A number of significant BREEDPLAN software enhancements and the addition of a large amount of research data will occur for the August 2018 Brahman GROUP BREEDPLAN evaluation, and then in all subsequent analyses. This included data from Northern Multibreed Research Database as well as the transition to a full crossbred analysis model. With the inclusion of a large numbers of animals with intensive recording from northern research projects including the Repronomics project and Northern steer BIN project has allowed the Brahman analysis to move to a full crossbred configuration.  This allows animals of different breed compositions, if recorded together, to remain in the same contemporary group, and for their performance to be adjusted for heterosis.

The females have days to calving records along with the new measures of heifer age at puberty and lactation anoestrous interval of first-calf cows.  Most of these animals also have SNP genotypes and the inclusion of this data will add significantly to the size of the genomics reference population of the Brahman breed and will help drive increased EBV accuracies through the Single-Step BREEDPLAN evaluation.