Evidence
Our evidence: proven first in pigs, by design
Few selection methods rest on a dedicated controlled experiment. Ours does. It was established as a multi-year controlled study, defended before an independent academic council, published, and then tested for ten years where it matters — in working herds.
The study was a full three-factor experiment conducted in 2008–2011 at a pedigree breeding complex in southern Ukraine: 120 replacement females, 48 dams, 192 animals on feeding trial and 48 carcass evaluations. It was defended in 2016 before a specialised academic council, with the head of Ukraine's Institute of Pig Breeding among the official opponents, and published in peer-reviewed journals.
Pigs were chosen because they give the fastest generation turnover and the harshest test of a prediction: an answer at six months can be checked against a real litter at twelve. The underlying relationships — growth intensity in early life and later reproductive performance — are not specific to one species, which is why the same structure is now being prepared for sheep, goats and cattle.
And on working farms, not only in the trial
From 2016 to 2025 the criteria were applied on commercial farms in southern Ukraine under long-term service contracts. Two of them became our reference farms: production herds where every group of replacement females was evaluated the same way, year after year, and where the approach proved itself in farm economics rather than in an experiment.
Plody Merkuriia farm enterprise, Kherson regionA family farm led by Serhii Pishta, in livestock since 2010 and grown to a herd of up to 4,000 head at its peak, one of the largest private operations in the region. Mr. Pishta is the kind of owner every breeder hopes to work with: he weighed every group on schedule, kept the records, asked for the numbers behind each recommendation and was never satisfied with last year's results.
Kerob Arutyunyan farm, Rozdilna district, Odesa regionA private breeding farm founded in 2014 by Kerob Arutyunyan, who built his herd around genetics rather than headcount. The farm became our reference site for growth-curve modelling and dam rotation.
Both owners invested years of disciplined weighing and record-keeping in this work. Much of what HerdGen EarlySelect automates today was first done by hand, group by group, on their farms. The same approach has since been applied on other farms in Ukraine and Armenia.
Methodological guide (2026): doi:10.5281/zenodo.22745011. Results were implemented on the trial farm and adopted in a university curriculum in animal breeding.
