Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster, Ron Hays, continues a conversation with the president of Angus Genetics, Inc. (AGI), Kelli Retallick-Riley, about genomic progress in the beef cattle industry. Yesterday, the two of them talked about genomics, and today’s Q&A centers on indexes.
“Baskets of traits is a great way to describe it,” Retallick-Riley said. “It is all of the traits for a certain segment of our industry – what are the costs and what are the revenues. One of our more maternal cow calf oriented indexes is going to be our maternal weaned calf value. What is our output? It is pounds of weaned calf. What is our input? It is going to be everything to do with that cow.”
The mature size of the cow will relate to how much she will consume over her lifetime. Her heifer pregnancy values have to do with her fertility. Also included in these indexes is teat size, functional longevity, and udder suspension scores.
“If you think of all the reasons a cow may leave the herd early, that obviously affects profitability,” Retallick-Riley continued. “Those are the types of costs we are thinking about in something like maternal weaned calf value, but they are designed with the commercial breeder in mind.”
The EPD indexes are called dollar value indexes because they are all profit-driven. In regard to bulls, the higher the number, the more profitable a bull should be for the situation indicated whether that be maternal trait indexes or terminal trait indexes.
AGI works closely with AngusLink and the Association’s other performance programs on the genetic merit scorecards. “Mr. Troy Marshall and Sarah Dreyer do a wonderful job of running that program, and we are just there to support what we call the ‘intelligence’ behind that GMS scorecard,” Retallick-Riley explained. “We are really trying to open this window of transparency and make sure that all of the commercial producers who have been investing in these good genetics are getting paid for those black calves on the rail.”
She described two parts of the AngusLink program: AngusVerify, which verifies that a group of calves are sired by registered Angus bulls, and the Genetic Merit Score Card, which identifies the average genetic potential of a group of calves.
“We have really seen it grow over this past year,” she shared. “We have really seen it make a high impact on creating a more objective value on those calves. We even have a packer in National Beef that is paying a grid premium for calves that are scoring over a certain level in their genetic merit scorecard, so we are getting that all the way down the chain.”
Artificial intelligence is being incorporated into the system to help evaluate how two different indexes might perform in different environments.
“I think the holy grail is, as I talk to producers, they want to know ‘If I buy this one-pound birthweight bull, what is the actual birthweight of his calves going to be?’ and how can I predict that for Ron’s environment here in Oklahoma versus Kelli’s environment there in Missouri?” Retallick-Riley described. “I think that is where we could use artificial intelligence to help us mine some of that type of data which allows us to make more prescriptive management and genetic decisions for individual cow herds across the globe.”
She admitted that it was a lofty goal, but one that is being researched now.
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