In 2013, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal Genomics & Improvement Laboratory (AGIL) signed a non-funded cooperative agreement with the Council on Dairy Cattle Breeding (CDCB) to transition U.S. dairy cattle genetic evaluations from AGIL to CDCB.

The effective date of the agreement was Dec. 17, 2013, and in the two years since, CDCB worked on becoming self-sufficient in computer resources and staffing with the capacity to run the genetic evaluations, provide the dairy management benchmarks and maintain the industry cooperative database.

According to CDCB, the transition was completed Dec. 11, and all data processing for genetic evaluations is now being conducted by six permanent staff and two contractors at the CDCB headquarters in Bowie, Md., on servers and a database owned and maintained by CDCB.

In order to ensure continuity, the system was designed to allow service users to continue to interact with the CDCB system exactly as they did before the transition.

Building the CDCB system and transferring the legacy files was only possible due to the support provided by the AGIL staff, showing once again their commitment to the dairy industry. AGIL will continue performing research and development of methods, procedures and algorithms used by CDCB to compute estimates of genetic merit of dairy animals.

Along with the technical implementations, all material license agreements proposed by CDCB to data suppliers have been signed and filed, completing a very important step for the industry collaboration effort that represents the core value of CDCB.

Successfully completing this landmark goal means CDCB is ready to face different challenges ahead on its commitment to constantly improve services that empower dairy farmers in their quest for efficiency, profitability and sustainability.