DNA tests to identify, accelerate and increase productivity in dairy and beef cattle could only be a few years away for farmers.
Dr Ben Hayes is Associate Professor at La Trobe University and research leader at the Department of Environment and Primary Industries.
He says that having the opportunity to predict the breeding merit of calves will not only improve farm profitability, but also aid the health and welfare of future herds.
"If we can find the genes affecting traits that are important to dairy farmers and beef farmers like fertility, milk production, meat production and disease resistance, then we can come up with DNA tests for those traits and screen animals when they are really young for breeding and accelerate the genetic gain process," he said.
"What we're finding is really interesting. Even bulls that were real legends for traits like fertility, they have a lot of good genes for fertility, but also a couple of bad genes.
"Farmers will be able to take a tail hair or an ear punch from a calf that they are interested in knowing the genetic merit of, send it into the lab, it will be profiled for those DNA mutations and then the farmer will get back estimates of how good the genes of that calf are.
"The tests out there to do the DNA profiling is only $60."