Sheep Industry News August 2023

Changes in Cattle Industry Show Where Sheep Are Headed SHEEP GENETICS USA L eachman Cat tle CEO and Founder Lee One of the big challenges is that it takes a lot of data to get good predictions. Plus, the data models depend on strong genetic linkages between herds and proper contemporary group designa tions. Ultimately, the predictions were and are only as good as the data submitted by the breeders. Even when the data is correctly calculated, it is still hard for breeders and commercial herds to see the differences.

Leachman is a third generation seedstock cattle producer who markets more than 2,000 head of Angus, Red Angus, Stabi lizer and Charolais bulls annually. As a past president of the Beef Improve

Another major challenge is that not all high BV animals are good. Yes, they excel at one trait, but that does not make them good animals. Often times, the traits we seek to improve are negatively correlated to other important traits. A classic example is growth rate versus calving ease. As the growth rate increased, we initially had troubles with birth weight and calving ease. More recently, we’ve seen many high genetic merit Angus bulls manifest poor claw structure. It’s hard to have faith in Breeding Values when the high BV animals turn out to cause more prob lems than they are worth. The last – and perhaps most significant – challenge was the skepticism expressed by breeders. Through the years, every major breeder has seen their leading genetic line succumb to being ranked low on some trait. The natural response is for the breeder to discount the accuracy of the genetic predictions – doing so ultimately undermines confidence in the system. SGUSA: You spend a lot of time working with profit predict ing indexes. What economic differences in the cattle industry have you witnessed by using those indexes and Breeding Values in general? Leachman: By using Breeding Values, we dramatically in creased the growth rate of beef cattle in the last 40 years. At the same time, we all but eliminated females that were very low on milk. Breeds that had weaknesses on one or two traits used BVs to move their breed means and become more competitive in the marketplace. Perhaps most notably, we have been able to dra matically increase end product quality by selecting for marbling. These changes were primarily driven by individual trait selection using BVs. Unfortunately, with these changes have come some negatives. I already mentioned the decrease in calving ease and the increase in hoof problems. In the case of calving ease, we simply imple mented BVs that allowed us to keep calving ease at the right level. The same will happen with hoof structure – we’ll use BVs

ment Federation and a recognized innovator and leader in the field of beef cattle genetics, he offers a look at how genetic technology became so prevalent in his industry. SGUSA: The use of Breeding Values are now widely accepted in the cattle industry. What were the major challenges the cattle industry faced in the adoption of that new technology? Leachman: Breeding Values for cattle first arrived in the early 1980s. It took nearly 20 years for them to become widely accept ed. In beef cattle, this adoption was greatly aided by the use of BVs in the dairy industry. Beef cattle producers could directly see the progress being made in dairy cattle. Even more importantly, the bovine semen distribution companies used BVs on dairy bulls and quickly adopted their use for selection of beef bulls to market. As in all segments of animal breeding, master breeders of beef genetics had established themselves through visual selection. They bred for a type. The most successful breeders, generally, were those that had uniform herds with exemplary phenotype. Like any major change, the move from phenotypic selection to data driven selection was painful. For starters, breeders didn’t re ally understand the BVs, and their commercial genetics custom ers understood them even less. Everyone in the industry was trained to do visual selection. To this day, the highest selling bulls are all phenotypic standouts. The easiest bulls to sell to commer cial ranchers are the good-looking ones.

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