Episode 16 - Beef genetics - UMN Extension's The Moos Room

We wrap up our three-part genetics series with BEEF. Genetics is an enormous topic and we can't cover everything, but we had to start somewhere. Unlike the dairy episode, we tried our best to avoid the breed conversation on this one with limited success. We will be back on this topic more than once I am sure.

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What is The Moos Room™?

Hosted by members of the University of Minnesota Extension Beef and Dairy Teams, The Moos Room discusses relevant topics to help beef and dairy producers be more successful. The information is evidence-based and presented as an informal conversation between the hosts and guests.

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Dr. Joe Armstrong: Hello, everybody, this is Dr. Joe Armstrong with the University of Minnesota Extension and you are listening to The Moos Room. Today we're talking about beef genetics. Our expert is no one, none of us know a ton about beef genetics but we're taking our shots, letting you know what we know, laying the groundwork for future episodes, giving some base knowledge. Goal is to come back to genetics a lot. It's a big topic, there's lots of cool things happening in the industry but we wanted to start with just the basics so that we can all be on the same page as we have other people in that know a lot more than the three of us.
Thank you for listening, continue to send your requests, ideas, rebuttals, anything we say to [e-mail], and continue to visit our website to check out information or reference anything that you hear in the show @extension.umn.edu. Thanks for listening, hang in there, everybody.
Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. We are here today just the OG three to talk about beef genetics. We talked dairy genetics episode, we did some dairy cross beef and now we are working on beef genetics. Going to be pretty brief, pretty informal today, and then we're going to get into specifics down the road, probably invite some guests on that know a lot more than the three of us do.
We wanted to make sure that we have our opinions out there, so you know what they are and we can give you the basics, so lay the groundwork for future episodes.
Emily: That's the whole point of this podcast, is just to get our opinions out there.
Joe: Absolutely, yes.
Emily: I was like, otherwise, I'm not here for the right reasons.
Joe: We named it The Moos Room, but it's really just opinions room. It's my opinions.
Brad: It's my opinions. It's my opinions only.
Joe: We just pair it, Bradley's opinions that he gives us.
Brad: No, no, no. Definitely not.
Emily: That's true, nobody is wiser than Dr. Bradley J Heins.
Brad: It is not all about me, definitely.
Emily: Did you know he has tenure?
Joe: He has tenure. He has tenure. Let's get into this. I think we mentioned this in the dairy genetics episode. We talked a lot about PTAs and they're very different than EPDs in a lot of ways, mostly in the way that they're averaged. PTAs are averaged to zero. If you're positive, you're better than average, if you're negative, you're less. With EPDs, of course, and the beef really had to make it more complicated, it is not that way.
For instance, if you look at the Angus Association, you look at calving ease, the average for calving ease is plus six, random, completely random number. You have to know that when you're looking at EPDs.
Emily: You said for Angus, so are EPDs different for each breed?
Joe: Absolutely, I can't even count how many different beef breeds there are, there's so many, an unreal amount. Every single breed pretty much does it differently. They have different EPDs, they have different values, so you can't compare an Angus to a Simmental without running some kind of conversion to make sure the EPDs are somewhat similar. There's some good tools for that. We'll probably talk a lot about Angus today, just because I think for the most part, they have done the best job of creating EPDs and making it easy for everyone to use them. That's my bias for Angus.
Brad: People from all the other breed associations are going to be after you now.
Joe: That's fine, they can come.
Emily: You can send your complaints to [e-mail].
Joe: [e-mail]. That's where you can send them. I think they've done the best job. That's my opinion. I talk about them a lot because they're a widely used breed and they've done a really good job of explaining all of this. Now, there's other breeds that have done pretty well as well. Obviously, there's Simmental and Limousin and Hereford and Red Angus and they all have their own EPDs and different indexes that they use, but it can get complicated trying to keep track of all the different ones.
If I say anything in the episode that is Angus-specific only, it probably applies to the other breeds but I'm going to use terminology that is probably Angus just because that's the one that I know the best. We see that in the dairy side too, Brad, it's different for breeds, right?
Brad: Of course, everybody always talks about Holsteins and they forget about the other breeds.
Emily: There are other breeds than Holstein?
Brad: All breeds have something to offer, we know that. It depends on management and lots of different factors. It's all about genetic diversity and maintaining many different breeds, I'm not all about one breed.
Joe: I think we've done that pretty well on the beef side and we're starting to see more and more of it on the dairy side. On the dairy side, is net merit comparable between breeds, Brad?
Brad: It is not. No, it's not, because they're all adjusted on their own breed base so you'd have to convert them all back to a single breed base and that breed base is Holstein, so everything would be compared back to them. You can't compare, just like the beef world.
Emily: Brad, and/or Joe, actually, both of you, I want you to answer this question, do you think or do you wish that for both EPDs and PTAs that when creating a system that was universal across all breeds or do you feel like breeds can be so different and so you're just going to be doing apples to oranges anyway?
Joe: Go first, Brad.
Brad: I'll give you the dairy example. All of the breeds are evaluated on the same-- they have a multi-breed evaluation but everything is converted back to their own base. Define what breed do you want to be the base to compare everybody off of, do you can set Guernsey as the base and then Holsteins look really good, or you set Holsteins and then the Guernseys look really bad, just to use those two breeds? It's really difficult what breed you pick to decide what to set is the base. That's why everybody has chosen to put them on their own base.
I would suspect that's the same with beef breeds just because they all have different traits they analyze too, they're not all the same. They have different goals that they're trying to reach for in their genetic index, so not everybody's the same.
Joe: I think it's very similar on the beef side. It's just that, at least on the dairy side, I think you see some conservation of terminology, at least. If we're talking net merit Holstein versus net merit Jersey, at least, they're both using the term net merit, which isn't necessarily true when we started looking at EPDs. For example, Angus uses value indexes and that is not the same term that is used for Herefords or Red Angus or anything else, because they just choose something else to name it.
Now, it's almost identical, it's almost the same thing that they're talking about but they've just chosen to call it something else, which makes it a little tough when you're looking at all these things and trying to compare bulls.
Angus uses value indexes, Herefords use profit indexes, which they're very similar but they're just different terminology. Like in dairy with net merit, we have these value indexes that give you basically a combination of a bunch of different EPDs that try to give you a profit number so that you can compare like Brad talked about when we're talking about dairy genetics, you don't want to just pick on a single trait. You want to be able to look at a bunch of them together and these value indexes or these profit indexes make it very easy to do.
Now, what we've done in a lot of cases and the ones that are very popular on the beef side, which we don't really see this on the dairy side, is a lot of these indexes can be very specific to a timeframe. I think that's really confusing for some producers and I don't like how it's set up. The one that I always think about is dollars beef. Have you guys heard of that one, dollars beef?
Brad: I haven't, enlighten us.
Joe: It's $B, which is dollars beef for beef value. I think I see a lot of guys on the cow-calf side, see that and they're like, "Well, of course, dollars beef, that should be the index I look at just because why not, it's a very easy composite to look at." Well, that's really only the expected progeny differences for the feedlot side post-weaning, it only covers post-weaning. If you're selling at weaning or around weaning, that may not be the best value index to choose a bull from. That's where some of the stuff gets a little-- you have to read into all the definitions to try to figure it out.
For a cow-calf guy that's selling at weaning and that's how he's marketing, maybe the better index to look at is Weaned Calf Value, which is $W. That's everything prior to weaning. That gives you a lot of different things to look at. It's something that you have to go in and read the definitions. There's one thing that I always try to take with me to bull sale and most of the breeds have this and it's a percentile breakdown for every single EPD category. It fits on one page, it's a little tough to read because it gets small, but at least then I can have a reference for. Usually, the average is on there too for every category.
Then I can see, all right, I see a bull's numbers, I know exactly where he sits in the ranking. That helps me to decide where you should really lie on how much I'm willing to pay for him.
Brad: That is one good thing I would like to say about the beef industry is when you're at sales or something, they present a lot more information. Now the dairy has been getting better, but they've always presented genetic information on cows, heifers, bulls for people to purchase. Dairy hasn't always been that way. I think with the advent of genomics, it's improving but beef has been lockstep far more advanced with their genetic and EPDs and showing off the EPDs of their cattle. Even beef were crossbreeding long before dairy was. Maybe there's a lot of things we can learn from beef genetics.
Joe: It's weird to see and it's strange to hear that the beef industry is ahead of something. I'm not criticizing--
Emily: You just want that hate mail from the beef.
Joe: I want it, I want it. Bring it.
Emily: That's [e-mail].
Joe: That's the deal. If you look at pigs, you look at poultry, cattle, in general, are always behind. If we had to say who's behind on most things in terms of technology and accepting advancement, it's usually the beef guys if we're talking beef dairy. It's really nice to hear that maybe the beef guys got ahead on one thing a little bit here.
Brad: I was looking at something on EPDs and how genetics work in the beef breed. I made a few notes here. One, I saw over the last 20 years, weaning weight has increased by one and a half pounds a year, birth weight has decreased a quarter of a pound per year, marbling has increased by 0.5 units, and carcass weight has increased by four pounds a year. Now that's genetically. It really shows that EPDs over the last 20 years in the selection within the beef industry, it works. Some of those highly heritable traits.
Joe: It really does. It's good to see progress, and I don't want to be a downer, sandbag this whole thing but it's really cool to see progress when we talk about the weaning weights and things like that. It never really tells the whole picture because I think there's better values to look at when we look at success of a system or actual improvement across a system-wide. I think on the beef side and I know our colleague Eric Mozell has covered this quite a bit.
The value that we'd really like to look at in terms of efficiency and success in a cow-calf operation is going to be pounds of calf weaned per cow exposed to the bull or AI or however many are exposed to breed. That really gives you a reproductive efficiency. What's frustrating for me is that we have all these other advancements in weaned weight and everything else, we have not made improvements in pounds of calf wean per cow exposed.
I think that has a lot to do with reproduction and possibly has a lot to do with what we are selecting for in these cows. Just like maybe we got in trouble on the dairy side a little bit with reproduction at one point because we were selecting so heavily for milk production we hurt ourselves a little bit, shot ourselves in the foot. I think we've done that on the beef side a little bit.
Brad: Well, I think there's an optimum for milk production in the beef herd too. You don't want the EPDs on bulls that are going to have high milk value because there's some sort of, I don't know, diminishing returns so you want some happy medium there and not select necessarily the high milk EPD of that bulls.
Joe: Absolutely. For me, there's a lot of stuff coming out. Now in Minnesota and Iowa and there's a whole upper Midwest area we get a little spoiled because of the resources that we have and how good our feed is. We make excellent feed, excellent feed. We tend to have bigger cows already and we can get away with some of this higher production and still manage to have good repro because we have such good feed, but there are areas of the country where the genetics are not able to be fully expressed because basically, the genetics are above what the resources can support. That becomes an issue as into are we selecting for the right things or not.
Brad: I think selection certainly is going to depend obviously breeds and we're not going to get into breeds today. That's just--
Emily: Oh, man.
Joe: No way, no way.
Emily: We don't have another hour.
Brad: That's right. We still don't have enough time to get into breeds. I think a lot of it comes down to a lot of things we talked about now as far as environmental type stressors and things like that on selecting for those because what works up here in the Midwest might not work in Texas. I've been in other places in the US and there are a lot of different beef breeds out there. It really depends on the farm and what their goals are.
I remember when I was a 4-H, we went on a 4-H trip and we went to some Brangus Farms. Well, we don't really have Brangus, that Brahma-type influence that they would have in the heat in the south is not up here in the north. It's really different and different ideas. Obviously, that genetics plays a role in those things too.
Joe: This is back to one of my soapbox things because the soapbox. I like people who select cows to fit their system. I really think it's an easier way to go than to try to fit your system to your cows. You want to make the best management system for you that you can make but at a certain point, there's just things you can't do in Minnesota that you can do with Texas.
Brad: Agreed.
Joe: You have to find cows that work in your system. For me, the biggest piece of that is culling. If someone's not cutting it in your operation and the vast majority of animals are, they need to go. There's no two ways about it. They should leave. They might work in someone else's system so they don't necessarily need to go to slaughter but if they're not working in your system, they need to go and need to figure out how to make cows that fit your system.
Emily: Right, because you're just wasting money if it's not working your system or you're wasting more labor or.
Joe: Oh yes, and raising a heifer is expensive. We talked about that on the dairy a lot but it's expensive on the beef side too. We don't have time to get into economics and what the cow numbers are as far as when you should be buying replacements versus raising replacements but that's been a big issue in recent years on when should you really be raising your own and when should you be buying those.
Bradley, I think I figured out why you like Hereford so much. I had put notes and I didn't give you these notes but--
Emily: Because they're cute and fat just like him. [laughs]
Joe: Sure. That's not quite what I was going for. The profit indexes for Herefords are built based on Bradley's mind. They're all about crossbreeding. They're all about it. They have specific indexes that are made for crossbreeding. As in our Hereford breeds, baldies are huge so you got that black calf with a white face. They have specific indexes that target making crossbreds. Maybe it's just another reason to love Herefords, I guess.
Brad: They do. The Black Baldy, then they have their Brahma so that's crossing with Brahma. Then they have certified Hereford beef. They have a Caviness one.
Joe: I think it's probably-
Emily: All sorts of options.
Joe: -another reason to love Herefords.
Brad: Yes. My grandpa must have known something back in the day when he had Herefords.
Joe: Absolutely. There's one index that I want to get to because I think it's a really cool index. It's $EN and that's Cow Energy Value. This is an Angus thing again, so sorry other breeds but I love this value. Send your hate mail to [e-mail]--
Brad: Or to Emily Krekelberg, she will help.
Joe: We won't give out Emily's email, but you can find me if you want.
Emily: Find me on Twitter.
Joe: Yes. Find her on Twitter. Cow Energy Value is really cool because it's basically dollars saved per cow per year. You can compare two cows and say, "Actually, if I had this cow instead of that cow, I would save this much money every year." It's basically an efficiency number. It's all about feed expense. This cow will do the same thing on less feed. I think it's a really, really interesting trait. I like this index more than I like a lot of the other indexes because that cow is around a long time and she's got to eat, girl's got to eat.
Emily: Girl's got to eat.
Joe: Every year she's got to be maintained through the winter and you got to have feed for her and it can save you a lot of money over a long time because some of these beef cows can live forever and still be productive. I really love that trait. If you haven't looked at that before, you should check it out. Story time. Story time.
Brad: Oh, yay.
Joe: Every veterinarian has someone they call Doc. If I say Doc, I'm talking about one person. If my buddy in vet school says Doc, he's talking about somebody else but everyone has their Doc. My Doc is Dr. Rick Jamison down in Southwest Iowa. He's retired now, semi-retired. I don't think he'll ever actually stop working but when he first graduated vet school, he worked in North Dakota, Steel, North Dakota, middle of nowhere. That was when we were starting to see these big continental breeds come over and started to be used in the US in a big way. You got Charolais, big cows.
Well, we didn't have a good handle on calvings at that point. We didn't understand how that all worked as well. In my entire career, I practiced for four or four and a half years. I did, I don't know, maybe 15, 20 C-sections total. Otherwise, I could usually get them out the back. In some way. Whether it was in pieces or together, they were coming out the back usually.
Emily: Charming.
Joe: Charming, yes. Doc was telling me that when he first graduated, his first season up there, he did over 200 C-sections in one calving season.
Brad: Oh, that's like Belgian Blues man.
Joe: Yes, absolutely. It was unreal. One of the biggest improvements to the whole point of the story is that now we don't do that many. When we didn't understand this calving ease thing, basically you had your normal day, did all your normal stuff, and then every single night you came back to the clinic and there was three or four, five trailers waiting for you so you could do C-sections at the clinic. We've made some huge improvements. That's probably one of the areas that we have made the best improvements on is calving ease.
I think one of the things that we talk about, and we talked about this with dairy beef too, is that we can't sacrifice birth weight in a lot of cases because they can't make that back up. We've almost gone too far. Again, we've taken it too far. When you have 35, 40, 45-pound Angus calves hitting the ground, I don't think that's a good thing. They don't make up that weight. They can handle bigger calves, especially your cows. I know there's some peace of mind there but don't sacrifice birth weight that much. You can pay attention to calving ease but there's some really good calving ease bulls that don't sacrifice birth weight at all. Keep that in mind as well. They're expensive.
Brad: Yes, small birth weights don't work in a lot of breeds.
Joe: There's a reason that Jersey calves are hard to take care of and no one wants to do it. It's because they're tiny and they don't [crosstalk] very well.
Emily: They're the size of puppies.
Joe: Exactly. They're super tiny.
Brad: Emily will take care of your Jersey calves if you want.
Emily: I will.
Joe: Just bring them into the city. Stake them out in the backyard.
Emily: Yes. Just send the request to [e-mail].
Joe: Don't do that. Now we're gonna have people trying to give us--
Brad: We'll not raise your Jersey calves.
Emily: Overrun with Jersey calves.
Brad: We'll not raise your Jersey calves. Sorry.
Emily: Speak for yourself, Bradley.
Joe: Emily's going to have a house full of them. I don't know if we have a whole lot of other stuff to talk about. The big takeaways from all of this is that you need to understand EPDs, understand if you're a dairy guy coming to the beef side, you need to understand how they're different than PTAs, and recognize that they're breed specific. They are used to compare two bulls. You can't really use them all by themselves. You can say that one bull has progeny that will do this, will be expected to do this over another bull, but you can't really use them all alone. It doesn't work that way.
Use the indexes when you can but understand what they mean. Make sure you're fitting with the goals of your operation. Use the resources available. Make sure you know what averages are for each category so that you know where average sits for that specific number. Anything else, guys? Do you have any questions?
Emily: Not to be that guy but--
Joe: Any burning questions?
Emily: --the plural for index, indices.
Brad: It is indices. You are correct but most people say indexes. It's, yes.
Joe: I'm a simple person.
Emily: Yes, I noticed. That's the only question I had.
Brad: Everybody says indexes all the time.
Joe: It's indexes in my mind.
Emily: Indices.
Joe: Fine, indices if you're trying to be fancy. Emily's all dressed up today anyway because she had to do an interview so she's feeling all fancy.
Brad: With her bling microphone with her rubies all over her microphone.
Joe: She did. I know. We didn't update listeners on that, that she did bedazzle her microphone. One day, if we're ever doing these live, you can see Emily's bedazzled microphone.
Emily: Yes. We may need to do that just to show off my microphone.
Joe: Just do some live. We could do that at trade shows once things are back up and running. Just sit on the-
Brad: We could.
Joe: --Expo floor and do some podcasting
Brad: Yes. Minnesota Milk. Minnesota Milk, we'll do it there.
Joe: Let's do it. It's a new plan.
Emily: Always a good time at Minnesota Milk.
Joe: Then we can have Tim on too, or sorry, not Tim. Tom Rothman.
Brad: Yes.
Joe: He's got the perfect voice for radio and he did it for a long time.
Brad: Yes, we should have him.
Joe: Tom would be good.
Emily: We should. What a good idea.
Joe: All right, let's have him on. I don't know what we'll talk about but we can talk about policy or whatever else or just radio, that'd be fine.
Brad: Yes.
Joe: Okay. Let's wrap her up. If you want to get ahold of us, comments, questions, scathing rebuttals, catch us at [e-mail].
Emily: That's [e-mail].
Joe: Good work. I didn't have to do it. Also, check us out at [e-mail]. We are working on getting more and more content up there. Bradley is publishing left and right, so there's something to reference there and good information to find. With that, thank you for listening. Hang in there. We'll catch you in the next episode. She's fancy. You got to be specific. I didn't know I had to watch what I said as much on the grammar side.
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