The meeting started with introductions and the designation of the voting delegates. The directors for this meeting were:

The minutes of the last meeting were reviewed. There was some discussion on the required implementation date of the American Identification Numbering System. It was decided that the Council had agreed upon the January 1, 2003 date. The minutes were then approved.

Mike Rector gave the Quality Certification Services Report. This was followed by the Audit Review Committee Report given by Bill VerBoort. Their meeting had been conducted that morning between 9:00 a.m. and noon. They had addressed and approved several committee recommendations for rewording, clarification or minor changes on a range of topics, including scale calibration and sample handling. The approved recommendations will be provided in written form for the next Council meeting.

John Meyer discussed the Council's potential liability for their activities with quality certification. There is a risk involved with monitoring someone else's records for compliance. Different parties can be upset with over-enforcement as well as under-enforcement. He believes that we need to discuss the possible exposure that the Council is placing itself into and how should we react if a law suit was taken out against us. How is the Council equipped to deal with conflicts and problems? Do we have a method of assessing members if the need arises? Paul Miller directed people to the Council's Bylaws for some clarification of these issues.

John Meyer motioned, seconded by Dave Kendall, that The Council recommends that a committee be established to investigate our potential exposure to a legal suit being taken against the Council as a result of our actions and proceedings and to propose a method of assessing members in such cases. Motion passed unanimously.

Contract for Quality Certification Auditor
The Council received two proposals to serve as their Quality Certification Auditor. The first presentation was by Mike Rector of the Quality Certification Services, Inc of Taylorsville, NC. He gave a description of the current activities as well as some comments on potential changes and its impact on the budget. The 2000 budget was $196,050; projected 2001 budget $228,500; projected 2002 budget $241,500. In 2002, staffing would be 2 full time employees and 2 contracted auditors.

The second proposal was from California DHIA and given by Bill VerBoort. California DHIA would set up a wholly owned subsidiary. The establishment of a subsidiary with a separate set of directors would help distance the QC work from the parent company. Bill pointed out that there would be less conflict of interest under this arrangement, than currently exists with QCS and its parent company NDHIA, because fewer organizations would be audited by its own subsidiary.

It was estimated that the resources of one person would be required to carry out the duties of the QC Auditor. The subsidiary would contract for ½ of Bill's time plus ½ of Scott Taylor's time. The proposed budget was $179,750.

Mike Rector was then asked to provide some examples of the feedback that he had obtained from the receivers of the service. He said that the major compliment would be that Quality Certification had gone from being very lax to becoming a very tight system in a short period of time. The major criticism would revolve around delay of getting reports. They asked Bill to explain the major differences between the two proposals. He thought that the reason why the two proposals differed in price was because QCS was also involved in education and training. California DHIA would concentrate on providing auditing services which is what is described in the Council's description of the requirements.

Pete Giacomini was asked for his opinion of the service provided by QCS. He said that the service had greatly improved over the last two years, however, he still sees a conflict of interest coming from NDHIA's internal politics and its influence over QCS. Establishment of standards has greatly improved but there has been little activity in enforcement. The auditor has too much discretion on enforcement. As one who is paying for the service, he believes that the low bid should be accepted unless there are sound reasons for going with a higher bid.

Several people voiced their opinion on whether the QC Auditor was a one or two person job. Did the Council want education and training as part of the job description? There had been several previous attempts with one person and they had failed. The committee discussed some of the events that have occurred over the last two years, e.g., the problem with changeover to true protein. Should the QC Auditor have checked the data that was being sent to AIPL? There are quite a few electronic meters that are not being calibrated on an annual basis and yet these herds are not being identified. Dan Webb pointed out that the use of records from electronic systems that are not monitored should not be used in the national genetic evaluations.

At the end of the open discussion, Chairman Paul Miller called for an executive session. Upon return to the open meeting, it was announced that by a six to three vote, The Council voted to award a two year contract to the Quality Certification Services, Inc of Taylorsville, NC to serve as its Quality Certification Auditor.

Test Day Patent. Tom Lawlor provided an update. His attempts at trying to discuss the merits of the patent with Cornell administrators and researchers is getting nowhere. The Dean and the Department Head believe that the faculty should be generating additional research dollars from the intellectual property that they have developed. Given that the Test Day Model has been granted a patent by the U.S. Patent Office, then there's really nothing to discuss other than how much does the dairy industry want to pay for a license. In that case, contact the Cornell Research Foundation because it's their job to negotiate the terms.

Paul Miller informed the committee that Dairy One had acquired a six month license on the Cornell Patent with the option to have two additional 6-month-renewals. They are suppose to revive the herd management software and see if they can market it. They haven't decided what to do with the genetic evaluation rights but he didn't envision that Cornell would allow them to give them up.

Tom informed the group that Canada had filed for reexamination. The Canadian Patent Review Board has granted their request. Cornell has 3-months to respond. In talking with Brian VanDoormal of CDN, he explained the process that they went through in putting together their reexamination material. They went through each and every claim and provided material illustrating that the Cornell patent was invalid due to prior art or being obvious to those skilled in the field. Their arguments were written up by legal counsel. They offered the U.S. access to this legal document and requested that the U.S. help pay for some of the expense.

The USDA's lawyers have offered to file a reexamination on behalf of the U.S. dairy industry. George Wiggins and Duane Norman have provided them with 15 new articles on the prior use and application of test day data. Tom recommended that we should not accept the USDA's offer of legal assistance. He explained that if you submit material for reexamination and you do not win, then you can not resubmit that same material at a later date. So, if we're going to do a reexamination, we should put forth the necessary financial and human resources into this effort to guarantee our success. Gordon Doak agreed that we should not rely on USDA's attorneys at this time.

The European Patent Office has recently ruled in favor of the Cornell Patent. For several years, the EPO would not allow the Patent to go forward because it applied to too many areas (breeding, feeding, management, etc.). Apparently, Cornell has made some recent changes. Germany, Holland and perhaps others are going to challenge the patent. They are also asking ICAR to assist them in this matter. Paul Miller pointed out that a patent has never been applied for in Australia and New Zealand by Cornell. That's because a test day model was already in existence when Bob Everett went there on sabbatic in the 1980's.

At this point, it was mentioned that the universities and other research institutions have had a long term relationship of obtaining free data from the U.S. dairy industry. The premise behind this agreement was that the resulting research would be openly distributed and the benefits freely shared. If Cornell no longer views this relationship in this way, then why should the U.S. dairy industry continue to provide Cornell with data for their Northeast Sire Summary. It's ironic that Bob Everett uses a test day model to analyze the data and pays no royalties to Cornell. It was then recommended and moved that The Council recommend that Council members not send test day data to Cornell University. The motion passed unanimously.

At this time, the Council does not want to hire legal counsel. Denny Funk voiced the opinion that many people would like to have a Test Day Model for our genetic evaluations but we don't need to have it. There are plenty of other areas where refinement, improvements and further research would yield a significant advancement in our genetic evaluations. It was also expressed that a good course of action would be to wait and see how successful the Canadians are in their reexamination effort. Doug Blair concurred with waiting but said that now is the time to develop a proposal on how to fund a reexamination effort so that we're prepared for that course of action if we so choose.

Reports from NDHIA, NAAB and PDCA
The DHI Report was presented by Paul Miller. He spoke about electronic meters, robotic milkers and the upcoming ICAR meeting. The NAAB report was presented by Gordon Doak. He said it was rumored that Germany would be moving to three genetic evaluations per year. Since we thought Germany might bring a proposal to the 2001 Interbull meetings in Budapest, the NAAB Board took the following action at the August 2001 meeting: "The NAAB Board supports changing the genetic evaluation frequency to three times per year only if the three evaluations are evenly spaced at four month intervals with a common international (Interbull) release date." NAAB plans to bring a proposal to the March 2002 Council meeting recommending a change in the frequency of official genetic evaluations from four to three per year. As it turned out, Germany has not proposed a change to the Interbull schedule as they will calculate three genetic evaluations in February, May and August and just resubmit the August evaluations to Interbull for the November run.

Gordon also mentioned that the gene for CVM has been found and that CVM has been declared as an undesirable genetic recessive. The AI studs have tested many of their bulls and breeders will be informed of the carrier status of most active bulls with the release of the November genetic evaluations. Unfortunately, due to the high up front licensing fee for the DNA test, there are no labs in North America offering this service.

John Meyer provided the PDCA report. The group had a very upbeat meeting in Madison during Expo. The major issue discussed was the universal registration process being promoted by Dr. George Schook and Ted Halbach. Milking Shorthorn, Brown Swiss and Holstein have had some good discussions on working more closely together.

AIPL Report
Duane Norman gave an update of the activities at AIPL. The first topic was the handling of records from sick cows. AIPL could do a better job of identifying abnormal records if there was more uniformity in how individual farmers and DRPCs handle the situation. Another way to improve the accuracy of production records is to make more use of the heifer pedigree information. Duane reviewed the progress from the committee to develop guidelines for utilizing information on crossbred animals. Dave Kendall asked if there was uniformity across breeds on the use of crossbred animals in genetic evaluations and whether or not USDA made any adjustments for heterosis. Unfortunately, at this time, there is no adjustment for heterosis and the breeds handle the crossbreds differently.

Mike Schutz informed the group on the activities of the university researchers involved in the dairy genetics project referred to as S-284. They have recently written their new five year objective, entitled "Enhancement of Productive Life and Health Traits of Dairy Cattle". Three areas of research will be emphasized

Duane presented the list of Industry Research Priorities from 1999. He said that now is the time to update that list. Gordon Doak gave an update on the Council's efforts to obtain increase funding for AIPL. The Senate appropriated $750,000 for AIPL and the House had $400,000 in their budget. Since the Senate's appropriation was higher than the House, the eighty percent rule was applied resulting in an increased funding of $600,000. Duane said this money is not additional support for ARS but rather a transfer of funds from other research areas. With this much of an increase and ARS's desire to maintain scientist numbers, he will most likely be looking at hiring an additional researcher.

Gordon handed out a list of NAAB research priorities. He asked that PDCA and the DRSPs work on getting their research list to Duane by mid December. Kent Weigel provided the following suggestions; try to identify important areas of research; think about whether it's an area that AIPL can work on; and try to determine if someone at AIPL would be the best person to do this work. In other words, NAAB prioritized their list using both the importance of the research and whether or not AIPL was a good fit for that project.

Identification and Industry Developments
Paul Miller informed the group that Dr. John Weimers from USDA had been invited to the meeting but was unable to attend. He asked Pete Giacomini to update people on the Wisconsin Animal ID Consortium. Pete said that American ID is the standard for dairy animal ID. However, we still need a national standard for identifying the premise. For example, there's no uniform way of obtaining a herd code for non-DHIA herds. Several organizations are utilizing GPS coordinates as a premise identifier. He's been impressed with the variety of organizations (eg. John Deere, Schering?Plough, etc.) that are actively involved and putting large amounts of money into animal identification. Hopefully, the Wisconsin Animal ID Consortium can make a significant contribution to this effort.

Tom Lawlor gave a report on the individual and herd characteristics of the cows on USDA's elite list. Much of this information was the result of an industry wide effort for open disclosure and identifying the conditions under which the records were collected. This information is commonly referred to as a herd profile.

The last topic prior to the adjournment was the selection of the next meeting time and location. It was agreed that the meeting would be held in St. Louis on Thursday, March 14 from 8:00 am to 1:00 pm. In 2002, the directors of the breed societies will elect the Chair and the directors of the artificial insemination members shall elect the Vice-Chair.

Meeting adjourned.

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