May 17, 2013.

Executive Summary from the Interbull Steering Committee

An Interbull Steering Committee (SC) web and conference call occurred on April 22, 2013. Main discussion points and decisions are summarized below.

GMACE Implementation

As previously advertised, GMACE regular services will start being offered in conjunction with the August 2013 routine run and more details about this important implementation are given here:

• Service calendar: a detailed proposal will be presented by the SC at the 2013 Interbull business meeting in Nantes, France (August 23-25, 2013), in order to consider the feedback from the Interbull community.
• The August 2013 run will be considered as a routine run. In Nantes there will be a review of this first routine run. Since it is a completely new service the Interbull SC will decide on the feedback, from when on national genetic evaluation centers will be obliged to make all the results from MACE and GMACE routinely available. The current plan is to require this for the December 2013 routine run.
• Distribution files in GMACE runs will include all bulls that have an official/publishable genomic evaluation in at least one country and be known to have semen available for A.I.
• Interbull will start offering Truncated MACE services in 2014 to support national genomic programs.
  • Truncated MACE will use as input national EBVs obtained from the current national model but removing the 4 most recent years of phenotypic data, and its main purpose is to supply data for national genomic validations.
  • This is particularly important for groups of countries sharing the same reference population for genomic predictions.

Publication Policy Proposal

The “Guidelines for minimum requirements for advertising genetic merit of dairy animals” was reviewed to include publication of GMACE results and it is available at https://wiki.interbull.org/public/CoPAppendixV?action=print&rev=7.

Budget for GMACE

Adding GMACE to the service portfolio significantly increases the workload at the Interbull Centre. Therefore, the Steering Committee approved a modification to the service fees in order to cover the associated costs. The adopted fees are expressed in Table 1.

Table 1. Fee per service category expressed as a proportion of the fee for MACE - production traits.

Additional information:

• As for the other service categories, only organizations submitting data (national GEBVs) to the GMACE evaluations will be required to pay the associated fees.
• The GEBV validation test fee will decrease from 20 to 15% of the MACE - production traits fee and, effective 2014, will also cover the costs of an annual Truncated MACE run.
• A new fee, equivalent to 35% of the MACE - production traits fee, will be added to cover costs of GMACE runs for all traits.
• For 2013, fees related to GMACE services will be equivalent to 2/3 of the total fee (~23% of the MACE - production traits fee), since there will be only 2 out of 3 routine runs (i.e.: August and December 2013).
• For 2014, fees for GMACE will be charged for a complete year.
• The fees for GMACE and GEBV-test should be re-evaluated during the Interbull business meeting in 2014.

New Service Contract

As new items are added to the Interbull service portfolio, a new service contract template was approved by the SC to replace the current contracts and agreements between the service users and the Interbull Centre. The proposed text aims to:

• clearly define all actors involved in Interbull services and their respective roles;
• having a single legal instrument to regulate the commercial relationship between the above mentioned actors, instead of service category-specific agreements as it is currently;
• include the new services to be offered by Interbull in the near and more distant future (GMACE, for instance); and
• refer to the Interbull Code of Practice (CoP) for any detailed description of the services and the collective agreement underlying Interbull cooperation.

The new service contract is meant to replace all the current contracts and agreements which will be considered no longer valid after November 30, 2013. The template for the new contract can be found at https://wiki.interbull.org/public/New%20Service%20Contract%202013?action=print.