New Zealand’s own beef indexes roll out for 2025 bull sales

The Beef + Lamb New Zealand-led Informing New Zealand Beef programme has developed New Zealand’s first beef cattle indexes which will be available for commercial breeders to use this bull-buying season.

Rolled out at B+LNZ Genetics’ Beef Breeder Forum in March, the three indexes are maternal (NZ$Maternal), terminal (NZ$Terminal) and Beef-on-Dairy (NZ$BeefxDairy).

B+LNZ Head of Genetics Jason Archer says this is the first time indexes have been developed specifically for New Zealand’s farming systems and these will help commercial farmers make informed decisions when buying bulls this year.

Cattle breeders have access to a broad range of EBVs which cover a diverse range of important traits such as growth, fertility and carcase traits, and individual animals will have different strengths and weaknesses across these traits. This can make comparisons difficult. He says indexes put an economic weighting on an animal’s estimated breeding value (EBV) and reflect the expected differences in commercial profitability of a bull and his progeny.

“They help bull buyers by putting an economic value on the traits described by EBVs and are specific for different farming systems such as maternal systems, for breeding replacements, terminal and Beef-on-Dairy systems.”

To help farmers even more, each of the indexes are also broken into sub-indexes, which groups related traits together. For example, the NZ$Terminal index includes T$Calving ease, T$Finishing and T$Carcase trait groupings.

“They help bull buyers by putting an economic value on the traits described by EBVs and are specific for different farming systems such as maternal systems, for breeding replacements, terminal and Beef-on-Dairy systems.” – Dr Jason Archer, Head of Genetics, Beef + Lamb New Zealand

Dr Archer says the current indexes used by New Zealand’s beef industry were developed using EBVs and indexes developed for the Australian industry, and these don’t fully reflect New Zealand’s farming systems or beef supply chains.

“There are traits that are more relevant to the New Zealand environment and therefore needed to be included in New Zealand-specific indexes to allow genetic progress to be made.

“The development of New Zealand-specific indexes was one of the priorities for the INZB programme and we worked alongside AbacusBio, who undertook the economic modelling and prototype development, farmers and breed societies including AngusNZ, NZ Herefords, Simmental NZ, and NZ Beef Shorthorn Association to ensure they were fit for purpose.”

He says the roll-out of the indexes were part of the launch of nProve Beef, which again helps farmers select the genetics that best fit their breeding objectives. It is expected that the indexes will be adopted by New Zealand beef farmers and support genetic progress for the traits that are important for the New Zealand beef industry.

The seven-year Informing New Zealand Beef (INZB) programme is a partnership between Beef + Lamb New Zealand and the Ministry for Primary Industries through the Sustainable Food and Fibre Futures fund (SFF Futures) … It aims to boost the sector’s profits by $460m over the next 25 years.

Focused on increasing uptake of the use of high-quality genetics in the beef industry, the four main components of the programme are developing New Zealand-specific breeding indexes, building an across-breed genetic evaluation and data infrastructure, running progeny test herds and developing new data sources.

Check out nProve for Beef – nprove.nz