DEAR SIR: The Irish Limousin Cattle Society (ILCS) forwarded a statement to your paper early last week outlining the reasons behind the Society’s decision to suspend mandatory WHPR membership for attendance at the premier sale in Roscrea in October.

Contrary to some mentions in your paper last week, we have not pulled out of the WHPR, merely suspended the mandatory aspect for one sale. The issue is concerning WHPR and not the BDGP, as alluded to by Matt Dempsey. We are working to try and improve the national herd, but have realised that the star ratings and WHPR are not helping in their current format.

Our society has been to the forefront of linear scoring and weighing cattle, and we were scoring and recording our pedigree cattle long before ICBF came into existence. We are very aware of the importance of these tools as a method for identifying the best genetics and improving the Limousin cattle breed and, indeed, the Irish cattle herd in general. In 2013 the Society invested €50,000 of breeders’ money in the genomics programme at the request of Dr Donagh Berry to create a training population. The same Dr Berry eludes to the fact that 60% of dairy farmers milk record, however he is not comparing like with like. Milking cows have to come in twice daily regardless, but in the case of pedigree breeders the cattle have all to be gathered up.

We promoted the WHPR as a scheme which would improve data integrity and improve the reliability of the ICBF index. To date, 337 pedigree Limousin breeders are signed up to the WHPR out of a total national membership of 750 herds. If the WHPR scheme was working properly the stamp that farmers receive for participating would be worth the extra time and cost of joining the scheme. Pedigree breeders would see the advantages and would want to join, rather than a breed society having to make the scheme mandatory for premier sales.

As a Society we are not satisfied with the way the ICBF is running the WHPR scheme and as a result we have suspended our mandatory requirement on breeders being in the scheme in order to sell cattle at our premier sale in October 2018. We have written to ICBF outlining our issues with the star system and the WHPR, and are looking to discuss how the scheme can be improved. Towards the end of the year we will reassess the WHPR scheme and how ICBF is operating it. If we feel that there is sufficient progress we will review our decision for the 2019 premier sales.

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