E-Star making bull selection easier

• Published date: 24 May 2023
• Publication title: Central Rural Life

The system showed the profitability to be made from each bull for the traits important to each client’s needs, including a maternal index

This year, it has had an exciting new expansion.

The Fossil Creek client base, who are those at the coal face of what works in practice in the industry, have given resounding support for the new system’s clarity and ability to reflect the areas of economic value for each bull in every special commercial breeding programme.

You should only be paying for a bull’s ability to add value to your individual programme — end of story.

Many commercial breeders pay huge money for bulls at some other sales throughout the country that have very low growth indexes or extremely low carcass weight estimated breeding values (EBVs). This makes no economic sense if you are looking for premiums for branded beef products (in these times of monitoring and traceability) and a demand for your calves from finishers who are watching the performance of each bloodline.

The Fossil Creek Angus programme concentrates on multi-trait selection. All females are calved at 2 years of age up on the hill block at Five Forks, North Otago — with a short two-cycle window of mating — and are subjected to a continuous rigorous culling regime throughout their lifespan and are run in genuine commercial hill country conditions.

‘‘Focusing on your bottom line, not fancy marketing or hype’’ has been a proven model for Fossil Creek Angus and one that puts it in good stead for driving profitable results for its clients’ breeding herds around the country.

‘‘You should be choosing your bulls on the requirements of what your own farming operation needs, not someone else’s,’’ Fossil Creek partner Blair Smith says.

‘‘This work has been paramount to help farmers move away from often-misleading indexes, for example ‘self-replacing index’, which is dangerous in terms of its generic assumptions in weighting of traits. You could be a maternally focused herd and end up buying a bull that is only suited to a terminal herd situation.

‘‘A more detailed yet simplified E-Star system allows the bull buyer to drill down to what they really need...