• A score of 2 or 8 are low scoring animals and should be carefully evaluating before using in a breeding program
• A score of 1 or 9 are considered culls
While this does provide good objective assessments, there is often a request from producers for more information regarding the whole animals, including front end, head and eyes, testicles and muscling. And with that amount of information, it’s often been asked if it was possible just to get a single score for each animal.
Over the past 7 years I’ve been working with a man who has been grappling with these questions, particularly in assessing sheep and goats. Angus Burnett Smith has been working on ClassiMate for around 10 years and has taken it to a point where it is now offering some great opportunities for producers to objectively assess their livestock.
In the case of Beef cattle, Angus approach me to form a small team to suggest how cattle could be assessed on their physical traits in a way that offered producers a simple summary of the traits and an overall rating on each animal. Working with well-known industry leaders, Jeff House, Brian Cumming and Alison Hamilton, we initially suggested BCAS as a starting point, with the inclusion of the standard BREEDPLAN assessments for docility and incorporating muscle scores into the observation.
It certainly hasn’t been a small undertaking. However, in recent weeks I’ve been able to take this pilot concept into commercial reality to assess a group of sale bulls for a breeder in the NSW New England.
Angus has developed a simple app that can be used in the yards on a mobile phone to assess the physical traits of each animal. This not only scores the animal on a scale of 1 – 100 so that there is a quick visual reference for a producer. It also evaluates the data collected to provide a score out of 10.
