Heifer Selection and the Modern Beef Cow - October 2021

Heifer Selection and the Modern Beef Cow by Nate Smith, General Manager

As we prepare for the upcoming 2021-2022 seedstock and feeder calf sale season, it’s worthwhile to look at how and why female selection has evolved in past years. More importantly, it seems like an appropriate moment to look at how the genetics and performance of females within the beef cattle system are critical to our industry’s resilience and success in an ever-changing, consumer-driven market.

More than in any other agricultural industry, the production of a beef female is central to the success of a cow-calf operation. The ideal beef cow is in production for eight to 10 years, while the average breeding bull makes a genetic contribution for an average of four to five years. Although our focus is often on sire selection, we can see the dam is a key contributor to an operation’s genetics and can have a greater impact on long-term profitability. So, why have we relied so heavily on sire selection rather than on replacement females? There is no simple answer, but three things come to mind: tools to measure and manage data, cost and time.

the lowest production cost and the most profit potential. In the past, producers have used tools like dam history, heifer birthdate, phenotype and weaning weight to make their replacement female selections. Producers that buy heifers may purchase females almost randomly, without anything more than cost per head being their main consideration. These selection metrics vary from one operation to the next, often with limited commonality.

We must also consider, even though most producers manage animals in a unique environment, they are typically working to produce the same general end product sold by quantity and quality. While every operation has its reasons to use different methods, it may be time to look at new tools and technologies that allow for at least one piece of the selection rubric to be standardized: genetic selection. This type of selection tool will allow producers to focus on a specific animal’s genes designed to move the operation forward compared to their peers, no matter the environment.

To understand this, we need to look at the common female selection protocols. Producers either rely on tradition or science. Both have a similar end goal: find a female with

Genetic are what we’ve been attempting to measure using traditional heifer selection practices, but in the past, we could not separate out management practices and environ-

ment. Without a standardized measuring tool, it’s difficult to compare animals from one operation to another, or even within a single herd. This leaves an immense amount of ‘unknown and guess’ in the selection equation. In the past, producers who had the time to collect the physical data from the production system are the only ones who could effectively use any type of actual data. However, that data carried a heavy non-genetic influence from the environment in which the animal was raised.

As time passed, these data points gained more value in the seedstock sector, allowing us to compare animals from across the country on a standardized set of genetic parameters known as EPDs. These standardized metrics across large populations continue to improve our beef herds after becoming well accepted, but that was just on registered animals.

Today, we have the technology to go one step further by allowing producers to select commercial animals, even those with unknown breed makeup, with the same standardized genetic measurements. DNA testing has allowed us to find the relationships between specific genes and physically measured traits. Traits that, in the past, would have taken time and expense to measure. With commercially applicable technology like Red Navigator and Igenity Beef ® , we can take a tissue or blood sample at birth and have a reliable value of an animal’s genetics within a few weeks. And, those genetics won’t change during that

animal’s lifetime. Such tools allow for better selection of replacement females with reliable information backed by hundreds of thousands of genotypes that correlate directly to the phenotypic traits of interest. Traits like stayability, calving ease, growth and carcass that were once difficult to measure and required a cost-prohibitive amount of time can now be easily quantified in months, not years.

Our industry is continually being asked to produce a higher quality, more efficient product on the same or fewer resources. Every time we put an animal that doesn’t help to accomplish this goal in production, it affects the producer’s bottom line and may open the industry up for criticism from the very sector we are trying to serve, the consumer. To meet this challenge in the past, we focused heavily on the sire side of our herds by using EPDs, indexes and other information to make these advancements. Moving forward, it’s time to add emphasis on the animals that represent our largest financial and genetic investment – the core of our industry, the modern beef cow. •