A FARMERS’ group which is headed up by a Whitchurch vet has thrown its weight behind new genetic indexes for the dairy industry.

The Driving Dairy Group was launched by LLM Farm Vets to help support its clients tackle some of the industry’s major challenges, putting two new genetic indexes – EnviroCow and Feed Advantage – under the spotlight.

The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) has just launched these methods of sorting genetic data with the goal of helping dairy farmers breed more environmentally friendly cows.

And this was welcomed by LLM farm vet Jenny Bellini, who headed up the latest Driving Dairy Group event.

She said: “These new indexes are a great tool and will make a real and calculable difference to the environmental efficiency of milk production, as well as the economic efficiency of farmers’ herds.

“As an industry we don’t spend enough time talking about the genetics of our herds in relation to the environment.

"I urge dairy farmers to embrace these new indexes – when used alongside existing herd genetic data and the Profitable Lifetime Index (PLI), they will make a very real difference to both the environment and herd profitability.”

The EnviroCow index focuses on CO2 equivalents incorporating cow lifespan, milk production and fertility. It is one of the first indexes in the world to focus solely on breeding cows for their environmental credentials.

“Put simply, you can see that this bull or that cow is going to breed the best animals for your future emissions,” said Miss Bellini.

“The Feed Advantage index allows you to look at feed efficiency.

“Basically, it’s using less food to produce the same amount of milk. Genetics can play a massive part in this.”

Members of the Driving Dairy Group are drawn from LLM’s client base throughout the Midlands, North West and North Wales.

These two new AHDB indexes represent the culmination of more than 30 years’ research and data collection carried out by Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) at the award-winning Langhill dairy herd in Dumfries.