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 things are all non-genetic factors.

They are responsible for much of the differences between the bulls at this sale and are the same things we must account for when collecting data for genetic evaluation.

If you don’t performance record and account for all the factors that influence the way an animal performs, then it’s going to be impossible to work out what the animal will pass on to its calves.

If you don’t measure, how do you know where you’re at, or where you’re going?

You don’t. That’s almost true with breeding. In fact, you don’t actually have to record a trait to receive an EBV.

If you used to record the trait, or you are recording other traits that are correlated, then Breedplan will reward you with the breeding value anyway. But that doesn’t make it particularly reliable.

Some would say ‘‘rubbish in equals rubbish out’’. For example, if you record 200-day weight then you will automatically get a birth weight, 400-day , 600-day and mature cow weight EBV.

From a science standpoint we can estimate what the given animal is going to...