New Thinking In Beef Cattle Breeding

Winners of the Agricultural Research Council’s Beef Performers Awards, Llewellyn Angus (2017 National Beef Cattle Improvement Herd) and Sanele Mbhele (2017 Emerging Beef Farmer), attended this year’s Beef Improvement Federation Symposium in the US. In part one of a two-part series, Llewellyn Angus shares his notes.

- Llewellyn Angus

The Beef Improvement Federation Research Symposium & Convention is held annually in the US. Each year it is hosted in a different state by a local university with an animal science division. The format is similar to the annual Aldam Stockman School held in the Free State, only larger.

This year’s symposium, held in Loveland, Colorado, and hosted by Colorado State University, was the 50th anniversary of the event and drew about 500 delegates. The main theme was ‘Elevating the industry’.

The buzzwords were ‘singlestep’, ‘estimated breeding value (EBV) evaluations’, and ‘genomic-enhanced breeding values (GEBV)’.

The difference between the cattle breeding industry in the US and South Africa is that in the US, these GEBVs are available with relatively high accuracies for most breeds, and the application of reproduction GEBVs is gaining ground. The importance of good, clean performance data was also emphasised at the congress. Solid phenotypic data is required to implement good genomics.

The emphasis in the US is on early growth as well as meat quality, and in this respect the Angus breed plays an important role.

REPRODUCTION BENCHMARKING

According to one of the conference speakers, Dr Cliff Lamb of Texas A&M University, 60% of cows in a herd should calve in the first 30 days of the season. This implies that nearly 60% of cows should be in-calf after the first 21 days of the breeding season. Lamb stressed that the gestation rate had an economic impact four times greater than any other trait. It is followed by growth rate. To achieve this, heifers should calve easily at 24 months under high nutrition levels.