Advancing Genetic Improvement Across the Canadian Beef Industry
Project Title
Leveraging the Canadian Beef Improvement Network's (CBIN's) Collaboration and Resources to Advance Genetic Improvement Across the Canadian Beef Industry
Researchers
Sandy Russell – Canadian Beef Breeds Council srussell@beefbreeds.ca
Betty-Jo Almond - AgSights, Myles Immerkar – Canadian Angus Association, Craig Scott – Canadian Charolais Association, Michael Latimer – Canadian Hereford Association, Bruce Holmquist – Canadian Simmental Association
| Status | Project Code |
|---|---|
| Completed June, 2023 | KTT.04.20 |
Background
The ongoing development of the Canadian Beef Improvement Network (CBIN) has resulted in unprecedented cooperation and collaboration from industry leaders. This outcome has elevated the focus on advancing and aggregating genetic improvement resources and information for commercial cattle producers through data sharing, standardization and simplification in order to advance genetic improvement strategies within Canadian beef production. The intent is to provide a better understanding of the value of genetic improvement in beef cattle production and increased accuracy in a readily accessible, customizable genetic selection tool.
Objectives
The main objective of this project was to exhibit the value captured at both the individual operation level and throughout the entire beef industry when cooperatively focusing on increasing genetic understanding and facilitating adoption of customizable genetic selection tools for the benefit of commercial cow/calf producers.
What they DID
They improved an existing online tool (Amplify) to create the CBIN Dashboard to deliver: (1) consolidated educational resources on genetic improvement, (2) a national across-breed (commercial and seedstock) animal selection tool and, (3) genetic trends on traits of relevance to the greater beef industry. The Dashboard was housed on the CBIN website with links on BeefResearch.ca along with the websites of all the collaborative partners.
Each breed association (Canadian Angus Association (CAA), Canadian Charolais Association (CCA), Canadian Hereford Association (CHA) and Canadian Simmental Association (CSA)) recruited two or three registered seedstock members (a minimum of eight seedstock members total) to participate in this pilot project. A relationship with commercial buyers was essential, as two or three commercial buyers of each registered seedstock breeder (a minimum of sixteen commercial buyers total) was selected to become a member of the pilot project.
Producer and animal data and across-breed EPDs were analyzed and presented in the CBIN Dashboard. The addition of intuitive support features such as hover help, pop-up videos and links to relevant pages ensured proper understanding and use of the CBIN Dashboard. A resources and training section was also included, centralizing and consolidating resources that are currently dispersed across the North American beef industry including breed associations, Beef Cattle Research Council, Beef Improvement Federation and others.
Hands-on workshops with participating producers and early-adopters, webinars, and presentations at producer-focused industry events were used to increase awareness, understanding and adoption of the tool for commercial cattle producers.
What they learned
Incorporating commercial cattle data benefits genetic evaluations of purebred cattle by increasing the accuracy and reducing bias of genetic evaluations. This allows producers to have more confidence in selection decisions and the potential to accelerate rates of genetic improvement across the sector.
The lack of data standardization across breeds remains a major obstacle to collaboration for the purpose of genetic improvement. Considerable resources were required to retrieve, clean and standardize data for this pilot project before it was suitable for genetic evaluations. The development of common data standards is necessary to aid in future phases of the Canadian Beef Improvement Network.
What it Means
This project was a first step in developing resources and extension practices that will enable all sectors of the Canadian beef cattle industry to capitalize on significant efficiencies with respect to genetic improvement.
Continued collaboration is key to the promotion of genetic improvements in the Canadian beef sector and to further promote the value of CBIN. This pilot project illustrated that deeper collaboration across the beef sector is to everyone’s benefit. However genetic selection is a long-term solution that requires coordinated effort for incremental but cumulative progress. The value of CBIN will increase as more phenotypic data, herds and breeds are included in future phases.
Future initiatives are required to continue the momentum around beef cattle genetic improvement and those initiatives must be focused on collaborative approaches to delivering unified decision-making tools that are informed by standardized genetic information linked to key production metrics across the entire beef cattle system.