Genomics provides an opportunity to increase the efficiency of livestock production through faster gain in breeding value, exploitation of dominance and epistasis, minimisation of inbreeding and optimisation of management for individual animals. This increase in efficiency is needed for livestock agriculture to compete for researchers such as land, labour, grain, fertiliser and water in the future.

The development of DNA-based tools for use in the selection of livestock for economically relevant traits is advancing. An impediment to success in providing DNA predictions for traits that are not routinely collected by industry is the very large number of phenotypes required to develop tools with significant predictive power. Global collaborations aimed at combining information from existing datasets across populations are an attractive solution to cost-effectively develop more potent DNA-based selection tools.

Ireland has implemented genomic selection in its dairy breeding program. A unique collaboration enabled genomic predictions to be developed and used widely to deliver a major increase in the rate of genetic gain. The Irish cattle breeding infrastructure needs to be modified to ensure the benefits of genomic selection for dairy and beef can be fully captured and risks associated with potential undesirable correlated responses are quickly identified and ameliorated.

Poor signals along supply chains lead to suboptimal targeting of product outcomes and reduced production efficiency. Genetic and genomic information can be used to help form groups of animals and make management decisions that improve focus and profitability in the supply chain. This may be of notable use for some key traits affecting carcass quality and possibly disease resistance, but otherwise, given sufficiently low costs, genomic information will contribute through increased accuracy of management optimisation tools.

Genomic information has the potential to change the way Australian beef cattle and sheep are selected. Both industries have made considerable progress in developing the resources required to underpin this genomic selection, including large populations of animals with DNA genotypes matched to performance for many economically important traits. Information from these populations is now being used to increase the accuracy of selecting animals in industry herds and flocks, with the potential of substantially increasing genetic gains.

Genomic selection is the prediction of genetic merit using a large number of genetic markers. Here we review the implications of this technology on the design of dairy cattle breeding schemes. Rather than waiting until a bull has daughters with phenotypic records, a process that typically takes 5–6 years, young bulls with breeding values estimated using their genetic markers, that have no progeny, can be selected and used as sires of the next generation.

This paper presents how genomic selection is implemented and has rapidly developed in French dairy cattle since 2009. The approach is a generalised marker-assisted selection and relies on the preselection of several hundred genomic regions found to be important for the quality of the prediction. Young bulls evaluated on the basis of their genome are going to replace traditional progeny-tested bulls.

Feeding the world’s growing population with qualitative food is the core aim of agricultural production. The production of eggs in mainly developing countries will gain more significance as demands for the same soar. To safeguard the production of a high number of eggs, it is essential to conduct early selection of the most promising male within full sib families in poultry breeding. Genome-wide selection is presently in the initial stages but it is expected to increase significantly with the further development of single nucleotide polymorphism chips with greater capacity. This paper discusses the pros and cons and provides an elaborate insight into this subject.