Earlier this year, Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster Ron Hays talked with Bob Weaber of Kansas State University about being intentional with heterosis. This is the second part of the conversation; the first of which can be found here.
Both small and large herds can be improved with intentional heterosis, or mixing different breeds of cattle, but the methods and sophistication depend to some extent on the operations’ infrastructure.
Weaber explained, “There may be a number of operations that use a two-breed rotation to build their replacement heifers. Once cows reach a certain age, they may be moved to another division of the ranch to get mated to terminal bulls.”
Those operations would have the physical capacity to move animals around and the infrastructure to hold them in different areas.
“The one I grew up in was a two-breed cross system. We divided cows up at branding time into breeding groups, so the Hereford-sired cows went with an Angus bull, and the Angus-sired cows went with a Hereford bull to get the flip-flop. After breeding season, we put all of the cows back together so we could manage them effectively in the grazing and range environment,” Weaber shared.
He advised that thinking thoroughly about how the breeding pastures are managed to ensure that correct bulls are bred to the correct cows is key regardless of the operation.
He mentioned that the pork industry is already very coordinated in its breeding systems and is already breeding specifically for males or females intended for certain purposes. They have lines of genetics that are maternally focused to build replacement gilts and sows optimally suited for production circumstances. Then they breed the optimized females to boars that target end-product quality – meat attributes, feed efficiency, and the like.
He said that pressures on the beef industry to produce larger beef carcasses have resulted in substantially larger cows. Only forty or fifty years ago, mature cows weighed 1,000 to 1,100 pounds, which is around the size of modern-day heifers which will mature to be fourteen-to-sixteen-hundred-pound cows. Bigger cows require more resources.
“That changes stocking rates and a lot of things in sustainability and production capacity stances that a lot of people are starting to rethink,” Weaber stated.
This way of thinking in the beef industry isn’t new, and several large operations are already implementing intentional heterosis, but modern technology makes it possible for smaller operations to do so as well.
“Even if you have a hundred or two hundred cows, today it is possible to do this with advanced reproductive technology. The creation of gender-sorted semen is a magical thing,” Weaber explained. “In many of the crossbreeding systems where we are trying to build the really optimal maternal component, the drain on the system is the decreased value of the maternal line male calves. By using gender-sorted semen to build the replacement heifers, we can really constrict the number of females allocated to the maternal production line without producing very many maternal steers.”
The Beef Buzz is a regular feature heard on radio stations around the region on the Radio Oklahoma Ag Network and is a regular audio feature found on this website as well. Click on the LISTEN BAR at the top of the story for today’s show and check out our archives for older Beef Buzz shows covering the gamut of the beef cattle industry today.
