lets have a different conversation about heifer calving ease

http://www.keeneyscorner.com/t305-direct-vs-maternal-calving-ease

This thread gets better as it goes on
Some really good thoughts on things I have been trying to understand.
Shorthorn could concentrate on this and make better headway, I think.

Interesting discussion, but the website is about to make my eyes melt.  Hard to take the people seriously when they're posting on a website that looks like it was built by a half blind Y2K doomsday prepper.

I think THE reason most lines of Shorthorns have occasional issues with calving ease is the following. Usually somewhere back in the pedigree there is a big birth weight floating around. It may be 3 generations back but it will randomly show up on occasion. I think......that in say a Angus calving ease line.....you won't find these occasional big bwts in a disciplined program. But in the Shorthorn breed you always have someone sampling a 110bwt bull......see if they can get away with it......to raise the next great one(every year the same breeder in the same sale has a calf that is the greatest ever produced from this herd). There are a lot of huge bwts in the breed along with all kinds of shapes of baby calves. And this occurs in any show ring herd but currently due to the black hided deal the Shorthorns have become a show ring breed. Not right or wrong but a fact.

BW, CE and MCE are discussed endlessly on "Shorty Hfr Bulls" thread and a lot of people can't get past birth weight to look at CE let alone look at the calving ease of a bulls daughters. If you want heifers that calve unassisted you really need to look at all three and at the end of the day for me it is MCE that is the most important. It also takes the longest time to determine. A bulls 3rd crop of calves is hitting the ground when his first daughter's start calving so until then you have actual BW's and and the calving ease of the sire to go on. If you have kept the daughters to this stage they probably have been a reasonable combination of these two traits. If you can produce animals with high MCE as well then you should be able to produce females that can be bred to terminal sires. A breeding program is long term so with any traits that you are selecting for you really won't know how good your sire is until his offspring hits production age.

I have heard my commercial angus friends saying that using calving ease bulls (low BW) has painted them into a corner so that now their homegrown bulls look like steers and their replacement heifers are transmiting smaller pelvic measurements. Also they associate all the selection for low BW with fawn calf.
So they regret the whole thing.
What are some examples of maternal grand sires in the Shorthorn breed to build in MCE?

Librarian......you can't go about it like that. It won't work. The best you can do is use a sire with a 80 sum pound bwt......three generations in a row. It takes care of itself. But Shorthorn breeders refuse to use a bull with a bwt less then 90#'s. You cannot take a fire and ice approach.jmo

Well, I was hoping to avoid that by not playing with fire
The thing is, I saw Charolaise bulls all over the place this summer, from Montana to Pennsylvania. To offer something relevant to the commercial producer as a way to introduce Shorthorn cross replacements from his angus based cows, they need to have the ability to calve out Charolaise or Simmental terminal cross calves.
If Shorthorn gets all hung up on low birth weight to save us, it might ruin the cows for the greedy world out there.
However, I heard you and will use the 80 lb rule when I save bull calves for my program. It explains a lot about preventing cow size from creeping up in retained heifers. Select for performance second and weight range first.

librarian said:

Well, I was hoping to avoid that by not playing with fire
The thing is, I saw Charolaise bulls all over the place this summer, from Montana to Pennsylvania. To offer something relevant to the commercial producer as a way to introduce Shorthorn cross replacements from his angus based cows, they need to have the ability to calve out Charolaise or Simmental terminal cross calves.
If Shorthorn gets all hung up on low birth weight to save us, it might ruin the cows for the greedy world out there.
However, I heard you and will use the 80 lb rule when I save bull calves for my program. It explains a lot about preventing cow size from creeping up in retained heifers. Select for performance second and weight range first.

Click to expand...

I do not pay any attention to EPDs.  I do measure the pelvis of all heifers before they meet the bull.  I expect a heifer to have a 70 pound calf unasisted.  That should produce a cow that can have an 85 pound calf.  I am slowly reducing frame size but not losing pounds as I add thickness and depth.

aj said:

But Shorthorn breeders refuse to use a bull with a bwt less then 90#'s.

Click to expand...

I don't think it's a refusal as much as it is the fact that MORE TIMES THAN NOT,the better bulls just so happen to be the ones with a little more birth weight. At this point in our breeds progression, it's very expensive if not impossible to find one that is genuinely superior and also considered heifer safe by general beef industry standards. Check out some of the birthweight to weaning weight spreads in the Angus breed, for example. We just don't have that available in our breed YET.

Why do elephant seals and wildebeests pretty much have no problem w be?


Dimorphism?

I think calving ease has more to do with the size of the cow's pelvis than the BW of the calf. The pelvis is a long bone and when we keep breeding for smaller BWs we can also inadvertently shorten that the pelvis.

To knabes question:
It seems a matter of life history strategy to me.
First I would look at differences between ungulates and the I would look at differences between ruminants. If migrating, herd traveling animals slow down, something eats them.
Precocial young have the advantage in this scenario. Nature selects against extremes, so we are back to optimal BW relative to resource availability.
The wild type bovine is born light and jumps up to fill its tank and go. Probably on that A2 milk.
Take predation out of the picture and put candy bars into the food chain and see what happens. Or cross with an elephant seal.

librarian said:

Well, I was hoping to avoid that by not playing with fire
The thing is, I saw Charolaise bulls all over the place this summer, from Montana to Pennsylvania. To offer something relevant to the commercial producer as a way to introduce Shorthorn cross replacements from his angus based cows, they need to have the ability to calve out Charolaise or Simmental terminal cross calves.
If Shorthorn gets all hung up on low birth weight to save us, it might ruin the cows for the greedy world out there.
However, I heard you and will use the 80 lb rule when I save bull calves for my program. It explains a lot about preventing cow size from creeping up in retained heifers. Select for performance second and weight range first.

Click to expand...

That is a little weird to me because that is single trait selection disregarding pelvic size and maternal calving ease. The only thing you will know for sure is that they can have 80 lb calves. What about commercial herds that want your british based cows to use in a terminal program using bulls that will give them maximum pounds at weaning? Will they want cows that are selected for 80 lbs maximum birth weights ?

Turn out 100 sets of 25 6month old heifer with a 2year old or less bull per pen of 25 heifers.


Rotate bulls for 10 years. Bulls that have heifers that die (no assistance allowed) gets removed from rotation.

Okotoks, I agree that there is a contradiction there.
I just meant my own program, which is developing a strain of low input, rugged Shorthorns that marble on hill grass pasture  and acorns. That kind of animal needs to breed early, grow fast to a certain point and then store fat. So there has to be a constraint on size.  For  the real world, looking at MCE three generations back and a 90 lb birth weight calibration seems a reasonable way to look at it. I am still wondering which shorthorn sires are considered great cowmakers for MCE. If I was conventional, I'd be concerned with daughters in production.

Okotoks said:

librarian said:

Well, I was hoping to avoid that by not playing with fire
The thing is, I saw Charolaise bulls all over the place this summer, from Montana to Pennsylvania. To offer something relevant to the commercial producer as a way to introduce Shorthorn cross replacements from his angus based cows, they need to have the ability to calve out Charolaise or Simmental terminal cross calves.
If Shorthorn gets all hung up on low birth weight to save us, it might ruin the cows for the greedy world out there.
However, I heard you and will use the 80 lb rule when I save bull calves for my program. It explains a lot about preventing cow size from creeping up in retained heifers. Select for performance second and weight range first.

Click to expand...

That is a little weird to me because that is single trait selection disregarding pelvic size and maternal calving ease. The only thing you will know for sure is that they can have 80 lb calves. What about commercial herds that want your british based cows to use in a terminal program using bulls that will give them maximum pounds at weaning? Will they want cows that are selected for 80 lbs maximum birth weights ?

Click to expand...

I think the 80lb threshold is a bit low but not by much.  You know there's going to be a normal distribution of birth weights and when you start pushing the MEAN birth weight over 85-90lbs, this is when the commercial guy is going to start running into trouble.  It's not the average calf that causes the problem; its the outlier 125lb calf out of cow that's used to having 85lbers that lays down and dies on you-- that's the one you really remember.  As to avoid this, the producers I personally know select bulls where even the top 1% of their bw's will still fall within an acceptable (meaning zero assistance as they'll certainly be unobserved) birth weight range. 


http://www.m6ranch.com/catalogs/bullsale.html
I looked through the M6 Charolais sale catalog prolly 40 times but went through it again just to confirm what I thought --  Out of all the bulls they sale, there is NOT ONE over 100lb birth weight.  I saw one bull in there w/ a 99lb and one w/ a 95 but, without doing the math, Id say the average bw of the Char bulls offered was under 88lbs.  What you see here is Char bulls with not only more growth, but also bulls with lower birth weights, and as is the case with many of these bulls, bulls that are every bit as maternal as the common SH bull. 

Now I understand the SH breed isn't at the point of luxury the Char breed is where we can just go out and choose at will bulls with the type of performance spreads these bulls do, but this doesn't mean we should stop continually striving to attain these standards. And it sure doesn't mean we should just discard the genetics of bulls who can't be entrusted to calve entire calf crops unassisted.  IMO- it just means these are bulls aren't IMPROVED (via evolution =>I've seen Angus pedigrees that have literally twice as many generations since 1980 as do some SH pedigrees and astute selection pressure) enough to present to the commercial market yet.  They have characteristics that are absolutely viable and beneficial to the industry but UNTIL improvements are achieved and an overall level attained, it's best they not be released to the commercial market. 

At the point of progression the SH breed currently is in,  progressive purebred breeders should be and are using bulls as breeding pieces that are more specialized in a particular area (but not well rounded enough overall) to really be applicable in the commercial mkt.  You see this in quote unquote "heifer bulls"-- most times if it weren't for their supreme calving use, they wouldn't be used at all.  The opposite end of the spectrum is just as valid.  Phenotypical excellence,, but in a 120lb bw package.  To me, neither of these lines should be discarded but rather the duty placed upon the pure bred breeder to merge the qualities of the 2 lines into 1 superior specimen.. BEFORE they're released.

I think the true merit of a breeder should be evaluated by the level of progression (in relationship to the breed in general) his sale cattle exhibit.  Anybody can go out, purchase cattle and start breeding 70lb low bw SH bulls that wean 475lb calves on Texas pasture.  Just as easily accomplished is having 95lb bw SH bulls that wean 650lbs on Texas pasture (I have both this year).  But by INDUSTRY STANDARDS, neither of these margins are desirable.  Restraint needs to be shown by purebred breeders to wait and only promote bulls that are genuinely competitive with individuals in other breeds.  If the Angus breed has high calving ease bulls that still have the performance to hit 700lb weaning weights, well then making noise about a SH bull w/ high calving ease that weans 500lb is silly.  Just seems big fish in a small bowl-like.  To me, this individual should be regarded as a breeding piece; a tool for the purebred breeders to utilize but not as a complete package worthy of being released into the Beef Industry under the Shorthorn name.  There's tremendous upside in the SH breed and endless room for improvement, we just have to be realistic.  There's many different avenues a breeder can take to achieve results, even to achieve the same results--  but whatever path is chosen,  I just hope its one that continue to close the gap between INDUSTRY leaders and the SH breed. 

librarian, go to this sight to search bulls that have a high MCE, put in 13 for a low and 20 for a high .http://search.shorthorn.org/default.aspx

Thanks, I didn't know you could do that. But of course I wondered off into the pedigrees..
How are the ways that MCE numbers can be misleading?
Here is a bull that looks to me like a good bull for making cows but his MCE is -2.8.
Looks to me just by the way he is built.

You can't tell by looking. One of my favorite bulls of all time is Buf Crk Cherokee Canyon 4912. His CEM (red angus version of MCE) is a -16! the cattle are really big hipped but the females have a bone that sticks up in the pelvis so you have to mate him right. A note on selecting for birthweight.... I don't think it is smart to pick a number such as 80lbs and go with it. Environment plays such a huge role. For example, in my registered red angus we will have several every year that are 95+ lbs at birth. The difference is the cattle graze out all year and calve at the end of may. This means they have two months of high cp high energy feed and the calves get big. These same matings calved in march would be at least 10lbs off of that. So I think you should select for your environment and select more for maternal calving ease, then calving ease direct.

Mill Iron.....thats so interesting. Our vet.....when she does pelvic exams checks for extra bone in the base of the pelvis. Every body I talk to about it thinks I'm crazy.....I wondered if she was crazy. Is there a name for this abnormality? Is it a mutation? Thanks in advance. Does this occur in all breeds?