The following resolutions have been received and will be voted on at the Affiliated Societies’ Conference taking place on Saturday 6th April 2019 after the BGS Annual General Meeting. Hard copies will be sent out early next week to all fully-paid up Affiliated Societies and will include voting cards.
The Cambridge & District Goat Club
The Cambridge & District Goat Club would like to propose that the BGS Monitored CAE Scheme and Whole Herd CAE Scheme be brought into alignment with the SAC Accredited Scheme.
The Hampshire Goat Club
The Hampshire Goat Club would like to make Home Milk Recording more straightforward by having the Check Weigh on the day of recording.
The current format for Home Milk Recording is much more involved than just recording the milk over 24 hours once a month. Never knowing when a check weigh is going to happen means that you have to organise your goats, the kids and your own life over 2 days each month.
Why can’t the check weigh happen on the day of recording?
The check weigh person knows the timing, the goat keeper has to be more accurate with the timing, but this seems much more straight forward than organising everything over 2 days. It would also save the costs of the second sample in the post. and the costs of the lab fee too.
The Anglo-Nubian Breed Society
The ANBS propose that the Dam of Excellence Award be added to the pedigree in the same way as all the other awards are. Otherwise it demeans what is a very prestigious award.
Golden Guernsey Goat Society
The GGGS would like the BGS to allow each affiliated society to be able to appoint one member who can ask the BGS secretary or another officer or committee member of the BGS, to run kinship reports on request for members. This would enable members to find out what the inbreeding coefficient (kinship) was of mating X to Y.
Libby Henson has confirmed this facility is part of the main Grassroots system, the function having been written years ago in the main system is an integral part of the Grassroots software already at the BGS secretaries fingertips. Calculating kinship is a complex what if inbreeding calculation going back 8 generations, so a very large number of iterations. The secretary can run the kinship of any group of females against any group of males and the system calculates the kinship and produces a standard report with the mean and individual figures. So this can already be used for any of the BGS breeds. The only expense to the Society is the extra work involved for the secretary. If it is decided to be more appropriate for another officer (a kinship officer) to produce the reports, it would require the secretary to either have a drop box link to the kinship officer or send them regular updates to keep their data up to date.
This facility would be a great benefit to all breeds and make good use of facilities we already have available to us.
The Pennine & Bingley Goat Society
The Pennine & Bingley Goat Society propose a resolution to amend 21. (1) (a) and (b) of the BGS Regulations to permit the award of * when the percentage butterfat is equal or greater than 3.25% averaged across both milkings and Q* when the percentage butterfat is equal or greater than 4% averaged across both milkings.
The Derbyshire Dairy Goat Club
The Derbyshire Dairy Goat Club would like the Committee, in consultation with the membership, to review the way in which the BGS President is elected.