GGenemap
Founder

Andrew Freshwater

Founder of Genemap, Director of Clear Creek Pastoral Co and CEO of Moorella Ag Holdings · Byawatha, North East Victoria · MAIAST, CPAg

Andrew Freshwater is a seventh-generation livestock producer from Clear Creek at Byawatha in North East Victoria, where he and Angela Murphy run Angus and Red Angus cattle alongside the Advancer composite and the Catalyst shedding sheep flock, and he's also CEO of Moorella Ag Holdings Pty Ltd, which runs cattle and sheep on properties across Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria.

His working life has gone into breeding livestock and building the tools to measure and select them, which started when he was exporting sheep genetics to nine countries by the age of nineteen, including live rams he sent to southern South America while he was still in Year 12, and has since taken him through importing the Leachman Stabilizer cattle into Australia, helping set up a cattle breeding system on the Kazakh steppe, building a sheep genetics supply chain and recording system for Sweden's largest food company, and working with an overseas government and university group on a tropically adapted cattle composite.

He's a director of Clear Creek Pastoral Co, holds MAIAST and CPAg accreditation and publishes the Clear Creek Newsletter, and he wrote the software behind Genemap, TheFarmOS, PaddockOS and the Clear Creek tools because he wanted commercial producers to have evaluation and management systems built around the traits that actually make them money, things like fertility, body condition, structure, docility and how well an animal's adapted to the country it runs on.

He reckons the future of both sheep and cattle breeding lies in climatically adapted composite breeds that are measured properly under commercial conditions, and that's why the phenotypes in his own dataset were taken by him, on his own livestock, and analysed with evaluation software he's written himself.

Why he built Genemap

Genemap came out of a long-held frustration with breeding values that only make sense for an average farm, because a national index prices every trait for a business that doesn't exist, while someone picking bulls or rams needs to know what each trait is worth in their own enterprise, on their own sale grid and at the market prices MLA publishes each night. He built it so a producer can start from the EBVs they've already got from their breed society or genomic test, see every sheep and cattle animal valued in dollars on the same footing, rank sires for a particular mob, forecast where the herd or flock is heading over the next 10 to 15 years with an honest range rather than a single promise, and have the weights, scans, calvings and DNA results they record on the farm flow straight back into the evaluation.

Other work by Andrew Freshwater

Writing