The free online site was revealed for the first time to farmers at the B+LNZ Genetics Beef Breeder Forum in Christchurch last week.
Developers walked farmers through the sliders, buttons and filters so they could match the genetics they needed from a list of stud breeders.
New beef breeding indexes were designed for the genetics tool with the guidance of farmers and breed societies.
So far bull data is available from Angus NZ, NZ Herefords, Simmental NZ and the NZ Beef Shorthorn Association.
AngusPro, a group of studs with more than 40% of registered Angus cattle, is in talks with the B+LNZ Genetics team, while Charolais, Murray Grey and other beef breeds are yet to be part of nProve.
Farming excellence manager Dan Brier said the tool was a "labour of love" built mainly for commercial farmers.
The design made it easy for them to quickly refine their bull selection based on their needs so they could find a beef breeder who had the same breeding objectives as them, he said.
He said the launch was timed for the coming bull buying season so farmers could make better decisions to deliver better productivity, efficiency and profitability for their businesses.
B+LNZ Genetics IT programme manager David Campbell said farmers had provided their views on previous tools.
"There was some really strong feedback. We kept on getting beaten on the head to be blunt ... that this was not designed for us as commercial farmers and which EBVs are which and what’s good value and how am I supposed to compare options? In terms of being user-friendly the feedback was it was pretty overwhelming."
He said a series of workshops with small groups of commercial farmers had provided insights for developing initial mock-ups tested on them and then an easy-to-use, visual genetic tool free of jargon.
Later, it was hoped to add sire feedback for a gene flow model to see the potential impact for farmers before mating decisions were made and possibly score cards for sire teams to lift traits, he said.
Advisory group member Dave Warburton said the collaboration of the breed societies had been a breakthrough after initial blunt and honest conversations and "strong meetings".
"We channelled the strong alignment around the ultimate customer which is the commercial farmer and the need to increase the emphasis to use EBVs in the bull-buying decisions to make progress was the common goal for the betterment of the whole industry."
Beef breeding indexes based around core breeding values are in maternal, terminal and beef-on-dairy categories.
The indexes help farmers select sires for their own breeding objectives, whether they are breeding replacements, finishing cattle, or supplying beef genetics to the dairy industry.
Performance Beef Breeders, AbacusBio and other database providers were also in the development team.
As part of the rollout, B+LNZ will run 17 workshops around the country with sessions to help farmers use the tool and new indexes when selecting bulls for their herds.
NProve is part of a B+LNZ’s Informing New Zealand Beef (INZB) programme in partnership with the Ministry for Primary Industries and supported by the New Zealand Meat Board to increase the uptake of quality genetics in the beef industry and deliver extra profit of an estimated $460 million.
The tool has a sheep model with 3800 users logging into it over the past year during 17,000 sessions of at least seven minutes.
The yearly benefit of genetic gains in the $1.3 billion beef industry is only 0.5% at $7m — and less for dairy beef — compared with 2.8% at $125m for the $4.4b sheep industry.
Mr Brier said the beef industry’s genetic gain was lagging compared with sheep and the target was to increase its rate through promoting tools such as estimated breeding values with nProve helping to improve the access of genetics and their potential for farmers.
"Finally, that will lead to increased demand for genetically superior animals."
The INZB programme was working on a fair and cost-effective way to develop multi-breed evaluations and compare animals across breeds as this was sought after by commercial farmers, he said.
New Zealand has a much higher percentage of dairy cows to beef cows at 83% compared with Australia, Ireland and the United States which carry much larger beef herds.
Mr Brier said 1.8m bobby calves needed to find a home last year and a project with dairy companies was aiming to improve their genetic quality.
Other projects included looking at less calves by extending milking for longer than a year and finding new products for younger dairy beef animals.
In a question and answer session Mr Brier was asked if AngusPro would join.
"Up until now in the project we have worked very closely with those four breed societies so we have got their data coming into it. We do plan to bring other data streams into it over the next many, many years, but at the moment AngusPro is not one of them."
Later in the forum Mr Campbell confirmed staff were in talks with AngusPro.
"[We are] working through the details with them and we are expecting them to be the next breed society that will be on the platform."
B+LNZ genetics head Dr Jason Archer said breeding groups had to put their hands up and when that happened they would be put on as IT resources were able to process their data.
"We would like to have every bull with accurate performance data in New Zealand available on that tool."
