Performance recording brings value

• Published date: 18 May 2023
• Publication title: Clutha Leader

It occurs when the sire team you select are of higher merit than the cows in your herd and ultimately breed calves that are superior to their parents

To select sires of higher merit (and create genetic improvement in a herd), we must record our animals. It is the difference between animals (known as variation) that is the important stuff we work with.

We can only select the better animals for parents if we are objective in our measurement and sniff out the variation between them.

The eye is important. But unfortunately, many of the economically important traits in a beef herd must be measured objectively — because in using the eye we can only guess their value.

For example, it’s hard to tell if a bull will have fertile daughters by just looking at him, just as it’s hard to tell if his calves will have good marbling by just looking at him.

This can be overcome by recording these traits.

Imagine — you go along to a multi-vendor sale and raw data is presented for all of the different bulls for sale.

The bulls have come from all sorts of different farms and feeding, there is as much as three months’ age difference between them, some are out of heifers, some have been drenched and others have not.

You are meant to try to work out which is going to breed the best calves using the weights of the bulls in front of you as reference.

Sounds difficult? Well it is, and nearly impossible on the back of an envelope on sale day.

These...