The fifth meeting of the Processing Center Advisory Committee was held at the Marriott - St Louis Airport in St Louis, MO. Originally scheduled for the morning of September 25th, the meeting was conducted on the afternoon of the 24th because the DRPC Workshop concluded early.

Ken Crandall chaired the meeting and the following persons attended as participants:

Ken presented an agenda for the meeting and the Committee marked off items covered during the DRPC Workshop.

Paul Miller reviewed the current status of the Cornell patent situation and confirmed that the patent had been upheld during an initial appeal. He further stated that the patent was being appealed in Canada and that another entity had expressed interest in paying royalties to Cornell for its use.

The Minutes of the August 2, 2000 meeting and the March 5, 2001 conference call were approved as written.

Michael Rector reviewed the status of the complaint regarding Central Valley Dairy Labs failure to convert from crude protein to true protein, summarized the QCS activities since the last PCAC meeting, pointed out the last changes to the CDCB Auditing Manual for Processing Centers, and reviewed the Field Service and Laboratory Advisory Committee recommendations for revisions of their respective manuals.

Jerry Steuernagel reviewed the procedures used during individual processing center audits and the results of those audits.

Jerry discussed the procedures used for monitoring compliance with Standard Transfer Format revisions. He stated that, in most cases, he was considering the results provided by the majority of the processing centers to be correct and had been sending notes to the others asking them to adjust their calculations accordingly.

Jerry also reviewed the Test Herd program and confirmed that it had been expanded to include DHI and DHI-AP types of test. He stated that the results were becoming more consistent but noted that variation had been discovered in the reporting of sick cows and premature calvings.
The Committee discussed the variations noted and identified potential reasons. They agreed that there should be no assumptions made with the input data provided and that it should be interpreted literally. The AIPL personnel confirmed their need for uniformity.

Jerry reviewed the AIPL web site comparisons of the Format 4 and Format 14 Test Herd results. He stated that there were few differences noted in the Format 4 results and that the Format 14 comparison was not online yet.

The Committee reviewed the list of AIPL core variables for Format 4 and agreed to the following revisions:

Leigh Walton agreed to investigate the possibility of having the AIPL web site flag the Test Herd variables that are outside the established range.

Michael Rector requested help in developing a procedure whereby the auditor could attain some of the information needed for field service audits directly from the processing centers. The centers agreed to review the request and determine its feasibility.

The Committee discussed the use of crude protein values in the energy corrected milk (ECM) and cheese yield (CY) calculations. Bill VerBoort and Ken Crandall agreed to draft a letter of recommendation to change the formulas from using crude protein to true protein values.

Ken Crandall presented a request submitted on behalf of Texas DHIA to have the processing centers develop a simple, standardized report for DHI associations to use in creating annual reports and year-end summaries. The Committee recommended that the Standard Transfer Formats be used. Agritech Analytics and DRMS agreed to communicate directly with Texas DHIA to provide this data.

Duane Norman reiterated the following decisions reached or announced during the DRPC Workshop:

1. That changes in the termination codes should be implemented by April 1, 2002

2. That an additional birth code has been added to distinguish split embryos from nuclear transfers

3. That a QC code noting the certification status of each test day will be added to Format 14 in the data collection rating (DCR) field

Duane stated that AIPL will send a letter confirming the changes and will submit a recommendation during a future meeting regarding the inclusion of a QC code in Format 4.

Ken Crandall requested that the DRPCs send any recommended revisions to the CDCB Auditing Procedures for Processing Centers manual to Michael Rector by October 31, 2001.

The Committee did not set a date or location for the next meeting and the meeting was adjourned.

Respectfully Submitted,
Michael Rector
QCS President

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