ABP is a leading consumer food business delivering quality beef products to our retail, foodservice and manufacturing customers. At ABP, we are committed to supporting British agriculture and work with over 12,000 farming families across the UK each year. We are passionate about helping farmers meet the demands of consumers to produce high quality British beef by maintaining high animal welfare ...

The Automatic Dipping & Flushing system from ADF Milking was developed by founder and engineer James Duke in 2003 when he had a vision to increase efficiency in post milking hygiene methods. By 2004 the first prototype system was installed on 10 farms in the UK, and in 2005 the Automatic Dipping & Flushing system was officially launched and was awarded the Prince Philip Award at that year’s Royal ...

There are many ways artificial insemination (AI) can benefit beef producers. One of the main advantages is it allows producers with suckler herds to access high genetic merit sires with desired estimated breeding values (EBVs) that suit the herd’s breeding programme. This allows high rates of genetic improvement to be achieved. High genetic merit stock bulls can often be expensive to purchase, so ...

UK Herefords report sustainable growth As more and more people turn to the Hereford for its ease of management and grass converting abilities, we catch up with the society to explore its recent growth and development and future direction. It is no coincidence the Hereford breed has seen a great revival in recent years, says David Deakin, breed secretary of the Hereford Cattle Society. The Heref...

Little did we know that this year would be like no other and that we as a club would have to embrace both change and technology, and as such the BCBC committee made the decision to organise a ‘Virtual’ conference for 2021.  We are excited by the new opportunities that a virtual conference provides by giving us access to speakers and a wider audience from around the world, allowing us to inspire ev...

Members of BCBC may be interested to know that one of our long-standing members, Dr Brian McGuirk, has published a book entitled “A Bovine Thriller”. This 125 page book is an historical account of GB’s dairy cattle breeding industry, from the early 1940s, when the first commercial Artificial Insemination services were established in GB, to “about 1990”, the effective end of the Milk Boards, and th...

BCBC goes virtual in 2021 – Due to the Covid-19 uncertainty BCBC have decided to go Virtual for the 2021 Conference. This one day E-Conference, on Tuesday 26th January, is an exciting change of direction and will open BCBC up to a greater national AND international audience. BCBC is renowned for delivering the leading conference for the beef and dairy industry; which provides a forum for knowledg...

The Shout about the Sire campaign was launched by AHDB at the 2019 British Cattle Breeders Conference, with an aim to increase the number of known sires being recorded on cattle passports. The campaign has mainly been based on social media, with support from a number of industry stakeholders, and has successfully encouraged the conversation on the importance of sire recording in the cattle industr...

Based on feedback from previous conferences, the British Cattle Breeders Club committee decided to try a new format for the Monday afternoon beef workshop. We decided to go back to basics and run a more interactive style of workshop for farmers that wanted help to develop a breeding plan. The workshop was run by staff from AHDB Beef and Lamb, with some assistance from BCBC committee members. The ...

At January's conference dairy delegates attended a condensed version of the AHDB Breeding Blocks workshop which had run during October and November 2019, hosted by Marco Winters and Fern Pearston from AHDB’s Animal Genetics team. The workshop began with a discussion around who is responsible for making the breeding decisions on farms and who makes up the team when these decisions are made.  The h...

Werner Brand, Geneticist/Programmer from SRUC, opened Dairy Day at the BCBC Conference by explaining how deep learning can be used as a way of solving complex genetic problems. He discussed a project that is looking at predicting the pregnancy status of dairy cows using mid-infrared (MIR) spectroscopy data, routinely collected during milk recording. Werner’s colleague Dr Scott Denholm looked at t...

Sustainable succession was a central theme in all the presentations at the 2020 British Cattle Breeders Conference, which took place between January 20-22nd in Telford, Shropshire. The sustainability of the industry, beef and dairy production and the future plans of those working in the industry, were all topics that were discussed. As usual, question and answer sessions were lively, and the indus...

On Tuesday 21st January, BCBC will host the annual club dinner during conference at the Telford Hotel and Golf Resort, Great Hay Drive, Sutton Heights, Telford.  The evening will commence with the Champagne Reception kindly sponsored by Dairymaster UK.  Guests will enjoy a three course meal with the Roast Beef kindly donated by Dovecote Park and Waitrose, and table wine kindly sponsored by VikingG...