Beef + Lamb New Zealand Genetics is on a mission to give breeders and farmers the tools to produce great-tasting beef backed by a strong environmental story, while at the same time improving production efficiency.
The Informing New Zealand Beef (INZB) programme is a seven-year Sustainable Food & Fibre Futures partnership supported by the Ministry for Primary Industries and B+LNZ, which aims to boost the sector’s profits by $460m over the next 25 years.
The objectives of the programme are to:
- develop a beef genetic evaluation system that includes traits that are important to New Zealand beef farmers and supports a sustainable beef farming industry
- create easy-to-use tools that enable data to be efficiently collected, managed, analysed and used by farmers to make profitable decisions for their operation
- create a new approach to extension design with the goal of increasing farmer engagement across the industry.
The across-breed Beef Progeny Test is a key project within the INZB programme. More detail about this initiative can be found on the across-breed Beef Progeny Test page.
Access all Informing NZ Beef information and resources through the B+LNZ Knowledge Hub
INZB involves five key projects:
To get where you want to go, you need to define your goals and work out how to get there. Breeding objectives and selection indexes do just that – a breeding objective defines your goal and where you want to go as an industry and index(es) are the tool(s) you use to get there.
Our indexes should be fit for our New Zealand industry. That is, there are some traits that are more relevant to the NZ environment and should therefore be included in NZ-specific genetic evaluations and indexes to ensure we’re making genetic progress on them – while also continuing to progress on current productivity traits.
In project 1, we are going to build these NZ-specific indexes and decide on what traits to develop EBVs for, using input from advisory groups, international experts and most importantly – NZ farmers.
Traits that are selected for further development within the INZB programme will be developed in this project if standardised trait measurement solutions are not currently available for genetic evaluations.
Where possible, we will look to include data from other organisations for the purpose of R&D and genetic evaluations. To this end, a broad data sharing industry agreement (breeders, commercial farms, and breed societies) will be developed and will include data management, ownership and its use.
The purpose of this project is to generate enough data to enable accurate across breed genetic evaluations and drive uptake amongst commercial farmers.
There are two main aspects to this project:
- establishment and running of Beef Progeny Tests (BPT), and
- involving commercial farmers in the programme.
The BPT sites will support the genetic evaluation and key activities include:
- diallele cross experiment – including estimation of hybrid vigour
- record current industry traits to go into the evaluation
- trial new traits
- demonstrate the value of hybrid vigour
- create industry linkages for the main beef breeds.
The inclusion of commercial farmers is to increase the accuracy of the genetic evaluations and to drive uptake in commercial farmers. Key activities associated with participating commercial farms are:
- linking commercial data to bulls – to increase accuracy of the genetic evaluations
- give commercial farmers more tools to help with farming practices
Educational support will be provided to commercial farmers for training purposes.
The focus of this project is on providing intuitive easy to use genetic tools to breeders and commercial farmers.
The tools that will be developed as part of this project are the nProve database, nProve reports and a genetic engine. In short, this involves building the tools to store the data, crunch the numbers and turn this into something useful for farmers for to use to make breeding decisions.
To ensure the industry realises the gains of the INZB programme, it is important that a quality extension project is put in place to help drive uptake of the genetic tools produced as part of the programme.
This project aims to define, develop and deliver an extension model as a suite of products and services specifically targeting industry uptake of genetic and genomic tools. This aim of this extension programme is to drive increased use of high Estimated Breeding Value (EBV) bulls, increased use of AI in commercial herds and the use of genomic tools across the industry. The project also encompasses the programme management of INZB.
INZB Programme contact: Gemma Payne, Portfolio Manager – Genetics Research Programmes. Email: [email protected].