News

“Why can’t ICBF just leave the stars alone? If he’s 5 a star bull – just leave him that way”. Of course, it is frustrating when a bull’s figures drop and especially if you are a pedigree breeder (more…)

Ans: The Gene Pool is only reduced if the 5 Star bulls are all inter-related.

Two tools that a breed could exploit more to prevent the gene pool getting tight are ‘Gene Ireland’ and ‘Genomics’. (more…)

Orders are continuing for the Gene Ireland Beef Spring 2019 bulls. 230 herds have now signed up taking a total of 3,050 straws so far. (more…)

For a Beef Pedigree breeder, taking a tissue sample of a young pedigree calf and sending it off for ‘genotyping’ naturally enough feels like a very ‘scientific’ and ‘unstockman’ like thing to do. (more…)

There are over 580 herds signed-up to the Dairy Gene Ireland Programme taking a total of 21,465 straws to date. There are still a limited number of Dairy Gene Ireland straws available to order. (more…)

The number of HerdPlus members that used the Sire Advice application has increased from 2,557 herds in 2018 to 2,740 herds in 2019, an increase of 7% (see table below). This incorporates almost 295,000 animals. (more…)

The Gene Ireland Progeny test centre at Tully, Co. Kildare recently slaughtered 30 dairy bred bulls at Slaney Foods International, Bunclody, Co. Wexford. The progeny were sired by 18 different sires across 3 different breeds HO, MO and JE. (more…)

John, David and Mark Finnegan are Simmental pedigree breeders and WHPR participants.

“We operate in Cork under the ‘Leeherd’ prefix within the Simmental breed and have been using WHPR and the Stockbull Finder since it started; we are very strong advocates of the WHPR scheme. (more…)

The latest HerdPlus Dairy Breeding charts have been generated and are now available online. The HerdPlus team have just started the process of posting breeding charts to customers who have responded with the word CHART to a recent text. (more…)