I think there are many misconceptions about EPD's and Composite cattle.
I was at a sale the other day that we had performed a multi-breed evaluation on some of the bulls selling. Some of the consignors were very interested and liked what we did.
Out at the bull pens, visited more with some of these guys and even when they had some potential buyers looking at their bulls they had me explain some of our results to them.
Visiting with some other people there that I knew they were primarily looking at Angus bulls to put with heifers because of their calving ease. I ask them about some of the other bulls in the sale and they said that they knew that the EPD's on the other breeds were different and didn't trust themselves enough to be able to select another breed to use on the heifers.
So I pulled out the evaluations that we had done and showed them the results and that some of the other breeds of bulls in the sale could definitely be used on heifers. He wrote down the lot numbers and was going to look at them. In fact some of the other breeds had bulls with better calving ease. I have seen many questions on this forum asking about which bulls can be used on heifers. Where is there any kind of information as to the calving ease, BW, WW, YW etc.?
Wanted to see how some of the first lots in the sale sold. Was setting buy a guy from Iowa and a guy from Kansas. Got to visiting with them and they really like the idea of being able to have a true multi-breed evaluation to compare bulls of all breeds. Another thing that they said, they feel that EPD's are too confusing, one even mentioned that breeders with college degrees have difficulty understanding EPD's. The thing that is so confusing to them is the fact that every breed associations EPD's are all different, can't compare one breed to the next, and there are just too many EPD's.
We DO NOT use the EPD for our evaluations that have been done by the breed registry. We use the raw date, birth weight, weaning weight, yearling weight etc. along with 4 other contemporaries to generate our Multi-Breed evaluations. We have over 70 breeds and over 2.5 million animals in the database. We take into consideration the animals true breed makeup (not by a breed associations rules), include the hybrid vigor and breed information BEFORE our evaluations are ran. This is why we can compare one breed to another or one breed to an animals that is a composite, accurately.
It would surprise you how many we have had contact us that they finally got fed up with the politics and high expense of registering cattle with breed associations. Also how many breeders have more than one breed.
I guess it seems that many people want to say there are 2 kinds of beef breeders, show people and real beef people. I have ask some people who breed to club calve bulls, how well their cattle can perform compared to other breeds. They say they will perform quite well. We have seen some data that they do. But none of this is promoted, WHY?
How many club calf sire are there that are not registered? What if they are used on commercial cows? Where can these cattle be registered?
The Composite Beef Cattle Registry, is not the enemy. We are here to help producers.