Irish Simmental Yearbook 2022-D 2 - Flipbook - Page 15
INDEX PROGRESS
E
arlier this year ICBF published the Replacement and Terminal Index 20-year trends, which
gives us a good opportunity to identify what progress the breed has made in the evaluations
over that time.
As expected, we fare well in the Replacement Index. Our ranking hasn’t changed over the past 20 years,
but we are now much closer to the top 2 and the gap to 4th has increased signi昀椀cantly. At just under €62
we had the largest value increase of all the breeds, which equated to an 85% increase in value. We have
cut the gap between ourselves and the top breed by more than 50% and we are now within €29 of them.
The upshot of this is that 90% of all Simmentals are BDGP eligible (=> 4* across breeds)
Looking at the terminal index we made the largest relative increase of all the breeds going from €38.4 to
€78.3 (104% increase). Although we have narrowed the gap with most of the breeds that are ahead of
us, we still have a lot of ground to catch up and currently only 5% of Simmentals are => 4* across breed.
In the mid noughties we as a breed focused on improving our terminal qualities which is re昀氀ected in the
steep increase from that time, with just a minor tail off in recent years.
In summary our genetic merit has improved signi昀椀cantly over the past 2 decades and the efforts in breed
improvement have paid dividends, but we should re double our efforts to further improve our terminal
performance while maintaining our maternal strengths. (graphs courtesy of ICBF)
Irish Simmental Yearbook 2022
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