NZS 8100 Dairy herd testing

Overview

We are consulting on the draft DZ 8100 Dairy herd testing. 

What is NZS 8100 about? 

NZS 8100:2015 Dairy herd testing applies to herd testing covered by the Dairy Industry (Herd Testing and New Zealand Dairy Core Database) Regulations 2001, or its successor. These Regulations are administered by the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI). The standard provides information on procedures and practices that shall be adopted by certified herd testers, and their farmer customers, as well as guidance on procedures and practices that should be followed to meet industry goals resulting from herd testing.

A note from Wendy Harker, the chair of the P8100 committee

I am pleased to inform you that after 16 months of intense discussions and debates, the draft revised “Dairy herd testing” NZS8100 is now ready for public consultation. The document has been prepared by a committee of 21 industry representatives, who have worked assiduously to ensure the document reflects the interests of the many NZ dairy farmers, their industry and related industry organisations.

The draft document includes important changes for animal recording and dairy production data, which will provide benefits for the industry improving genetic gain and the selection of future sires for the dairy farmers. 

This standard reflects a paradigm shift in data collection to recognise the importance of high-quality production data and meta data that enables more accurate contemporary groups to be formed. Accurate contemporary groups are the cornerstone of animal evaluation enabling animal evaluation models to account for environmental and farm management practices and thereby identify genetic gain.

Hence, this standard’s focus is on enabling farmers to provide the data and meta data that will enable environmental and farm management practices to be identified. To achieve this, farmers will be able to identify herd management groups and variable milking regimes critical to dairy production data being valuable for animal evaluation.

The NZS8100 committee has also introduced:

• The options for including new and emerging automated technologies for collecting production data; and
• Changes to enable the interoperability of databases so that data can be used for research to improve genetic gain thereby enhancing the genetic potential of sires and their progeny.

We have reached an important milestone with the release of the draft for public consultation. We would like to thank all the committee members for their extraordinary efforts, their nominating organisations, and the sponsor for its ongoing support. It is with a sense of accomplishment and relief that all members recently signed off on the release of the draft for public consultation.

We look forward to hearing your feedback. We encourage you to take part the public consultation process and have your say. We understand that there is a lot of information to digest and to consider in the new draft standard, but your view is both encouraged and appreciated.

Consultation draft

Please find below the consultation document (DZ 8100 consultation draft) for you to view or download. 

Important to note

All submissions need to go through this portal. There is no option to upload separate files during the submission process. Documents with submissions sent to Standards New Zealand separately will not be considered by the committee.  

DZ 8100 (DZ 8100 consultation draft)