ANGUS breeders have the chance to take part in Australia's largest-ever single breed progeny test.

Designed to find the elite sires of tomorrow, the Angus Sire Benchmarking Program, run by Angus Australia with funding from Meat and Livestock Australia, will use 40 sires over 2000 commercial Angus cows each year, for three years.

In all, 3000 calves will be produced for the program.

The steers will be tested for feed efficiency and slaughtered after feedlot-finishing for carcass and meat quality data, and the females will be tested for fertility and calving ease.

This information will then be incorporated into the estimated breeding values of the nominated bulls, resulting in higher accuracies earlier for these traits.

Program co-ordinator Bob Dent said the ASBP would allow breeders to compare progeny evaluated for feed efficiency and female fertility, on top of carcass traits, and growth from their best bulls with other top performers in the breed.

"It's an opportunity to benchmark prospective elite sires in a structured progeny test program," Mr Dent said.

He said the program had three key aims: to identify elite sires suited to Australian conditions and markets; to provide a database against which genetic marker packages can be assessed and to help find new genetic markers.

"We hope to find some bulls that walk on water," Mr Dent said.

He said the program would gather enough data to assess the effect some genetic markers have and to quantify their effect so they can be incorporated with EBVs.

"We need to know if the markers we've identified work and if so, how much effect they have on performance and how far up or down we change the EBVs.

"Hopefully, we'll also find some new gene markers to assess genetic differences for traits like feed efficiency.

"We're still searching for that silver bullet that will allow us to do things other than assess the growth and carcass of an animal."

The ASBP may generate enough DNA information to identify a test for feed efficiency, he said.

Breeders can nominate up to two bulls, of any age, in any one of the three years of the project.

Nominations for the first round of bulls close next Monday.

Bulls must be vet checked, be free of genetic defects and a nomination fee of $4400 applies.