Initiating the Southern Multi-Breed Resource population

Abstract

This paper describes the first year of a large 5-year breeding project being conducted across New South Wales involving five temperate beef breeds and the Brahman breed. Artificial insemination and back-up matings were designed to produce progeny that are representative of the genetic diversity in the national herd of each breed. Sires and dams were selected with a focus on high accuracies for the 400-day weight estimated breeding value (EBV) and reproduction EBVs. The project progeny will be managed in mixed-breed groups and intensively recorded head-to-head for current BREEDPLAN and new economically important traits such as early-in-life female reproduction and worm egg counts. All animals will have high density SNP genotypes taken to contribute to the breeds’ genomic reference populations and for inclusion in BREEDPLAN genomic evaluations. The project design will facilitate development of genomic EBVs to allow across-breed comparisons, assist in increasing selection accuracy, particularly for young bulls, allow genotype by environment (GxE) investigations, and the potential development of new traits.