$ INDICES

$ Indices have been developed to allow quick, summarized ranking of animals. Unfortunately their user friendliness is drawing too much focus to the B3 index which seems to be heavily weighted to sectors of the industry further down stream than the cow/calf producer.

We would recommend breeders wanting to make serious use of Breedplan, pay little heed to the $ indices at this stage. As new information comes to hand, the contributing factors for formulating the indices constantly change. Hence their dependability is fairly low and certainly should not be the basis for breeding decisions in typical extensive Australian grazing systems.

It will be interesting to see the outcome of the introduction of Net Feed Intake EBV’s to a multi trait analysis, expected at the end of 2006. It is likely there will be a significant $ index re-ranking of animals once this information is included in their calculations.