I must tell you about a very important development which benefits the commercial interests of all current and future Australian Shorthorns members as well as non-member cattle buyers.  Beginning this week, in a ground-breaking collaboration between ABRI, New Zealand Performance Beef Breeds Ltd (PBB) and the US company International Genetic Solutions (IGS) – ABRI will publish genetic evaluations of cattle registered in the Australian and Beef Shorthorn Herd Books compiled by IGS. The evaluations (EPDs) will be updated weekly.

Through membership of Australian Shorthorns, you will have access to analysis of genetic traits via IGS. The IGS evaluation factors in an animal’s pedigree, any objective data provided by the breeder and any genomic data provided by Weatherbys.  The IGS evaluation for any animal can be viewed and searched via the ABRI’s ILR Online system that you already know and use.

IGS provides EPDs (Expected Progeny Differences) to a number of cattle societies worldwide. They include other shorthorn cattle societies – Shorthorn Beef in Australia, and the American and Canadian societies.  It was considered important that the EPDs of cattle in our herdbooks be subjected to the same benchmarking as cattle in those other shorthorn herd books.  Breedplan(closely associated with ABRI, our registration authority) is a first-class system which provides EBVs (Estimated Breeding Values) for the cattle of many societies.

Whilst EPDs and EBVs produce similar evaluations, the EBVs provided by Breedplan cannot be directly compared with the EPDs produced by IGS for other shorthorn societies, and this put both cattle buyers and our breeders of registered Australian Shorthorns at a disadvantage. Our members whose focus is on commercial production and cattle buyers more generally could not fully assess the comparative worth of a particular bull or female and our stud breeder members could not benchmark their cattle against Shorthorns registered with other Societies.

Australian Shorthorns has been able to establish a link with IGS through New Zealand Performance Beef Breeders Ltd, which acts for many New Zealand breed societies. PBB has an IGS license, and in effect Australian Shorthorns has become a sub-licensee at a satisfactory annual fee.  The upshot is that ABRI will remain our registration authority, that ABRI will regularly send data to IGS for evaluation, and that IGS will provide weekly EPD evaluations which ABRI will then attach to every animal registered with Australian Shorthorns.

While this new service adds significant value to your Australian Shorthorns membership, I want to stress that it comes at no increased cost. Indeed, until now, if a member wished to make use of Breedplan, the member paid an annual fee together with transaction costs. If a member was not enrolled with Breedplan, no EBVs were provided for that member’s cattle.  But under the IGS arrangement, EPDs will attach to all the cattle of every breeder member.  Australian Shorthorns is paying the cost of this.

The annual Full Membership fee of $125 and the $16.50 fee for all-of-life animal registration will stay at their current, competitive rates for the foreseeable future.

A female inventory system will not be introduced.

The process of registering cattle with ABRI will not change, and there is no need for you to learn a new system.

Further to this, ABRI is working behind the scenes to streamline the user experience across the ILR Online platform, including the improvement of search functionality. We will keep you informed about updates to the system as they’re shared with us by ABRI.

I invite you to share this exciting news with fellow breeders, and I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the hard work of our colleagues at ABRI, PBB and IGS over a period of many months in making this service available to all Australian Shorthorns members.

Yours sincerely,

Peter Falls, President