CAB said:
cbcr do you or I should say your program have the ability/capability to make reccomended matings either accross the board or breed specific. In other words if I were to give you a registration # of a female, could you highly reccomend a bull to match up with her #s to make the resulting offspring's #s better?
I have been watching lately all of the questions posted on here about what do I breed my heifer to or my cow to, I have a Maine Anjou what can I breed her to, and the list goes on and on.
One of the bulls that was mention here was the black simmental bull ( SVF/NJC Built Right N48 - Reg#: 2225381) He has EPD's with the Simmental Association and is also in our evaluation system.
Now let's look at his EPD's
Simmental
Calving Ease (CE) 10.4
Birth Weight (BW) -0.6
Weaning Weight (WW) +28.9
With our evaluation here are his numbers
Within Breed Rank Across All Breeds
Simmental Ranking
Calving Ease (CE) +4 97% 76%
Birth Weight (BW) -2.1 95% 65%
Weaning Weight (WW) +49 71% 90%
So what do these numbers mean? we can start to look at a bull to use on heifers when his ranking on the across breed ranking is 75% or higher.
So with this bull there is no doubt that with the Simmental breed he could be used on heifers. But with our across breed evaluation, be very cautious.
We have several AI sires in our database. But, I think you are also seeing it on this board, there is not much information on many of the club calf sires as far as EPD's go.
Also what we are seeing is that with breeders breeding club cattle is that breed isn't as important as the result. What I mean is that it doesn't make any difference if you have females that are Angus, Shorthorn, Maine Anjou, Simmental, ChiMaine, or any other breed or combination of breeds. I think that when you start looking at this and if EPD's are available, with so many associations, evaluations, and then the breed association adjusts the numbers, how much more confusing can you get.
Now, just looking again at Built Rights numbers, if you were breeding to Simmental cattle you have nothing to worry about, but what about all the other breeds you have.
Again at looking at some of the posts as what to breed to, questions have been ask about adding more width, leg set, length and other traits.
Fact is there are no EPD's for these traits. Some of the bull studs have some of these basic traits listed as improves or not.
I think that what is really needed is a trait analysis list, combined with EPD's would be more beneficial than anything.
Years ago being very involved in the dairy industry and mating dairy cattle there was a system that was developed by Bill Weeks, known as the aAa (or Triple A) system. You can google it if you want to. Basically what aAa is is a 6 number system from 1 thru 6, each number has certain strength as corresponds to. Bulls are coded from the strongest trait to the weakest and females are coded from their weakest to their strongest. But this has only been applied to the dairy industry.
Now, to give you a short answer, while as I mentioned we do have quite a number of the AI sires in our evaluations, but not so with the club calf sires. If you have a short list and those bulls are in our database, YES, we can give you a list. We need data and we need information and then we can make it happen.
We are here to help and do whatever we can.
I feel that phenotype is closely related to a trait analysis. What are everyone's thoughts.