Angus HeiferSELECT supplying valuable insight for herd management Diana Wood, Marketing & Communications Manager
At ‘Guy Fawkes’ station, Ebor in the New England of New South Wales the use of Angus HeiferSELECT was introduced as a way of gathering accurate sire identification as well as supplying predictive data that could be used to decide which heifers would be kept to breed from. Fraser and Pam James have now been using Angus HeiferSELECT at ‘Guy Fawkes’ for three years, with the 2019 born ‘Q heifers’ first tested in 2020. More recently the James’s have just begun sampling the 2021 born ‘S Heifers’ as they have been coming through the yards for their booster shots post weaning. ‘We’ll sample most of our weaner heifers each year, but we will leave out any that have any obvious structural issues and I will sample smaller lighter heifers as long as they have the frame, as they may simply have been later born calves and I’m confident that most will grow out well over winter with our program to develop them,’ said Mr James. Mr James started to investigate Angus HeiferSELECT following the products release at the end of 2017. ‘I began talking to Lachie Ayoub at Zoetis about it when the first media articles started appearing and it took me the best part of two years to get my head around it’. I had many conversations with Lachie in that time and read as much as I could about genomics and we finally pulled the trigger in 2020, following a fairly busy 2019 while there were drought and fires to contend with.’ When asked what he hoped to achieve using Angus HeiferSELECT and his reasons for implementing the use of the product, Mr James highlighted efficiencies of management and selection as key factors. ‘Simply weighing heifers and drafting off the ones I liked wasn’t going to produce cows and ultimately steers that marbled, had big EMA, were efficient etc.’ ‘We could select heifers that were structurally acceptable but the only way to keep pushing the traits I wanted was
“
to keep using bulls that displayed those progeny traits, but I didn’t have any way of identifying the females that were holding us back. The drive to receive more data to help make more accurate breeding decisions was also a driving force behind the implementation of Angus HeiferSELECT. ‘We don’t progeny test, I don’t have any interest in spending two months a year looking for newborn calves to tag and weigh etc. and even if we did start traditional progeny testing it would take us years to start getting accurate data.’ And while Mr James sees the current accuracy of Angus HeiferSELECT as a limitation, he believes that because the research has been done and will continue that overall accuracy will continue to improve. ‘We know that genomics works and has predictive ability, the levels differ with the various traits but as long as the R&D keeps going then the technology will continue to improve.’ The use of Angus HeiferSELECT is a long-term commitment at ‘Guy Fawkes’, with Mr James highlighting that he is only three years in and until he is further down the track, he won’t know the impact the product is having for his herd. ‘We’ve committed to the program as long as the R&D continues by Angus Australia and its partners and as long as the data continues to support the program.’ ‘This is new technology, it isn’t traditional progeny testing and collection of EBVs, and I’ve listened to the critics who think I’d be better off running a traditional progeny test program, but I don’t have the time, resources or inclination to start that now and it would be a slow process to collect data of any accuracy.’
Simply weighing heifers and drafting off the ones I liked wasn’t going to produce cows and ultimately steers that marbled, had big EMA, were efficient etc
“
The Angus Bulletin - Winter 2022
| 49
