Home-bred bulls have turned the tables on foreign sires
The replacement of Australian and Danish bloodlines in the Irish dairy herd by home-bred sires represents a genetic revolution, writes Martin Ryan
The historical dominance of the Aussie and Dutch bloodlines in Irish dairy breeding has been almost completely replaced by home-bred dairy sires in less than a decade.
The 9,000pc increase in Irish-bred dairy bulls on the recommended ICBF list 2020 reflects one of the biggest changes in dairy genetics in this country in more than a century.
The 62 bulls listed by the AI service in 2005 were almost all from the Netherlands (35) and New Zealand (25), with two from the USA.
Two years later there was one Irish-bred bull on the official list, while the dominance of Kiwi- and Dutch-bred sires continued.
As Irish breeders’ demands broadened, the American influence on the list increased to 20 US-bred bulls by 2010.
And as Irish dairy farmers assessed the possibilities for expansion after the milk quotas’ abolition in 2015, the emphasis switched to the improvement in Irish dairy genes, with home-bred bulls increasingly represented on the list.
The 2020 list shows 67 of the 75 bulls are Irish-bred, with an almost complete wipe-out of New Zealand and Dutch bulls.
The 10pc of non-Irish-bred bulls on the list includes Canada (4), USA (2), Germany (1) and just one from New Zealand.
“It has been remarkable progress by Irish breeders in developing our dairy genes to become some of the best in the world,” said one industry analyst.
“And it is more than a coincidence that the improved genes have come at the same time as the rapid
The dam of Foxview Bond, bred by Aidan McGrath, which is in seventh place on the ICBF Dairy Sire 2020 list expansion in the Irish dairy herd since the ending of the milk quota.”
Steering the change was the National Cattle Breeding Centre (NCBC) in conjunction with Teagasc Moorepark and the ICBF.
The aim was to identify elite, high-EBI Irish cows of unique pedigree and proven performance for fertility and milk solids production, and then mating these cows to high-EBI AI sires.
The new procedure, under
the Gene Ireland Programme, developed by Teagasc Moorepark, was designed to deliver the optimal panel of young bulls for Ireland while addressing concerns about in-breeding.
The objective was to test 70 bulls each year and target each bull to have 100 heifer replacements recorded in 100 herds, by year four of the programme.
To progeny-test the 70 young bulls, 35,000 doses of semen were used across a
The table shows how the origins of the bulls on the ICBF dairy sires list have changed from 2005 to the present day
small number of ‘targeted’ herds. The aim was to obtain 100 milk-recorded heifers from the selected herds to increase the reliability of each bull’s proof.
Test straws were made available in three pack sizes: packs of 25 (5 bulls x 5 straws) 35 (5 bulls x 7 straws) and 50 (5 bulls x 10 straws). There was no particular requirement on how these straws are used, but all straws had to be used in the herd during the assigned season.
The herd owners did not get a choice of individual test bulls. The allocation of bulls per pack were chosen at random, but each represented a range of sires and had an average EBI as close to the overall group as possible.
The New Zealand influence staged the strongest resistance to the Irish sires’ takeover. In 2012, the Kiwi bulls continued to outnumber the Irish by over 25pc, but thereafter their decline was rapid, dropping to 11 out of 75 listed bulls in 2015 and seven
in 2016.
IHFA field officer Donal Carey said: “Pedigree Holstein Friesian bulls registered with IHFA continue to be a rich genetic resource for Irish farmers and the AI industry.
Genomic testing
“IHFA introduced genomic testing as part of the Herdbook registration of all males in 2012. The adoption of this DNA-based breeding technology has been a positive outcome for IHFA members and for the AI sector at large.
“Holstein Friesian bull calves who might otherwise have been sold destined for beef outlets have been purchased for AI stations, their advantageous Genetic merit having been identified by genomic test results.
“The compound accumulation of IHFA genomic testing data continues to help underpin the population of reference animals relied upon for compiling updated breeding evaluations.”