Progressive Genetics Dairy Beef Plus Program

Diary Beef Plus

At Progressive Genetics, we are delighted to announce our New Dairy Beef Plus Program where our primary goal is to improve access to the best genetic merit of beef calves coming from the National Dairy Herd. The genetic potential of these beef calves has come under increased scrutiny in recent years as the beef calf bred from the dairy herd has been treated as a by-product in many circumstances with little emphasis on traits such as carcass weight and carcass confirmation when making breeding decisions.  At Progressive genetics, we have an extremely exciting team of dairy beef sires that excel for traits such as carcass weight and carcass confirmation whilst also maintaining the hugely important balance of short gestation and easy calving. Our New Dairy Beef Plus Program is aimed at providing dairy farmers with an outlet for their beef bred, high genetic merit, AI bred calves whilst also providing the beef farmer with the knowledge necessary to make informed decisions when purchasing beef calves. Through our dairy beef plus scheme, it is hoped that Progressive Genetics beef bred AI calves will command a premium at sale for the dairy farmer due to these particular calves possessing an exceptionally high genetic merit. It is also hoped that beef farmers will also benefit hugely from such a scheme as a higher genetic merit beef bred calf will contribute to a more sustainable, profitable dairy calf to beef system time of exceptionally tight margins for many beef farms.

At Progressive Genetics, we are committed to constantly improving the genetic merit of the sires within our beef stud in order to help address some of the major challenges currently facing Irish Agriculture. Throughout the last number of years, we have dramatically improved traits such as the carcass weight and conformation of our Beef sires available for use within the dairy herd. This has been achieved whilst also placing a huge emphasis on the importance of short gestation and easy calving with a huge percentage of our sires now combing all these traits outstandingly well. Some of our established sires are displaying excellently for these traits whilst some of our test sires have been chosen for their outstanding indexes and also through our careful attention to detail. When completing an analysis of our Beef on dairy Angus and Hereford AI sires, we found that Progressive Genetics sires bred progeny with similar carcass weights than progeny bred from other sires. However, the real difference was seen when we looked at the days to slaughter where we found that progeny bred by Progressive Genetics sires finished almost two months earlier than progeny bred by other sires!

• Top six Hereford sires available on Dairy Beef Index (DBI)
• Top three Hereford sires available on gestation length

Progressive Genetics/ NCBC superiority over Competitors

• Our very own planned mating program provides us with the ability to selectively choose sires for particular dams when selecting for various different highly desirable traits.
• We source British Blue sires from our partner genus ABS who have put years of work and dedication into developing the NewEra profit index. The Nuera Profit index aims to increase the value of the beef x dairy calf  through improved genetic merit whilst also maintaining calving ease and gestation. ABS have worked tirelessly to deliver Irish farmers the best genetics with British Blue sires all showing improved Carcass Weights, Food Conversion Efficiency and Shorter Days to Slaughter.
• Within the National Cattle Breeding Tully performance centre, a huge amount of data is collected on our beef sires from progeny test results. Many progeny from our sires are tested for traits such as Live weight gain, days to slaughter, carcass weight, food conversion efficiency and carcass confirmation among others. We are one of the only AI stations that elect to get a large amount of sires tested through the National Tully Performance Centre which helps to ensure that we keep on achieving a strong rate of genetic gain.
• We analyse and keep track of the performance of various progeny from our sires within Research projects conducted in Teagasc as well as the Irish Farmers Journal THRIVE programme.
• All these projects and programmes help to ensure that Progressive Genetics sires achieve the most accurate Euro star/ DBI ratings in order to deliver the best possible service to our customers whilst also being able to contribute positively towards Irish Agriculture.