
Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster Ron Hays is talking with Dr. Bob Weaber of Kansas State University about EPDs and indexes. Dr. Weaber consults with the North American Limousin Foundation about their genetic activity. He has found that putting EPD data into indexes is a good way for a breed to reach its improvement goals.
“One of the significant challenges, particularly for our commercial cattleman, is that most breed associations produce more than a dozen EPD traits but making sense of those can be a real challenge,” Dr. Weaber said. “That is where selection indexes and selection index technology has really helped to still those EPDs into single values aligned with a specific production objective into a much more usable tool.”
Commercial cattlemen need to make good selections when the goal is profitability. According to Dr. Weaber, the producer must first have a specific breeding objective in mind to take advantage of selection index technology.
“For a lot of commercial cow calf producers that keep replacement heifers and sell calves at weaning, two important selection decisions are described: the alignment of what your market endpoint is and do you keep replacement females from your herd. That defines where we are going to put emphasis in the selection objective and what traits are going to get weighted in the appropriate selection index,” Dr. Weaber explained.
Once a producer has articulated their goals, it is easy to find a selection index that closely aligns with their production scenario. It is equally important to avoid selection indexes that don’t align with a producer’s production scenario.
He used the example of a traditional cow calf producer who keeps replacement heifers using a terminal index, because those are used when the intentions are to sell all of the steers and heifers produced from a certain mating typically on some type of value-based marketing grid as beef carcasses.
“So, none of the maternal traits are included in those terminal indexes so they make very poor tools for building replacement females,” he detailed.
He noted that many breeds so have some sort of all-purpose index that includes terminal calves value-based marketing grid but also includes the potential for keeping some replacement heifers; however, that scenario reflects a very small percentage of cow calf producers. It also complicates things because there are always antagonisms between maternal traits and terminal traits.
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