Composition
| Tone Roalkvam (Chair) – Specialist Advisor Sustainability at Tine S, ICAR Board Member | Norway |
| Beat Bapst -Geneticist Qualitas AG also CEO Swiss Association for Animal Sciences, SAAS/SVT (part time position) | Switzerland |
| Martin Burke (Secretary) | CE ICAR (Secretary) |
| Ben Bartlett – NMR Group Business Development Manager and Director | UK |
| Fabian Bernal – Global Head of Sustainability DeLaval Group | Sweden |
| Christa Egger Danner – Chair ICAR Functional Traits Working Group | Austria |
| Robert Fourdraine – Asst Director, Dairy Record Management Systems | USA |
| Birgit Grendl-Gredler – Co-Chair ICAR ‘Feed and Gas’ Working Group | Holland |
| Stefan Hörtenhuber – University Assistant and Senior Researcher at Division of Livestock Sciences NUWI | Austria |
| Filippo Miglior – Senior Advisor, Genetics and Strategic Initiatives, Lactanet | Canada |
| Corina van Middelaar – Animal Production Systems group Wageningen University | Holland |
| Henrique Trindade – Professor, Department of Agronomy – School of Agriculture & Veterinary Sciences UTAD | Portugal |
Documents
List of ICAR sustainability traits
The purpose of ICAR sustainability traits is to provide a harmonized approach to assess the sustainability of dairy herds. By providing a common definition of these traits, we encourage organisations that are involved in milk recording, breeding or any other way of data recording in dairy herds to develop tools to support farmers to increase the sustainability of their dairy herd.
The traits have been selected and defined by a group of ICAR related experts. The group has made the choice not to come up with an ICAR sustainability index, but to let the user make a choice which traits to include in their own national sustainability index. A selection of traits can be used to create an index that fits the data available and the specific circumstances in your organization or your country.
ICAR sustainability traits are selected in such a way that they cover the most important aspects of the performance of the herd regarding sustainability. The traits have been defined in a way that they generally reflect a period of a year. So, they do reflect the performance of the herd during a longer period.
The index contains several categories of traits:
- Feeding and production
- Young stock
- Health
- Fertility
- Longevity and culling
We recommend users of this list of traits to select one or more traits per category and to combine these traits into a sustainability index suitable to their national system. The weight per trait could be determined by each user. The sustainability index could be made available to members of your organization to support the sustainability of their herd or to proof sustainability or product quality to e.g. dairy processors.
If you have questions or remarks about the traits in the list and their definitions, please contact René van der Linde (rene@icar.org), ICAR Technical Projects Coordinator
List of definitions of traits to assess sustainability at herd level
A detailed list of the definitions of traits to assess sustainability at herd level is available here
