More farmers join beef programme

Eleven more commercial beef farmers have been selected to take part in the ground-breaking Informing New Zealand Beef (INZB) programme.

The seven-year INZB partnership, supported by Beef + Lamb New Zealand, the New Zealand Meat Board and the Ministry for Primary Industries’ Sustainable Food and Fibre Futures fund, aims to boost the sector’s profits by $460m over the next 25 years.

INZB programme manager Gemma Jenkins said the four main components of the programme were developing New Zealand-specific breeding indexes, building an across breed genetic evaluation and data infrastructure, running a beef progeny test and linking in data from commercial herds.

‘‘These 11 farmers from across the country will join last year’s intake and support our mission to give breeders and farmers genetic tools to help produce great tasting beef and drive production efficiency,’’ Jenkins said.

The programme, now in its third year, was helping commercial farmers understand the value of better genetics and offer them the opportunity to easily select the right genetics for their system to drive greater profitability on their farms.

‘‘Commercial farms are playing a key role in the programme because they contribute to the accuracy of breeding values of stud bulls available to commercial farmers.

The 11 new commercial farmers from Waikato, King Country, Gisborne, Wellington, Canterbury, Otago and Southland and bring the total number of farmers involved in the programme to 22.