Speaking at an interactive workshop at the British Cattle Conference, DairyCo geneticist, Marco Winters, warned about the reliance on guesswork, the selection of bulls that would be better suited to different farming systems, or a tendency to use indexes (such as the USA's TPI or Ireland's EBI) which are designed for use in other countries.
However, he said there was plenty of scope to choose different types of bull for different farming systems within the extensive list of high PLI bulls and there was a greater selection of bulls available to UK producers today than ever before.
See this week's The Scottish Farmer for the full trend, out February 2.
