NCBC recently hosted an excellent group of breeders from the Lihakunta Cooperative in Finland. The Lihakunta Cooperative was founded in 1903 and later became a key part of the Atria Group, a Finnish food industry company. It was originally a meat cooperative for producers in eastern and northern Finland. Lihakunta later merged with other cooperatives like Itikka and Pohjanmaan Liha, and together they became majority shareholders in Atria.

 

The group firstly visited the National Beef Progeny Test Centre which is operated by ICBF. Here they were given an overview by Centre manage Stephen Conroy how the Centre is managed and how data is collected traits such as feed efficiency, methane, meat eating quality and water intake. Stephen explained how this data is then incorporated into the breeding values for each of the NCBC AI Sires thus giving them highly accurate breeding values on many economically important and hard to measure traits.

There were progeny on display on the day from some of the following NCBC AI Sires:

• Angus: Intelagri Matteo ET
• Charolais: Corbaun Rory
• Simmental: Portroyal Mr Bull PP
• Limousin: Lisna Sir

 

 

 

 

The group then visited Teagasc Grange Research Centre and were given excellent presentations and trial demonstration talks from Jamie O’Driscoll and Peter Doyle. This underlined to the group the critical role that research has played in underpinning our national evaluation system and in particular our Dairy Beef Index.

Many thanks are due to Stephen Conroy ICBF and also to Jamie O’Driscoll and Peter Doyle Teagasc Grange for facilitating the visit of this group and giving up their time so generously.

NCBC (The National Cattle Breeding Centre) operates the Dairy & Beef breeding programmes for Ireland’s largest AI Organisations - Progressive Genetics & Munster Bovine.