Josef Kučera - e-news

05.08.2019

Dear Simmental-Fleckvieh breeders, dear colleagues,

In the last issue of our eJourn@l I expressed the invitation to the conference of the International Committee for Animal Recording which was held in June in Prague, the Czech Republic. More than 430 delegates from 57 countries attended this event and spent a couple of days in the discussion about standardization and harmonization of animal recording systems a genetic evaluation. It is great that also representatives of our breed took actively part in many of the workshops and presentations. Important part of the ICAR activities become InterBeef, as a service for international genetic evaluation for the beef breeds. One extra workshop was dedicated to this topic and we may expect next improvement of this project, where currently 11 countries and 5 beef breeds are participating. Also, the conformation working group met in Prague and discussed the next level of harmonization in this field. The program of the Breed associations working group was focused on the how to better facilitate the different aims and request of various breeding associations and world breed federations.

Interesting presentation of Dr. Reents in the plenary session reviewed the “genotyping age” - from the beginning about 10 years ago up to most recent development in this field.Genomicevaluations were primarily implemented for traits with an established performance recording scheme providing phenotypes that were also used in conventional genetic evaluations e.g. production traits, fertility, longevity etc. The implementation of the genomic breeding values for this group of traits was relatively fast, as there is enough information available on the progeny of the progeny‐tested bulls in the reference set. The changing economic environment in the dairy and beef sector and progress in technology must react on new sources of data and new traits available for the evaluation. Genotyping of the females is another way in which a larger reference population can be achieved. Adding genotyped females to the reference population could improve the reliability of breeding values. Nowadays many of the reference population in the main dairy and beef breeds contain more female genotypes than males one. All presentation from the Prague ICAR conference are available on the https://www.icar.org/index.php/icar-meetings-news/prague-2019-home-page/.

The European Simmental Federation General Assembly is this year held in conjunction with a well-known Austrian agricultural fair in Ried im Innkreis – “Rieder Messe” on 4thof September.

I believe many of you will be able to participate in the American Simmental Simbra congress in Costa Rica. The program of the conference seems to be very interesting and I have no doubt about the outstanding quality of the meeting.

Sincerely yours,

Josef Kučera

ESF President