Peer review

The discounted cash flow procedure of management accounting is used to evaluate national breeding programmes. Alternative methods of improvement of meat production from cattle born in the dairy herd are taken as examples. These schemes utilize selection for beef characters either in the dairy breed itself or within a beef breed, maintained in a small herd and used as a source of bulls for crossing by AI. In each case young bulls are selected for growth rate in a performance test, which precedes the progeny test for milk production in the dairy breed. Greater rates of genetic progress and monetary returns are predicted from improvement of the beef breed, but both schemes are expected to yield a return on investment of over 15%. The net returns from the programme in the beef breed are influenced less by changes in assumptions. Approximate, but simple, methods of computing the discounted returns are described.

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