Genetics
Increasing Economic Efficiency with Genomics
By Wes Ishmael
The more accurately you know genetic potential,
and the sooner, the more opportunity there is to
build on the top and cleave from the bottom.
A thousand days here, a thousand days there,
and pretty soon you’re talking some real time.
That’s how long it takes to feed and see the
results of a replacement heifer’s first progeny.
That’s why Ryan Noble of Noble Ranch
LLC at Yuma, Colo., used genomics to help
identify replacement heifer prospects
most likely to merit the investment.
Among other things, Noble reduced the average
three-year culling rate of his replacements
to 2% from 15% to 17%, after adjusting bull
selection based upon genomic data.
Incidentally, according to a BEEF survey of
commercial cow-calf producers this year, a third of
the respondents say they buy at least some of their
replacements. While 52% expect their seedstock
suppliers to provide genomic profiles of the bulls
they sell, 41.8% use genomic profiling for at least
some of their breeding decisions; 10.8% said they
base all breeding decisions on genomic profiling.
The value and cost of time is why Jared Decker,
Extension beef genetics specialist at the
University of Missouri, encourages commercial
producers to consider estimates of cow
lifetime productivity when selecting bulls.
These are estimates like the Stayability EPD
offered by some breeds, which looks at the
genetic difference of the probability that a bull’s
daughters will remain in the herd to at least
6 years of age. More recently, the American
48 | MARCH 2019
Hereford Association introduced an EPD for
Sustained Cow Fertility, which predicts a cow’s
ability to continue calving from 3 years old to 12
years old, having first calved as a 2-year-old.
“Given the cost of developing or buying
replacement heifers, if those females drop out
of the herd in two or three years, we’ve made
lots of investment with little return. These tools
help identify females that are fertile and will
stay in the herd longer,” Decker explains.
Keep in mind that whatever EPD you’re talking
about, for almost every widely used breed
of cattle, EPDs — long the gold standard of
estimating genetic merit — are even more
accurate now than 12 to 18 months ago.
That’s thanks to a revolutionary way of calculating
genomic-enhanced EPDs (GE-EDPs) by which
pedigree, genotype, phenotypic information
and progeny performance are incorporated
into the calculation at the same time.
These GE-EPDs address time as well, providing
a level of prediction accuracy for a nonparent
animal that is on par with already knowing
the performance of 10 to 20 progeny,
depending on the trait in question.
The more accurately you know genetic potential,
and the sooner, the more opportunity there is to
build on the top and cleave from the bottom.
“There are two things that really drain profit
out of a cow herd,” Noble says. “One is the
cost of developing replacement heifers.
The other is depreciation of cows.