My father and grandfather were excellent cattle men and far better than I could ever hope to be.

My grandfather travelled all over Ireland buying dairy cows. He was renowned for being an excellent judge of dairy stock. I do not remember a lot about him, but I have been told that he could pick out the best dairy stock from any line up.

My father, on the other hand, was an excellent judge of beef stock. He would visit a lot of local marts buying store cattle for finishing. From what I remember he was well respected around the markets. Most of the cattle he bought did really well and, like my grandfather, he bought cattle simply on their looks.

Inherited

I would not classify myself as any kind of a judge of livestock. I have not inherited any of their skills.

I do aim to breed good livestock, so I use artificial insemination (AI) on my cows. However, I don’t make my decision on looks, but on the available data. When choosing what straws to use on my cows, I rely on information held on the internet and not the show rings.

I would reckon I am very much in the minority. Most suckler farmers probably choose the bull they are going to use on their cows, solely on looks. I could not do this with any confidence.

When I look at the really good dairy farmers, they are choosing their bulls on figures alone. They very rarely look at the bull. When combined with sexed straws, they are able to make really rapid genetic progress.

Pigs and poultry have been working on figures for years and the genetic improvement is there for all to see. It is a similar situation in the seed industry (grass or cereal seed), where they have been pushing genetic improvement.

Little change

It is sad to see how little genetic improvement the suckler industry has made in recent years. It is probably due to farmers buying on looks only.

I can understand some farmers are sceptical about the figures, and they prefer to trust their eye.

This has probably been of some benefit to their livestock but to take the really big steps in genetic improvement they will have to embrace the use of figures.

For generations of cattle breeding, I have been using AI on my suckler cows. I have been trying to choose bulls based on their figures. I have tried to disregard looks and breed. To be fair I have seen a steady improvement in my overall breeding herd, but it has been slow, and it has not always worked out as the figures would have suggested. The big problem is that the whole process takes so long. You are talking about four or five years before you know whether a bull you have used, really is any good.

Opportunity

To this end I am looking forward to the long-awaited bovine genetics project being run by Sustainable Ruminant Genetics in NI. I think this offers the opportunity to make a sizeable genetic improvement in a shorter space of time.

It seems like it has been talked about for a very long time, but I think it will be worth the wait. There is still some within our industry who question the scheme, but that always happens when we are faced with change. We are very lucky to have a pot of money available to get it up and running. I think all farmers with breeding cattle need to embrace this project.

We need to be positive and feed information into it – if we do that, it will end up being a world leading programme that delivers real genetic improvement within our cattle industry.