'Beef Cattle Production and Trade' covers all aspects of the beef industry from paddock to plate. It is an international text with an emphasis on Australian beef production, written by experts in the field. The book begins with an overview of the historical evolution of world beef consumption and introductory chapters on carcass and meat quality, market preparation and world beef production. North America, Brazil, China, South-East Asia and Japan are discussed in separate chapters, followed by Australian beef production, including feedlots and live export. The remaining chapters summarise R&D, emphasising the Australian experience, and look at different production systems and aspects of animal husbandry such as health, reproduction, grazing, feeding and finishing, genetics and breeding, production efficiency, environmental management and business management. The final chapter examines various case studies in northern and southern Australia l covering feed demand and supply, supplements, pasture management, heifer and weaner management, and management of internal and external parasites.

Single step genomic BLUP (SS-GBLUP) for BREEDPLAN beef cattle evaluations is currently being tested for implementation across a number of breeds. A genomic data pipeline has been developed to enable efficient analysis of the industry-recorded SNP genotypes for incorporation in SS-GBLUP analyses. Complex data collection, along with format and/or naming convention inconsistencies challenges efficient data processing. This pipeline includes quality control of variable formatted data, and imputation of genotypes, for building the genomic relationship matrix required for implementation into single step evaluation.

Improved methodology to update the inverse of the coefficient matrix(C)for new individuals without phenotype is described here. Computational performance is significantly improved by re-using parts of the coefficient matrix inverse calculations that do not change from one animal to another, in combination with updated calculations for those that do change. This efficient method delivers more than 500-fold improvement in performance.