Steer Planet - Show Steers and Club Calves Forum

Heck TJ, if that doesn't rank as at LEAST a 12, I don't know what kinda life your living, but I sure would take a chunk of it!!!
Congrats on the great news on Doc!!! Sounds like some real potential to help out many different aspects of the cattle industry!

TJ, could you clarify the MMI scores for marbling a little bit please.  are the best scores centered around an imaginary mean of high choice and the scores go down from there if they grade both lower and higher, ie the score for prime was lower (+14 was the avg MGV for choice.)\

select grades     negative number
low choice         +7
choice               +14
high choice       +20
low prime           not reported
prime                +14
high prime        not reported

doc holliday score  25.34

also, is there a number of markers associated with his score.  there is a waygu bull i linked the other day i think that is 14 stars by genestar.  any thoughts on why you chose MMI over bovigen, and have you considered using the bovigen system for just one bull for "marketing" purposes as well?  i once saw some stats on the pervasiveness of tenderness, marbling genes in the general cattle population, and their presence is pretty meager, but could have been associated with sample bias for their relatively low presence just to market the system.  now for the very faint drum roll, have you ever seen any "smokey" marbling in your feeders?  this is usually referred to a smaller fat molecule which is not ususally visible when the carcass is graded, and may actually be more visible after the carcass has cooled for a couple of days like a friday kill and viewed on monday.

interesting data from a couple of perspectives.  it seems sufficient pressure has been placed on feeding where the most numbers are between low choice and hi select.  the next test would be to see if progeny from a marker selected bull could skew either the mean or the distribution.  from inital tests to do this, i have seen a change, but at the time, the test was too small to deehphasize selection bias. i am still confused why the prime carcass gets a lower number, other than what they are selecting for is to be in the high choice range, and deselect markers in outside this range as feeding for this much fat is counterproductive in their opinion.  i know this sounds strange, but i am interested in where the fat is which i think MMI tests for as well such as inside the body cavity, outside (backfat) or inside the muscle (marbling).  can anyone comment on wheter they think minimizing backfat may be a bad thing survivability wise in colder climates as an insulator.  robert de baca's wife once told me that one thing she thought was intersting about angus cattle was that in the winter, angus would have snow on their back, while other's (she didn't say what) the snow was melted off indicating more calories were being used to maintain body temp.

no genetic testing company has tried to determine what percentage effect photoperiodism plays in the ability to marble, with all inquiries by myself resulting in unreturned inquiries, kinda like asking which cutting stud would add foot size to my mare and could you send pictures.  no response to that one either.

the bovigen markers have been "certified" by the usda, for whatever that's worth.  the number of markers MMI uses is a strategy that is a big tent meaning different markers may work with different genetic backgrounds and not others at the same percentage.  i would like to see them report on the "percent" effect of those markers, which is economically difficult for them as they have so many markers, and well, to validate them is expensive.  a neat comparison of validated markers (bovigen) vs the big tent method (MMI). 

also interesting is just the data distribution itself, it's not a normal distribution.  only 5 and 9 primes,but lots of norolls.  perhaps from a purely statistical perspsective, the data may be real as the lower end of the carcasses just need further partitioning.  seems to be the most clustering around  high select, which is somewhat reassuring from a feeding perspective as that's what appears to be the goal of the feeders to retain profits from not too much feed to serve the costco walmart markets.  seems somewhat disappointing from a restaraunt and eating experience.  the data could also be skewed by the sample population itself.  if they selected cattle that had little chance of marbling, and if there was a small set of cattle that had some marbling distribution, they could have selected for markers for those cattle instead of marbling.  that probably doesn't make sense, but i would like to see some generational data.  there is probalby little doubt doc holliday has something going for him though.  how about a test with the same number of cattle with doc holliday as the sire of two generations of data, all linebred, with all semen sales to TJ?

my response is already too long as i have lost sight of the fact that prime has a low score, perhaps indicating there are markers in that group that are not in the MMI dataset, but in doc holliday and hopefully not just in the fact he is a smaller terminal size than probably most of the animals in the test.