The Irish Cattle Breeding Federation is reminding Beef farmers participating in the beef data programme to record any outstanding data on 2013 born calves before June 30.

It says this data can be recorded on postal forms, on the ICBF website or through your farm software package.

The ICBF also notes that, to date, over 113,000 ear tags have now been sent to farms in the Beef Genomics Scheme.

It says over 85,000 samples have been returned to Weatherbys to date and genotyping of the returned samples has commenced.

Over 7,000 samples have been genotyped to date and the ICBF says the quality of the DNA and genotyping is excellent. Research on including the additional information from the genotypes into the genetic evaluation process will commence in the next couple of weeks.