New tool to assist cattlemen with selecting bulls

LINCOLN, Neb. — Developing a breeding objective is the first step for selecting a bull for a cowherd.

“Your breeding objective should clearly identify sources of cost and revenue, economically relevant traits and goals based on available resources like land and labor,” said Matt Spangler, professor at the University of Nebraska.

“You have to identify the breeds you are going to utilize, develop a breeding system, select a seedstock supplier and select bulls that align with your breeding objectives,” said Spangler during the National Beef Cattle Evaluation Consortium Brown Bagger webinar series.

“I contend that we make bull selection too complicated and there’s too many EPDs (expected progeny differences),” he said. “We never drop EPDs and it baffles me why we publish birthweight EPDs because there is no justification for them.”

In addition, Spangler said, cattlemen don’t do a good job of technology adoption.

“They are poor at technology adoption overall, but particularly related to genetic selection tools,” he said.

Cattlemen are slow to use genetic selection tools, Spangler said, for many reasons such as genetic predictions seem opaque.

“Commercial producers don’t have time to excel in all areas related to sire selection because they are focusing more on day-to-day animal and financial management as I believe they should,” he said.

In addition, many times the EPDs are breed specific, so they need to be converted to a common base.

“Although indexes do exist and they are useful tools, they are still generalizations because they assume a general breeding objective, certain population means and certain economic parameters,” Spangler said.

To help with this issue, Spangler is working on a project funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop a web-based tool to aid in sire selection decisions.

“With iGENDEC, we’re taking the tools and knowledge we have relative to genetics and helping people turn that into impactful decisions,” Spangler said.

“We are encouraging the thought process of making an investment when you purchase bulls or semen,” he said. “Producers face the problem of obtaining the best bull for their operation given their circumstances since the best bull for me may differ from the best bull for someone else because our breeding objectives vary or our resources differ.”

Cattlemen should think about a bull purchase decision as a capital investment.

“To do that we have to quantify the differences in profit potential between the bulls given our unique circumstances,” Spangler said. “The iGENDEC tool helps people develop a customized index based on their own inputs which can be applied to EPDs of any bull.”

With the web-based tool, cattlemen enter information that includes the number of animals, herd specific parameters such as conception rate, calving loss rate, age distribution, calving difficulty and overall pregnancy rate.

“You can identify the breeds and breeders you want to apply your index to their bulls that have an index value which was derived from your input,” Spangler said.

Spangler used stayability as one example.

“If my planning horizon is three years compared to 20 years, I will see a fairly substantial change in the economic value for stayability,” he said. “If I’m making planning decisions based on a three-year horizon, stayability doesn’t mean much, but if I have a 20-year planning horizon it means a lot more and the same thing is true for heifer pregnancy.”

Cattlemen can use the tool to look at their herd averages and how they might impact pricing discounts.

“Maybe your hot carcass weights are over a threshold,” Spangler said. “Continuing to increase that is not advantageous where another producer may need to increase the hot carcass weights of his cattle.”

The developers of iGENDEC will provide the tool to the advisory board before the end of 2020 to get feedback on any changes they think are necessary.

“We plan to offer it to Extension personnel and producers during the first quarter of 2021,” Spangler said.

“We think that allowing beef cattle producers to take part in the creation of a selection index has the potential to increase the rate of technology adoption,” he said.