Irish Dairy Breeding with the ICBF’s Sean Coughlan

Sean Coughlan, CEO of the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation (ICBF), joins Stuart Childs on this week’s Dairy Edge to discuss Irish dairy, dairy beef breeding and everything in between.

Sean discusses the National Genotyping Programme, the changes that they have made to improve for 2025 and how they have even more herds taken into the programme and will be looking to recruit more later on this year with the long term view to have a fully genotyped national herd in the future.

Sean highlights what he feels might be a lost opportunity in that we're not able to filter some of the surplus replacements from the top EBI herds to the lower genetic merit herds. He would love to see the top herds breed the replacements for the bottom herds as it is just too much of a mountain to climb for those lower genetic merit herds and the performance levels that those top herds are actually achieving is so good: 500 litres more milk; producing 53 kilos more milk solids per cow; 16 days better calving interval which is translating into a 12% better 6 week calving rate, and low CO2 emissions.

Sean also spoke about the potential of dairy beef by choosing easy calving sires that have more carcass weight than the easy calving bull as was often the choice in the past – no extra calving difficulty but significantly better beef merit calves.

Sean then outlines some changes that are on the cards for the EBI this year such as a review of the economic values used in the index and a base change to reflect better the cows that are now in the country.

Sean finishes by outlining how the benefits of genomics in terms of its ability to identify lethal genes such as HH3 which results in embryonic death. Identifying the carriers and using sire advice to avoid the breeding of positive cows and bulls can eliminate this negative embryonic death which is a major issue for seasonal calving systems. 

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