CHOOSING THE RIGHT SELECTION TOOLS BASED ON YOUR OPERATION’S GOALS

from the American Gelbvieh Association

In addition to the benefits offered by crossbreeding, Gelbvieh and Balancer cattle offer breed advantages that make them logical for meeting the production goals and improving profitability of commercial farms and ranches. Long known for their value in crossbreeding systems, Gelbvieh sires add pounds and carcass value and their crossbred daughters will have longevity, fertility and maternal ability in the cowherd.

With the American Gelbvieh Association’s (AGA) participation with other world-wide beef breeds in International Genetic Solution’s genetic evaluation, it has never been easier to select Gelbvieh genetics to meet the needs of your operation. In fact, looking at a catalog on sale day or perusing a semen catalog can be overwhelming due to the amount of data contained and the number of traits reported. So, before you ever get started on your search for new genetics, taking the time to reflect on the goals of your operation and to establish breeding objectives is crucially important. What traits are important to you? Do you really need to maximize? Or is a more moderate amount of performance for that trait more suitable for your environment?

Once you have established your breeding objective, then it is important to understand the information available to help you meet that objective. Often, sale catalogs have not only expected progeny differences (EPDs) and indexes, but also performance data and ratios and sometimes even stand-alone DNA testing results. While an animal’s actual performance data (weights, for example) may be fun for coffee-shop bragging rights, those numbers only tell us an animal’s performance for a trait without taking into account the environment, which makes them fairly uninformative for genetic selection purposes. Even ratios, which do help compare animals within a single contemporary group do not allow us to compare animals outside of that specific group in that specific year. EPDs use much more information, including the animal’s own performance, pedigree data, progeny data and in some cases even genomic markers. Contemporary grouping also allows us to use EPDs to compare animals across years and herds. EPDs are our best estimate of an animal’s genetic worth as a parent and allow you to compare bulls based on their anticipated progeny performance for various traits of interest.

EPDs can be used to increase, decrease or optimize performance of a certain trait. You’ll find the percentile rank tables for various classes of animals on the AGA website at Gelbvieh.org. Remember, top 1 percent might be good for bragging, but does it meet your breeding objective? There are many EPDs to look at – and usually, selection for more than one trait that will be needed to meet the goals of your organization. With so many traits to look at, choosing the correct traits to put emphasis on while still practicing multi-trait selection can be challenging. This is where use of a selection index may be useful. Selection indexes, in general, are used to simplify genetic selection decisions by incorporating multiple traits into one number, allowing for simultaneous change in those traits through the use of one easily interpreted number reported in dollars. Typically, these indexes take into account the outputs considered on the revenue side of the profit equation, but they also consider the input, or expense, side associated with the production phase of interest. Indexes incorporate both genetic components (EPDs) and economic terms relevant to feedlot performance, carcass merit and cow-calf production.

However, before using any selection index in your breeding decisions, it’s really important to understand the traits underlying the index. If the trait EPDs are used in the computation of the index are not those that are important for the production goals and needs of your ranch, using them as a selection tool may not yield the desired result.