I was at a symposium thing (mostly beef genetics) yesterday and came out with some interesting things to think about. Thought I would get some input.....
Ok so in the future we are going to have more genetic selection tools at hand. Maybe EPD's on more traits, and of course, more marker assisted selection. But one speaker thought that the commercial guys aren't going to be interested in the EPD's and selection indexes much. Instead it would be the purebred breeders focusing on that stuff, and providing "custom" breeding stock for customers (remember a small number of large ranches have a lot of cattle, so some of these breeders have one ranch needing lots of bulls). The commercial guys might be a little more interested in genomics (markers). What do you guys thing about that?
Do you think if across breed EPD's, and cross-breed EPD's were widely available (they do exist by the way, but they aren't really able to be practically applied overall) that that might change the dynamics?
[Note...I already know how some of you feel about turnign in EPD numbers and all that, but lets just remember for this discussion, that there ARE plenty of people out there who use them]
Is branded beef the way to go?
National ID. Now remember in Canada we're ahead of you, so it's already well established and we have moved from the barcode tags to the RFID, which are pretty easy to read information from. So, my question isn't whether the ID is needed, so let's for the sake of discussion, say it happens. What do you think about the idea of being able to track all the information over an animals life? How would this affect marketing, and breeding?
What's farming's future in your area? We are all over so this should be interesting. If you are in urban sprawl, are 0 emission biodome farms going to be the only way to have intensive farms (like dairies and feedlots)? What about the land? What are we going to have to feed?
Some research was done on sheep, where ewe stayability in relation to her production traits was looked at. Now in one way you might expect ewes that have high litter sizes and give a lot of milk to wear themselves out and not have longevity. But in fact they found the opposite. He called it "Good Ewe Syndrome" and while the research hasn't been done, he does suspect there is a "good cow syndrome" as well. So I thought about my cows and sure enough....for example the one that moved from fall calving to first to calve in spring in her first 3 years just by breeding back quickly, raises the nice big calves, and is now 13 and going strong, among others. So think about yours...do you have "good cow sydrome" What do you think the cause might be? (Now I know in commercial herds we cull for production, so you might not see it, but in the experiment they did not....he said he had to ask 4 times because he couldn't believe it ;D)
Phew...that was a lot....but it should be interesting.
Ok so in the future we are going to have more genetic selection tools at hand. Maybe EPD's on more traits, and of course, more marker assisted selection. But one speaker thought that the commercial guys aren't going to be interested in the EPD's and selection indexes much. Instead it would be the purebred breeders focusing on that stuff, and providing "custom" breeding stock for customers (remember a small number of large ranches have a lot of cattle, so some of these breeders have one ranch needing lots of bulls). The commercial guys might be a little more interested in genomics (markers). What do you guys thing about that?
Do you think if across breed EPD's, and cross-breed EPD's were widely available (they do exist by the way, but they aren't really able to be practically applied overall) that that might change the dynamics?
[Note...I already know how some of you feel about turnign in EPD numbers and all that, but lets just remember for this discussion, that there ARE plenty of people out there who use them]
Is branded beef the way to go?
National ID. Now remember in Canada we're ahead of you, so it's already well established and we have moved from the barcode tags to the RFID, which are pretty easy to read information from. So, my question isn't whether the ID is needed, so let's for the sake of discussion, say it happens. What do you think about the idea of being able to track all the information over an animals life? How would this affect marketing, and breeding?
What's farming's future in your area? We are all over so this should be interesting. If you are in urban sprawl, are 0 emission biodome farms going to be the only way to have intensive farms (like dairies and feedlots)? What about the land? What are we going to have to feed?
Some research was done on sheep, where ewe stayability in relation to her production traits was looked at. Now in one way you might expect ewes that have high litter sizes and give a lot of milk to wear themselves out and not have longevity. But in fact they found the opposite. He called it "Good Ewe Syndrome" and while the research hasn't been done, he does suspect there is a "good cow syndrome" as well. So I thought about my cows and sure enough....for example the one that moved from fall calving to first to calve in spring in her first 3 years just by breeding back quickly, raises the nice big calves, and is now 13 and going strong, among others. So think about yours...do you have "good cow sydrome" What do you think the cause might be? (Now I know in commercial herds we cull for production, so you might not see it, but in the experiment they did not....he said he had to ask 4 times because he couldn't believe it ;D)
Phew...that was a lot....but it should be interesting.