EXECUTIVE CORNER

GENETIC FOOTPRINTS

by Darrell Wilkes, Ph.D., International Brangus Breeders Association (IBBA) executive vice president

This issue of the Brangus Journal lists the largest breeders based on THR receipts. There’s a list of the most aggressive users of ET technology, and a list of the sires with the largest genetic footprint in the breed during the past year. In this issue, we also produced a list of the sires whose daughters produced the most calves during the past year. It is quite obvious that the listed breeders and the listed sires leave a pretty large genetic footprint.

Looking only at the primary prefix categories of R (Brangus), RR (Red Brangus), UB (Ultrablack), and UR (Ultrared), the top 25 sires produced about 15% of the calves registered during the 12-month period. A bit more than 16% of the calves registered were produced by the daughters of another list of 25 sires, and there is some overlap in the sire lists.

Even though every breeder has their own breeding plan and goals, and no two breeders see the world in exactly the same way, it is obvious that the genetic trends in a breed, over time, are influenced greatly by a relatively small handful of genetic leaders (genetic leaders including breeders and bulls). This is nothing new and is not unique to Brangus.

Speaking only for myself, having grown up on a familysized seedstock operation, it took me a while to attain the maturity to stop looking at the largest and most successful breeders with envy and jealousy and begin looking at them as a large laboratory where I could reap the rewards of their experiments. In other words, kind of like an R&D department that I didn’t have to pay for. As I was growing up, we could not afford to make too many breeding mistakes and still market the number of quality bulls we needed to keep the outfit afloat. We gladly waited until the “big boys” had tested an exciting young sire before we would buy semen. They had large contemporary groups, so it wasn’t too difficult to see which bulls consistently sired the best calves. Come to think of it, I cannot recall a single time when one of the large, prestigious breeders turned us down when we asked to drop by and look at their calves. Most of them would drop whatever they were doing and drive us around through pasture after pasture looking at cattle – topped off by a homecooked meal and an offer to bunk for the night if we were too tired to drive home.

Can you imagine another industry where such a thing would happen? If the local Ford dealer had the largest and most successful dealership in the county, do you think he would allow the little Dodge dealer in the neighboring community to drop by to pick up ideas on how to run his own outfit better? Don’t hold your breath on that one.

Stop and think about it. Every seedstock breeder competes with every other seedstock breeder, but they’ll open the tent door and show you everything they’re doing. In that sense, we sure don’t act like competitors. We act more like partners. I truly believe that our competition is not the fellow Brangus breeder down the road but, instead, a mindset among far too many commercial producers that “any bull is a good as any other bull as long as he’s cheap enough.” This is a failing mindset and I believe that it is becoming less prevalent. It is becoming less prevalent because the cattle market is changing. The price spread between lower and higher quality calves has never been greater. Price signals are telling every producer that if they want to top the sale, they need good genetics. They need descript genetics – not some smorgasbord of genetic inputs that makes it impossible for the feeder cattle buyer to know what he’s actually getting.

The demand for high-quality documented genetics is strong and will continue to strengthen. We want to make our Brangus footprint bigger across the industry. Your fellow breeders have developed a long term plan and we are implementing it through exciting projects like Brangus Value and Brangus Vigor which are designed to grow our genetic footprint. Whether you involve yourself in one or both of these projects, I encourage you to bail in and get up to speed on them.