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The EU is set to implement new regulations with regard to breeding strategies by the Department of Agriculture and breed societies for the coming years. These rules will come into play on 1 November 2018 and look at the area of Zootechny in particular.
What is Zootechny? This is the scientific art of maintaining and improving animals under domestication, including breeding, genetics, nutrition and housing.
With this comes the control and management of the herd book, and identification of each animal in that herd book.
Looking over the conditions that need to be met, Ireland should already be OK for the majority of the criteria. The society herd books and the ICBF database will cover the points of the animal identification and genetic evaluations (eg €uro-Star indices).
However, one point of note is that breed societies will have to implement breeding programmes. There has been much talk that this means all pedigree beef cattle breeders will have to take part in the ICBF’s whole herd performance recording (WHPR) programme, but this still remains largely up for debate.
Breed societies have the option to outsource the programme to the likes of the ICBF but can also look down the line of creating one which meets their own criteria. The programme will then be evaluated on its aims, its selection and breeding objectives as well as having to meet a number of requirements such as genetic testing and producing zootechnical certificates.
This stands as the biggest change for Irish pedigree breeders. Zootechnical certificates will stand as a new term for most breeders, but in layman’s terms it is just a pedigree cert with added information.
The added information includes the likes of genetic evaluations and genetic testing for things such as genetic peculiarities. Ireland stands at the forefront of genomic testing in the beef sector due to the Beef Data and Genomic programme (BDGP), so shouldn’t be too worried with regard the evaluation and testing criteria.
However, the beef societies could possibly look at the genetic defects and genetic peculiarities as a form of breeding programme. For example, if the Angus societies looked at identifying the Myostatin gene in all cattle and removing any double carriers, this could be looked upon as a breeding programme for that society.
All breeds have different genes that can be identified and strategically enhanced or reduced within the breed for the betterment of that breed. This, coupled with a genomic sample to obtain a higher-reliability genetic evaluation, should adhere to most of the changes in regulations.
While there is no doubt that the new animal breeding regulations will affect breeders in some way, it is unlikely to hit the bovine sector too severely.
The ovine sector, however, may be hit a bit harder. This sector doesn’t have the database of genomic and genetic evaluations built up over the past few years that the beef and dairy sectors have.
While the new regulations do mention the inclusion of performance results, they say that breed societies need to ensure sufficient number of breeders are participating, not all. This could likely be overcome, due to the work done in the past with the likes of Tully. If the likes of genomic sampling was to become widespread across the pedigree sector, in my opinion it would suffice.
The sales of semen and embryos across the EU is not likely to be affected much as Ireland already meets the requirement of having a genetic evaluation and being collected by approved collection/storage centres or approved collection teams.
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