That 100 bulls sampled is not a scientifically supported number, it’s just that any breed with less than 100 sampled has struggled to make enough gains over recent decades to survive on their own. So given the Illawarra breed size, you will always need to draw from other red breed programs. That’s why I see no value in continuing with the x, y and z limitations to the other red dairy breeds. To me in-breeding has got a bad name, and has become a convenient scapegoat for breed weaknesses such as the poor fertility of Holsteins. Personally I see the fact that we have been intensely selecting over an extended period of time for high production, which is inversely correlated to fertility, as being the major cause of the problem.

Nowadays we have a proof for daughter fertility and can select for it, though correcting the problem will take time. If you look at the pedigrees of most of the great animals in any of the breeds you will find a very high percentage were quite line-bred. In an Illawarra breed with an open herd-book policy I don’t think you need get too worried about in-breeding. If one cow family produces a few top bulls then go back and get some more. Differences in genetics coming in from the sire’s side will take care of that issue. Back in the 70s many people thought that the Illawarra breed suffered from becoming too in-bred on Sunny-View bloodlines. But I wonder if it wasn’t a case that those bloodlines simply didn’t perform quite as well as we expected once they were out and used under other herd management conditions across the country.

Perhaps they were not quite as superior as they appeared to be when they were still at Sunny-View. Given your open herd-book status I don’t think in-breeding requires much thought; producing superior genetics needs to be the focus How do you go about setting breeding goals? In the modern breeding industry that is done via the total performance index. Never underestimate how powerful a tool these composite indexes are.

The ranking of the proven bulls directly dictates which bulls will get the most use in the breed. Some national indexes are more effective than others, judging from semen usage patterns, with virtually all the bulls getting significant use being in the top-10 or top-20. Your APR doesn’t appear quite as successful, as there are quite a few bulls in the top-10 that don’t get much use, at least in your Holstein breed, mostly because of negative udder scores. Most countries now realize that while these indexes need to be scientifically based, those who milk the cows need to have some input, and such traits as udders need a little more emphasis than the science may support. It stands to reason that if we want the breeds within a country to excel for different traits, then we need to have different total indexes for each breed. Canada has just implemented that approach this year, and the US already has separate total indexes for the breeds. Within the next 5 years I would expect all countries will move in that direction.

So I would urge you to push for, or even develop your own, Illawarra Profit Index, putting extra weight on such traits as fertility, calving ease and whatever other traits you feel are necessary to differentiate your breed and make it more appropriate for a sub-tropical climate. One of the weaknesses in virtually all breeds other than the Holsteins is that while extensive use is made of top bulls, not enough use is made of the top cows for breeding purposes. If I want to buy into the top 10 Holstein cow families in North America I can go to sales almost every month of the year and buy embryos, picks of flushes, or heifers from all the top families. In the Illawarras you have traditionally had to wait for a dispersal sale to access top families from other herds. As in most red breeds very few top Illawarra cows ever get flushed. There is not the market for young bulls to pay for the flushing.