Debate continues on whether the new plate-to-pasture red meat programme is reinventing the wheel or an extension of Beef and Lamb New Zealand's central progeny test.
Comparisons have been drawn between the primary growth partnership-funded project between Silver Fern Farms, Landcorp and PGG Wrightson, and the central progeny test work which was started by Alliance Group in 2002 but now run by Beef and Lamb.
There are similarities. Both involve identifying high-performing animals based on traits and using that information to improve the meat productivity of commercial flocks.
They will both look at taste and tenderness testing, but Silver Fern farms chief executive Keith Cooper says that is where the similarities end.
"I'm not bagging the central progeny test, but it is one-eighteenth of our model," he said.
That integrated value chain model consists of seven main projects: the market, a database, genetics, processing phenotype, processing improvement, technology transfer and farm productive capacity, with 18 sub-projects underneath those.
Further differences, he said, were the focus on determining what consumers want and improving productivity inside the farm gate through use of genetics, new forage and management, to supply what those consumers want.
Research into genetics, forage and management, will be packaged through an integrated value chain to supply consumers with those red meat products.
Mr Cooper said the project was based on the dairy model, where farmers are shown how to grow more grass to produce quality milk.
Another obvious difference was that this model involved sheep, cattle and deer, whereas the central progeny test (CPT) involved only sheep.
CPT project manager Neville Jopson said the CPT compared the performance of rams across breeds and across genetic sub groups to identify those that were superior for traits such as growth, meat value, weaning weight, resistance to parasites, eye muscle area, number of lambs born, fleece weight and resistance to facial eczema. This information is expressed as an estimated breeding value, and is freely available to all farmers.
In 2004, it was expanded to look at maternal traits for dual-purpose rams and recently Alliance has added meat taste and tenderness to compare the eating quality of stock fed different diets, the impact of growth rate and yield, and whether a male lamb was castrated, crypt or left entire.
"We have created a structure that otherwise would not be there," he said.
The project was started by Alliance in 2002 at Woodlands, near Invercargill, in collaboration with AgResearch, Sheep Improvement Ltd and AbacusBio.