The Agricultural Business Research Institute (ABRI) celebrated 50 years of operation with special events at Beef Australia and Armidale in the last week.
Established at the University of New England (UNE) by Arthur Rickards in 1970, ABRI's livestock performance records is now supporting livestock development in 15 countries.
At the time computing was in its infancy.
The spacecraft that first took men to the moon just a few years before ABRI started digitising livestock records had a computer guidance module about 100,000 times less powerful than today's smartphones.
"No-one else in the world has been doing what ABRI has been doing for 50 years," ABRI managing director Hugh Nivison said.
"ABRI software led the world in 1972, and it still leads now, even though we have much more competition.
"The work that was done for the beef industry 50 years ago built a platform for innovation and value that has revolutionised not just the cattle industry, but livestock industries across the world."
Before Breedplan, the only way to assess the worth of a bull was to look at it and make educated guesses about its traits, or to draw on a breeder's hand-written records.
ABRI built a system that drew on objective measurements of how a bull's offspring performed, then fed those measurements into a computer to build a comparison of how the calves thrown by a bull compared with the calves of all the other bulls in the database.
Producers had been keeping records for centuries, but digitisation meant greater analysis.
Breedplan was launched in 1985 and has lifted the genetic merit of animals substantially since then.
A seedstock animal born in 1985 had an average genetic merit (a cow's value per cow joined) of $18.80, while in 2019 that figure is $88.20 (not adjusted for inflation).
"At first, Breedplan only allowed comparisons within a herd," Mr Nivison said.
"Then it expanded to allow comparisons across all animals within a breed, then across breeds, and now we run performance comparisons internationally."
"We can now be very confident that those using the Breedplan are delivering animals within known performance parameters.
"It's a form of genetic engineering, except that it drives a managed evolution of livestock so that they express their traits in ways that are increasingly useful to humans."
The Animal Genetics Breeding Unit, established at UNE in 1976 to support ABRI, took on development of the Breedplan software.
It is said to have added an estimated $1.18 billion in value to beef and sheep sectors, and other industries.
Lucy Kinbacher
Raised on a cattle property at Biggenden, Lucy Kinbacher has spent 10 years working across metropolitan, regional and rural publications in both Queensland and NSW. Lucy has been the editor of the Queensland Country Life and North Queensland Register since 2021.
Raised on a cattle property at Biggenden, Lucy Kinbacher has spent 10 years working across metropolitan, regional and rural publications in both Queensland and NSW. Lucy has been the editor of the Queensland Country Life and North Queensland Register since 2021.
