a high of €150,000 two years previously.
The main sources of funding for the organisation are the Department of Agriculture (33%), Herd Plus (22%) and service providers (17%). Tag contributions from cattle farmers accounted for 14% of ICBF’s income stream.
“The issue of tag income did impact income in the early part of the year,” the ICBF stated. “However, thanks to continued strong support from the Department and robust income from our partners using and providing our services, ICBF ended the year with a small financial surplus.”
Overall revenue was €13.1m, down from €17.4m in 2016. ICBF says this is largely due to reduced genotyping revenues.
There was growth in cattle breeding service in 2017, with HerdPlus growing by 12% to 26,200 herds. Similarly AI grew by 7.5% “despite operational challenges faced by our AI partners, as a result of the technical error in the spring 2017 genomic evaluations”.
The ICBF database crossed one million genotypes last year, bringing it to 1.35m in May 2018. In 2017, 74,476 herds with 2.34m calvings participated in one or more aspects of the database.
The ICBF is now the “second-largest cattle-breeding programme in the world after the US”, its report says.
The replacement index in the suckler herd is now growing at €7/year as a result of the BDGP focus on maternal traits, according to the report. The average calves per cow has gone from 0.79 calves/cow/year in 2014 to 0.85 calves/cow/year in 2017.
The average EBI of dairy-bred females also increased by €21 in 2017. According to the ICBF, there are further gains to be made in dairy that could increase profitability at farm level.
“An additional €500m could be captured by moving from the current average performance to the top 1% as demonstrated by the elite animals in the national grass herd.”
The full ICBF annual report and accounts will be available in the coming weeks.
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