Recently, we have been contacted by a number of producers who have queried if they need to identify whether a live weight is a 200, 400 or 600 day weight when submitting it to BREEDPLAN for analysis. In addition, we have heard from several producers who are concerned because they believed they had entered a certain weight type, only for it to be subsequently analysed in a different weight category.

For example, a producer may have entered what they believed to be a 200 day weight, only for it to be shown as a 400 day weight in the ‘Traits Analysed’ for the animal. There is no requirement to identify whether a live weight is a 200, 400 or 600 day weight. Instead, producers should be aware that the BREEDPLAN evaluation will identify whether to analyse live weights as 200, 400 or 600 day weights dependent on the average age of the animals in the contemporary group, as shown in Table 1. Generally, the average age of many contemporary groups falls inside these age definitions. However, if calves are weighed when they are around 300 and/or 500 days of age, then producers are more likely to observe that the trait is not analysed in the way they were expecting