Interbeef in prectice: example of a joint genetic evaluation between France, Ireland and United Kingdom for pure bred Limousine weaning weights

The first international joint genetic evaluation between France, Ireland and United Kingdom for pure bred Limousin weaning weights offers the opportunity to review the Interbeef story and detail the different steps to achieve before implementing a common genetic evaluation for beef cattle. This study along with the previous EUBEEVAL works reveals the crucial need of identification of foreign animals in the different national databases, differences between countries with regards to data amount and structure, and also a lack of information to estimate maternal (co)variance components. Nevertheless, this objective approach taking into account country specificities provides a new powerful tool for the breeders to enlarge their breeding animal choice. IInterbeef: the story so far The Interbeef story began in 2001 with the initiative of the Irish Cattle Breeder Federation (ICBF) to develop a European joint genetic evaluation of beef breeds in order to enlarge their choice of breeding animals based on objective method. The EUropean BEef EVALuation (EUBEEVAL) project has then been conducted through a collaboration between ICBF, the French National Institut for Agronomic research (INRA) and the Institut de l'Elevage (IE), the British Meat and Livestock Commission (MLC), the Australian University of New England (AGBU) and ICAR: Quintanilla et al. (2002) and Renand et al. (2003) from INRA showed the feasibility and the potential benefit of a common genetic evaluation between France, Ireland and United Kingdom but also pointed out the need of a better genetic link identification between the participating countries. Phocas et al. (2005) from INRA but on secondment to AGBU determined that the best results in case of beef cattle data are obtained with an animal model with maternal effects applied on rough data and allowing heteroscedasticity for genetic, maternal and residual variances along with associated genetic correlations between countries. On the basis of these results and new datasets provided in 2005 by ICBF to INRA, Venot et al. (2006) estimated new genetic parameters between France and Ireland for Charolais and Limousin breeds: these works have shown different data structure and quality between countries, a lack of information to precisely estimate maternal (co)variance components, but also confirmed the feasibility of common beef cattle genetic evaluation with rather high genetic correlations between countries. Another practical outcome from these first studies is the standardisation of the file exchanges between countries (performances, pedigree and fixed effects files), leading to general guidelines for international exchanges of beef cattle data (Pabiou et al., 2007). In 2005, the International Committee for Animal Recording (ICAR) identified, through a general survey, a need of international beef genetic evaluation: several countries expressed their interest and France, Ireland, United Kingdom, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden even agreed to a financial contribution in the development of this evaluation. ICAR therefore decided in 2006 to establish a new Interbull service dedicated to beef cattle genetic evaluation, called Interbeef (Journaux et al., 2006).