Almost 700,000 calves have been genotyped as part of the National Genotyping Programme in 2025. Taking a look at the 2025 key statistics, the birth to passport printed time was 14 days in January and February.
The lab processing time ranged from an average of 5.3 days in January to 3.3 days in May. On average, samples took 7.6 days to get from the farm to the lab in February and this increased to 15.6 days in May.
Some farmers did experience delays this spring, with problem samples causing issues in the system. These include empty bottles, sample bottles not closed properly, blacked out barcodes and sellotape over the bottle.
Interestingly, there were 15,000 breed errors corrected. Within these errors there were 4,051 calves registered as an Aberdeen Angus (AA), but weren’t AA at all, while there were 4,188 AA calves registered to another breed.
Speaking to the Irish Farmers Journal Seán Coughlan ICBF CEO said: “In general, the system is working really well for the majority of samples. We acknowledge that some samples are causing issues and this leads to frustration when passports are missing in a batch of calves.
“We are looking at the system to see how we can streamline these cases and speed up the turnaround time.”
Almost 700,000 calves have been genotyped as part of the National Genotyping Programme in 2025. Taking a look at the 2025 key statistics, the birth to passport printed time was 14 days in January and February.
The lab processing time ranged from an average of 5.3 days in January to 3.3 days in May. On average, samples took 7.6 days to get from the farm to the lab in February and this increased to 15.6 days in May.
Some farmers did experience delays this spring, with problem samples causing issues in the system. These include empty bottles, sample bottles not closed properly, blacked out barcodes and sellotape over the bottle.
Interestingly, there were 15,000 breed errors corrected. Within these errors there were 4,051 calves registered as an Aberdeen Angus (AA), but weren’t AA at all, while there were 4,188 AA calves registered to another breed.
Speaking to the Irish Farmers Journal Seán Coughlan ICBF CEO said: “In general, the system is working really well for the majority of samples. We acknowledge that some samples are causing issues and this leads to frustration when passports are missing in a batch of calves.
“We are looking at the system to see how we can streamline these cases and speed up the turnaround time.”
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