What is the Dairy Beef Index?
The dairy beef index (DBI) is a tool for dairy farmers to select beef bulls. It is designed to generate high-quality beef cattle from the dairy herd by combining desirable calving traits, such as ease of calving, with valuable beef carcass characteristics for finishing. It achieves this by ranking beef sires for use in dairy herds based on their genetic performance across key dairy beef traits.
The DBI will select for:
- Easy calving, short gestation and less calf mortality
- Faster growing animals of greater conformation and in-spec fat score
- Cattle that are polled, carbon efficient and have lower feed intake and rewarded within the index
Why we need a Dairy Beef Index?
The Dairy Beef Index is needed because traditionally dairy farmers selected beef bulls that were easy calving and had short gestation lengths, without thinking about the beef carcass characteristics of the calf. Therefore by using the Dairy Beef Index farmers can select bulls that produce good quality beef calves without having an impact on calving difficulty or calving interval.