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Sire selection using Internet technologiesAuthor Introduction This paper outlines (1) some of the major Internet technologies, (2) discusses the importance of breeding objectives for sire selection and (3) shows how an Internet-based sire selection tool can help New Zealand beef cattle breeders select more profitable bulls. The Internet The Internet is an (inter-connected) network of computers. Although it may appear a recent phenomenon, the Internet was dreamt of in the 1930's (well before computers were invented), began to take shape in the late 80's and exploded in popularity in the mid 90's. You can think of the Internet as a tool that allows you to obtain information from many sources world-wide. The most popular Internet tool is the world wide web (herein referred to as the web) comprising millions of items of information such as text, pictures, video and sound contained in sites called websites. Don't be put off by the thought of wading through millions of documents, thankfully the web is searchable allowing you to find useful information quickly. Each website has a unique address (analogous to a street address for a house). For example, you may wish to read the latest rugby news at www.rugby.co.nz, the address tells you are reading a document on the world wide web (www), the domain name is called rugby, it is a commercial (co) organisation and the site is located in New Zealand (nz ). Another popular Internet feature is email (electronic mail) which is analogous to fax. and enables you to send messages to your chosen recipients. Email is a lot quicker and certainly many times cheaper than a fax. Newsgroups comprise groups of individuals who send email messages to each other on a certain field of interest - providing a very quick and effective means of discussing ideas and sorting problems. Among the 30,000 or so newsgroups that exist are groups established for individuals interested in beef cattle, animal health, animal breeding and livestock grazing. File Transfer Protocol (FTP) enables users to share large documents or large data files between computers around the world. Connected Kiwis New Zealand is a knowledge rich nation with the worlds fifth highest Internet usage rate per capita and an Internet growth rate of 60 to 80% per annum. An estimated 30 to 40% of New Zealand farmers own a computer, whilst a national survey suggests that 28% of New Zealand homes had a computer in March 1997. Those computer-owning farmers who are information seekers are most likely to be Internet users. The Internet in New Zealand is continuing its explosive growth. A New Zealand Internet monitoring group estimates that the number of Internet users at around 215,200 in April 1998 and climbing. This rate of Internet usage compares with 130,000 12 months ago, which itself was a 150% increase over the previous year (New Zealand PC World, May 1998). In the year 2000, the Internet monitoring group expects New Zealand accounts to reach 700,000. The number of Internet hosts per 1000 People (an indicator of Internet usage) is shown below for the 10 highest Internet usage per capita nations (Source: Statistics on Information Technology in New Zealand). Various reports including the Impact 2001 report (ITAG, 1997) suggest that "information technology will be of first order importance in the development of New Zealand's food and fibre industries". The improving chains of knowledge and communication between markets, processors, producers, breeders will facilitate the production of a greater variety of food and fibre products, supplied on a just in-time basis. Already, examples of many useful websites, established both in New Zealand and overseas have made their presence felt, a few New Zealand examples are provided:
The number of Internet domain registrations provide an indication of the number of companies and organisations that have (or are soon intending to have) a website. Two different domain names for example would be www.beef.org.nz and www.lic.co.nz representing the Beef New Zealand website and the Livestock Improvement Corporation website respectively. The graph below shows there has been strong growth in the registering of domains in New Zealand. By March 1998, there were 16,616 registered domain names, approximately 85% of which were for commercial companies. Getting Connected to the Internet Basically, to get connected to the Internet you need to have four things in place.
Of the above four, almost everyone has a telephone. Most, if not all new computers purchased are supplied with Internet software built-in. The remaining ingredients to get on the Internet a modem and an account with an ISP.
Breeding Programme Design - Breeding Objectives Whilst a hint of short-term optimism pervades the current beef industry, long-term projections for New Zealand beef prices show little sign of improvement (FAPRI, 1998). Figure 2.1 shows that the change in real beef prices over the last 25 years has been in only one direction and that is downward at the rate of four cents per annum. For beef cattle farming to remain viable in such a climate it is more important than ever to improve profitability. Avenues for increasing profitability include improved animal health, more efficient pasture management and breeding (including choice of breed, crossbreeding system and selection of profitable animals within a breed). This section will cover the most important element of within-breed improvement - namely defining a goal or direction for improvement. What are breeding objectives ? The most important step in the bull-buying process is to establish your own breeding objective, which is essentially a statement of a goal or aim for improvement of your beef cattle herd. You can think of a breeding objective as analogous to a road sign. Just as a road sign provides gives you directions for your travel and an indicator of distance, a breeding objective provides a direction for improvement and a measure of the rate of herd or flock genetic improvement which can be made. Your breeding objective may be to maximise profit per hectare, to do this you can comprise a list of traits important to your farming operation (such as calf weaning weight, cow live weight and bull fertility), together with a measure of their relative financial worth. The relative importance you assign to these traits will depend your farming policies, for example if you sell calves at weaning, you will place a higher selection emphasis on criteria such as weaning weight than for a farmer finishing cattle through to 2 years of age. Since breeding is a long-term process, bull selection decisions made today will impact on farm profit in future years. The goals and objectives of your bull breeder should ideally be aligned with your own breeding objective. A breeder without clearly defined objectives may be making little or no genetic progress; thus it is unlikely that consistently purchasing bulls from this source would improve profitability for your beef cattle farming enterprise. Breeding programme design Essentially a breeding programme can be thought of as the direction of, or target for selection and the use of technologies used to achieve those targets. In the New Zealand beef cattle industry a common problem is the lack of clear direction given to the establishment of breeding programmes and how these programmes should focus on improving profitability and meeting requirements of beef industry participants. A procedure for developing a breeding programme can incorporate the following five steps (Ponzoni, 1989):
Whilst this article is primarily concerned with beef cattle breeding objectives, factors 2-6 should be briefly explained. (2) Choice of selection criteria usually includes those EBVs which we see in most sire summaries and catalogues such as birth weight EBV, 200-Day weight EBV... (3) Pedigree and performance recording is undertaken by registered breeders and Breed Societies. Live weight, scan, culling, mortality, sales and pedigree records are recorded on a breed registrar and submitted for genetic evaluation purposes. (4) The predominant genetic evaluation service in New Zealand is Group Breedplan (ABRI, Australia), with the New Zealand Charolais Society obtaining EBVs through the Colorado State University Center for Genetic Evaluation of Livestock (CSUCGEL). A genetic evaluation service essentially calculates a set of EBVs for their customers. (5) It is the responsibility of bull-breeders and bull-buyers to choose which bulls to mate with which cows. Finally, (6) may require consultation with industry experts to determine the best strategy for re-evaluating the breeding programme and deciding on an appropriate course of action. Beef cattle breeding objectives - the crucial first step To maintain a sustainable beef industry, animals must be produced that will secure a profit for breeders, commercial beef cattle farmers and processors. Breeding schemes will be required to balance the antagonisms between traits whilst producing a product desirable to the consumer. Genetic improvement of economically important traits can be achieved using a breeding objective in which traits are weighted by an estimate of their financial worth, termed Economic Value (EV). The development of economically-based breeding objectives is becoming a more common feature of breeding programmes for many livestock species in both New Zealand and overseas. In New Zealand, economically based breeding objectives have been developed for dairy cattle (Harris, 1993), sheep (customised objectives available for Animalplan users) and swine breeding industries (Skorupski et al. 1995). Breeding objectives have been developed for New Zealand beef cattle previously, however with the notable exception of Landcorp Farming Ltd. economically-based breeding objectives have not been applied to breeding programmes within registered beef cattle herds or by commercial producers (Nicoll and Morris, 1993). Ideally, a breeding objective comprises a list of traits, which will be economically important at some future date together with likely pricing signals at that time. Large shifts in pricing (such as imposition of tariffs) or changes in market requirements (such as from heavily marbled to lean beef) can affect pricing signals and hence EVs assigned to traits. Through development of carcass measurement and information technologies within the beef industry, financial emphasis placed on carcass and meat quality traits may change, breeding objectives will need to anticipate these changes. The definition of the breeding objective can be envisaged as occurring in four steps (Ponzoni, 1989; Ponzoni and Newman, 1989):
Web-based sire selection Introduction From the previous section on defining breeding objectives it should be apparent that on of the major limitations of beef sire evaluation in New Zealand is the inability to relate sires EBVs to farm profitability. This section reports on the development of a sires elector programme enabling New Zealand beef cattle producers to select the most profitable sires for their own farming circumstances. Genetic improvement of beef cattle relies on motivated breeders transferring bulls with superior genes for traits of economic importance to commercial producers. To satisfy bull-buyers demands, the objectives of breeders should be aligned to commercial producers goals, which include improving profit. Genetic evaluation provides the ability to identify and rank individuals based on estimates of merit for some measurable characters, but typically not for all traits included in the breeding objective. For example, Group Breedplan genetic evaluation (Graser et al. 1995) includes scrotal size which can be used to predict traits in the breeding objective such as bull fertility.. A recent trend among larger beef cattle Breed Societies, especially in North America is the development of web-based sire selector software capable of sorting databases of EBVs (EPDs in North America). These sire selectors have not as yet enabled users to evaluate the relative economic importance between these EBVs. Materials and methods Defining breeding objectives with Economic Values EVs for an industry requires consideration of a range of physical environments and consultation with various industry sectors, each of which have differing requirements. The approach taken in this study was to consult with various industry participants in developing breeding objectives. First, registered New Zealand Angus, Hereford and Simmental breeders were surveyed to determine the selling age, sale destination and use (breeding role and retention rate) of bulls they sell. Second, representatives of the Angus, Hereford and Simmental Breed Societies were asked to determine which traits they considered of economic importance, from the perspective of improving profitability of commercial producers, who are their bull-buying customers (Charteris, 1996). New Zealand beef cattle breeding, production and marketing circumstances were modeled using BREEDOBJECT (Barwick and Yeates 1997) to derive breeding objectives for Angus, Hereford and Simmental and Charolais bulls used in commercial herds. Six farm classes (three in each of the North Island, NI; and South Island, SI), which comprise the majority of beef cattle producers were distinguished (New Zealand Meat and Wool Board’s Economic Service, NZMWBES 1996). As farm classes become increasingly more extensive (NI Intensive < NI Hill < NI Hard Hill and SI Intensive < SI Hill < SI High) an increased duration and intensity of winter feed deficit was modeled. Changes in feed deficit between farm classes reflect different pasture growth curves and feed demands. Progeny sale ages were higher at a constant liveweight and trading and transport costs increased for more extensive farm classes. Within farm classes, bulls were used in either a general purpose role (some heifer progeny retained for breeding) or a terminal sire role (all progeny sold). Three progeny selling dates were modeled with progeny selling via auction at weaning (6 months), store (12 months) or for processing at 18 months. Separate breeding objectives were developed for bulls sold to dairy herds, for which all progeny were assumed sold at weaning. From the defined breeding objectives, selection indices were derived. The characters comprising the selection index were Group Breedplan EBVs. An example of traits in the breeding objective and characters in the selection index are shown in Table 3.1. These characters were weighted to maximise the correlation between the index and the breeding objective. Table 1. Example breeding objectives and selection indices for
Hereford bulls used in a general purpose (GP) or terminal sire (TS)
role in North Island Hill Country ($ profit per cow per year)
1. REV = Relative Economic Value (in dollars) Intended sire selector users are bull-buyers, who may be either bull-breeders or commercial producers. Breeders should specify breeding, production and marketing criteria approximating that of their bull-buying customers when making selection decisions. Commercial producers should specify their own criteria to choose bulls most likely to improve profit for their conditions. Even if users do not select the highest ranking bulls on their index values, it is possible that within a set of farm criteria, groups of bulls from one or a few breeders may rank highly indicating that objectives of those breeders are closely aligned with the requirements of commercial producers within that environment. For each sire, breeders name, address and phone number are provided for ease of inspection of individual bulls. Current bull owners are provided the option of excluding bulls from the database which have been previously culled or are unfit for sale. EBVs for use as selection criteria and their associated accuracies
for yearling and 2-year old sires were obtained from Breed Society
databases. For the sire selector, a web interface was developed
enabling users to specify their own breeding, production and marketing
circumstances. From specification of the above criteria, an appropriate
index was used to weight the EBVs. Output tables from the sire selector
programme rank bulls in descending order on the basis of their index
value ($). Many bull-buyers have an intuitive range of EBVs from
which they select bulls, thus users were provided the option of
placing upper and lower limits on EBVs and lower limits on accuracies.
Selected bulls are ranked on their index values within these EBV
and accuracy bounds. Results And Discussion Providing a tool to weight EBVs by their relative contribution to farm profit greatly enhances the value of existing EBVs. EBVs for yearling and 2-year old bulls are not currently published in a national summary, but are published in individual breeders catalogues. Providing these EBVs on the web would increase the benefit to bull-buyers wishing to compare these young sires. Unlike printed sire summaries, a web-based delivery allows breeders to customise their sire searches and allows for regular updating of EBVs as more information becomes available. Conclusion Use of this sire selector tool enables breeders to rank bulls based on profit. This tool combines customised breeding objectives together with genetic evaluation within a web-based framework. It is likely that in future such selection tools combined with crossbreeding decision support and mate selection will become increasingly commonplace on the WWW. Such tools would need to be customer-oriented to ensure successful industry adoption. References Harris, B.L. 1993. Breeding Objectives - Future directions. In: Proceedings of the A.L Rae Symposium on Animal Breeding and Genetics. Eds. Blair, H.T.; McCutcheon, S.N. 30-37. Newman, S.; Morris, C.A.; Baker, R.L.; Nicoll, G.B. 1992. Genetic improvement of beef cattle in New Zealand: Breeding objectives. Livestock Production Science: 32: 111-130 Newman, S.; MacNeil, M.; Golden, B.; Barwick, S. 1994. Implementation and use of selection indexes in genetic evaluation schemes for beef cattle. Proceedings of the 4th genetic prediction workshop, Beef Improvement Federation, Kansas City. Nicoll, G.B.; Morris, C.A. 1993. Lessons from New Zealand beef cattle selection experiments. In: Proceedings of the A.L Rae Symposium on Animal Breeding and Genetics. Eds. Blair, H.T.; McCutcheon, S.N. 69-87. Ponzoni, R.W. 1989. Accounting for both income and expense in the development of breeding objectives. Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the Australian Association of Animal Breeding and Genetics: 55-66. Ponzoni, R.W.; Newman, S.N. 1989. Developing breeding objectives for Australian beef cattle production. Animal Production, 49: 35-47. Skorupski, M.T.; Garrick, D.J.; Blair, H.T.; Smith, W.C. 1995. Economic Values for Traits for pig Improvement. II. Estimates for New Zealand conditions. Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 46, 305-318. Barwick, S.A., Yeates, A.P. (1997) Proc. Assoc. Advmnt. Anim. Breed. Genet. 12: p 769-773. Callow, C.F. (1993) Proc. A.L. Rae Symp Anim. Brdg. Gen. 38-40. Charteris, P.L., Garrick, D.J. (1996) Proc. NZ Soc. Anim. Prod. 56: 386-389. Charteris, P.L. (1996) Breeding Matters, January 1996. N.Z. Anim. Brdg. Trust. Graser, H-U., Goddard, M.E., Allen, J. (1995). Proc. Assoc. Advmnt. Anim. Breed. Genet. 11: 56-64. Harris, B.L., Clark, J.M., Jackson, R.G. (1996) Proc. NZ Soc. Anim. Prod. 56: 12-15 New Zealand Meat and Wool Boards Economic Service (1996) The Sheep and Beef Farm Survey 1994-1995. Nicoll, G.B., Johnson, D.L. (1986) Proc. 3rd World Congr. Gen. Appl. Lvstk Prod. 9: 413-418. |
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