Newly released tools make bull buying easier
Bigger isn’t necessarily better with commercial beef breeding, especially in hill-country environments. Beef + Lamb New Zealand’s new bull-buying tool, nProve Beef allows for more considered selection. Words Sandra Taylor, Photo Storth Oaks Angus.
Beef + Lamb New Zealand has recently added two tools to its beef bull-buying resources to make selecting bulls easier this bull-buying season.
Jason Archer, B+LNZ’s Head of Genetics, says the recently launched nProve Beef and the development of three New Zealand-designed breeding indexes will make it easier for commercial farmers to find stud breeders and bulls that meet their breeding objectives.
Based on the successful nProve Sheep, which has over 17,000 user sessions in the past 12 months, nProve Beef is a user-friendly online tool which is now available for use in the lead-up to the bull-buying season.
Hawke’s Bay-based vet and consultant Dave Warburton says nProve Beef makes it easy for users to put in the criteria aligning with their breeding objectives and come up with a range
of breeders who meet those criteria. Within those breeders, there will be a number of bulls that will also meet the user’s requirements.
“It means that farmers don’t need to know the exact numbers, or EBVs, for each breed. Instead, users can use sliders to select the top 20% of animals for a particular trait.”
Warburton points out that bigger isn’t necessarily better with commercial beef breeding, especially in hill-country environments, and the slide mechanism in nProve Beef allows for moderation.
Users can pull the dual sliders up and down and select animals that might, for example, be between the top 20–40% for a particular trait.
“It brings up the next tier animals that might be more suitable for a more challenging environment.”
Warburton says another advantage of nProve Beef is that four breeds (NZ Angus, Hereford, Simmental, Shorthorn) are represented in one place, so bull buyers don’t have to go to individual websites to get the information they need.
“It’s easier to find animals within each of the breeds represented.”
It is also mobile-friendly and as a consultant, Warburton says he can be looking at a number of bulls with a client and use nProve Beef to identify the bulls that meet their criteria.
Included in the nProve Beef tool are the three NZ-designed breeding indexes: NZ$Maternal, NZ$Terminal and NZ$BeefxDairy. Warburton says these indexes are used across all four breeds on nProve Beef rather than being breed specific. Archer says the indexes were developed to take the complexity out of buying bulls.
“Farmers who only buy bulls once a year can be presented with up to 58 pieces of information about each bull which can be confusing.”
He says while the indexes present buyers with just one number, it is still useful to know the traits behind each index, hence the development of sub-indexes, or trait groupings. These help buyers understand what a particular bull is good at and include calving ease, maternal cow traits, finishing and carcase attributes.
