Breedplan & GeneSTAR
Murray Grey cattle in the United Kingdom are now being recorded on Breedplan. At present only the Murray Grey breed of beef cattle are all recorded on the same data base. This allows us to compare the genetic merit of our cattle with all the other Murray Greys in the world, it will enable us to improve our stock much more easily. The Breed has also started to test stock for Marbling and Tenderness, using GeneSTAR genetic testing, this has thrown up some very useful results. We are finding that a higher percentage of our cattle than all other breeds are exhibiting good results for Marbling and Tenderness. With the new testing standard which checks for four Tenderness markers instead of two, we are getting bulls that are 8 Stars out of 8. This will help in improving the quality of our own cattle and when used on other breeds and X breeds.
If you use this link Breedplan you will be able to get directly on to the Breedplan results pages. The Breedplan page will come up with a form; fill in the herd name in the top box for all the cattle recorded by the herd or put in the year lower down and just that years cattle will come up. The following herds have details recorded : Ashrose, Darose, Earnshaw, Leighon, Romany, Sence Valley and Wilby.
The GeneSTAR
results can be downloaded as Acrobat pdf files :
The breed has started to get back expanded test results for Tenderness and Marbling. The Tenderness marker genes have been expanded to 4 and Marbling to 3. The results are then scored 0,1or 2.
The Sence Valley Herd have had results back for 3 bulls all related which are showing 8 stars for tenderness and 1 or 2 stars for Marbling. These results put the bulls at the very top of the list world wide for GeneSTAR results. The bulls are Sence Valley Chieftain, Fred and Ivan - father, son and grandson.
These results are pointing to the fact that Murray Greys are the supreme beef animal in the British Beef Market. The use of Murray Grey Bulls on commercial cattle will help to improve beef eating quality, and produce first class suckler cow replacements.