Interbull Business Meeting Minutes

La Cité Nantes Events Center (Nantes, France) August 23, 16:00-18:00 and August 25, 14:00-15:30

First Business Meeting (August 23, 2013)

1. Opening

Reinhard Reents, Interbull chairman, opened the meeting welcoming everybody to the first Interbull business meeting and thanking the organizers for their great work. This year is a special year for the Interbull community as it turns 30 years of activity. The chairman briefly presented the program of the following days: two business meetings, one and a half day for the open meeting with very interesting presentations and a Steering Committee meeting which will then conclude the Interbull meeting.

2. Adoption of agenda

The agenda was adopted in its entirety, no other matters were raised.

3. Interbull Center Annual Report

• 3a. Activities

Joao Durr, Interbull Centre director, presented all the activities done at the Interbull Centre from June2012 until now. He also took the opportunity to congratulates all the participants for the important milestone reached by the Interbull community: its 30 years of activity. To celebrate it Interbull Centre had prepared a blog with information about the community, the Pioneers who had let this possible and pictures of past events.

• 3b. Work plans
• 3c. Financial Accounts

Erling Strandberg, Interbull Centre Secretary, presented the budget: the final budget for the year 2012 was positive even if less than what was estimated to be in Cork. The main difference between estimated and real costs for year 2012 was due to overheads costs, last year's projection considered less overheads costs than what have actually been.

For the year 2013 the projected income is higher than what was estimated last year due to an increase in the service fee and an increase in participation to the Intergenomic service. It is expected that the income due to the service fee will continue to increase in the 2014 due to the possibility of some new countries joining the service.

The budget/projected costs for the year 2013 are very similar. In 2014 there will be the termination of two contracts: the contract with Gerald Jansen as consultant and the Noth America Consortium. The overall balance for 2013 still remains negative although less than what was budgeted last year. Erling pointed out that the income from GMACE has not been included in the overall budget for 2013 as the decison to proceed or not with it was not clear at the time when the budgets were prepared.

Brian Van Doormal, delegate from Canada, expressed a concern about the high overheads costs: although Interbull Centre benefits from being located within SLU through the grants that it receives, the high office rent and overhead that it is required to pay back due to its connection with SLU takes away the benefit of receiving the SLU grants. Maybe it is time that Interbull Centre finds its own facility outside SLU or find a way to compensate the high overhead costs due to its affiliation with SLU.

Erling explained that a discussion is currently going on with the SLU central administration trying to make them understand that Interbull Center cannot be considered as a faculty body but a service provider and underlying all the benefits that SLU itself gets from hosting the Centre. Although they have not reached a decision they are anyhow willing to consider exceptions for the overheads that will led to a decrease in their costs and to provide more grants to Interbull Centre for its role as EU reference labotory.

Reinhard Reents also commented that the Steering Committee will provide an official letter to Erling and Joao to be presented at the Central administration. He also reminded the audience that interbull centre's employees are also SLU employees which is important as a layability within SLU's insurance.

Daniel Gianola from USA reminded that although Interbull Center is a service provider it aslo gather strength from an accademic environment.

4. ITC report

Gert Aadamant summarized the discussion during the first technical meeting which was held earlier during the day. Two working groups were formed during the last year: one on GMACE and the other on post-processing of correlations. It is the recommendation of the technical committee that post-process of correlations be applied to all traits evaluated at the Center, including conformation. For conformation traits Holstein priors should be used for non-Holstein breeds, all correlations lower than 0,3 should be set to the minimum allowed value of 0,3. Interbull Center should inform the countries when low correlations are changed into the minimum allowed value. All minimum and maximum values applied to other traits during post-processing of correlations should be reviewed at the Technical meeting which will be held in Berlin next year.

7. Nomination of SC and SAC members

8. GMACE (technical report)

• 8a. Method overview 8b. Results overview