Balla is one of the first, if not the first, mart in the country to have the new board that displays the relevant ICBF breeding values for beef and dairy replacement stock up and running.

The board has been operational since last Saturday 20 August but Martin Walsh, general manager of Aurivo marts, says it is too early to comment on how buyer behaviour has changed since its installation.

“There wasn’t a huge amount of animals that went through last Saturday and not all of them had star ratings displayed, so it’s too early to comment on whether buyer activity has changed at all since the installation,” he told the Irish Farmers Journal.

The boards in the rest of Aurivo’s marts, Ballinrobe, Ballymote and Mohill, are expected to be fully operational within the next couple of weeks.

Part-funding

The new boards are compulsory for all marts in Ireland as part of the Beef Data and Genomics Programme (BDGP) and are part-funded by the Department of Agriculture. The part-funding was announced by Minister for Agriculture Michael Creed in May this year following persistent lobbying by Ireland’s mart organisation, the Irish Co-operative Organisation Society (ICOS).

Farmers need to be encouraged to buy into the scheme because the cost of the screens will only be justified if genomic data pertaining to each animal is made available to ICBF by farmers so that it can be displayed on the boards

The Department set aside a total of €300,000 under State aid for funding up to 40% of the purchase cost of the new display screens, which works out at about €2,500 per mart.

However, only one application was allowed per mart. According to Walsh, Aurivo has installed boards in seven rings among the four marts, with the cost of each working out at over €8,000.

The funding that Aurivo has received from the Department per screen amounts to approximately €2,300, meaning it has had to pay roughly €5,700 out its own funding for the new screen installations that are part-funded by the Department and over €8,000 for the other three. This works out at approximately €46,800 altogether.

Walsh acknowledges that the screens are “expensive”, but added that the move to display economic breeding information for dairy farmers, and beef genomics data for suckler farmers, is “welcome as long as farmers buy into the new scheme”.

“Farmers need to be encouraged to make genomic data pertaining to their animals available to ICBF, and not just those farmers in the BDGP,” he said.

“Otherwise some of the information on the new boards will be the same as the old boards and buyers will be wondering where the star-ratings are,” Walsh continued.

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