Angus Families

[cow pollinater]

I gather that I need to set my selection criteria such as epds, physical characteristics, and goals and then go find those animals. .

That's a good start. Don't be to picky as they're all flawed somewhere. Get some cows that are overall kind of what you want to see and then focus on picking bulls that make them better.
Personally, I try to breed to the ideal rather than corrective mate every cow to a bull that is suposed to fix all of her fualts.
Example:The heritability of stature is 40%, which is high for a genetic trait. If you were to try to corrective mate a short cow by using a tall bull, you could get a calf that is either as short as his mom or as tall as his dad and anywhere between but you have no idea what will happen when you corrective mate the calf as it has the size of one parent but the genetics of both parents.
Pick an Ideal and breed towards that. Two generations of breeding to a bull that is of ideal height will likely give you some consistancy without the swing from extreme to extreme. There are certainly traits where more is better, carcass, WW,etc, but for the phenotype stuff pick an ideal and breed to that.
I like to use no more than two bulls in my AI program. That way my calf crop stays consistant. A few cows would be better served individually to be mated to different bulls but in the long run consistancy matters more than individual calves if you are selling to commercial cattlemen(if they're show cattle then individual matings might be a better option). Over time I see less cows that would be better served with different matings.
I'd much rather use a highly proven bull that does exactly what I want than a semi-proven bull that tempts me with fantastic epds and looks like he might do what I want. The young bull may be a great one and if he is I can still use him after he's proven himself to me and the genetics will still be the same but in the meantime I've avoided using some genetics that weren't what they were suposed to be... Leave the risk of young sires to big name breeders who can stand to absorb a bad mating into a pillow of good ones every so often.

 

[Massey135]

"Pick an ideal and always breed toward that" - great advice right there.

Consistency in your initial cow selection will put you on the right track as well.

 

[Warrior2154]

Cow pollinated. Your post was very informative. One topic you brought up that struck me was the using 2 AI bulls and that way commercial cattleman see consistency. Can you elaborate more on that idea because that is who I plan to sell bulls to? Should you try to find similar cows as well to improve consistency?

 

[cow pollinater]

Cow pollinated. Your post was very informative. One topic you brought up that struck me was the using 2 AI bulls and that way commercial cattleman see consistency. Can you elaborate more on that idea because that is who I plan to sell bulls to? Should you try to find similar cows as well to improve consistency?

Commercial cattlemen like to produce a uniform calfcrop if possible and one way to do that is to buy bulls that are either half brothers as a lot or try to mix and match similar genetics. If you have a few generations of similar genetics in all of your cattle then it's an easy choice for a commercial guy to come back to YOU to get his next bull since he knows it will fit the uniform set of cows that he has.
In my ai program I picked five bulls that were doing what I wanted, mated every cow to a bull on the list, and then counted how many cows were mated to each bull and then tossed out the bottom three bulls and re-mated the cows to one of the two remaining sires. That way my calf crop was fairly similar despite alot of variation on the cows. One of the bulls is going to get used on the daughters of the other bull. I'm on my second generation of doing it this way and I think it works well for producing consistancy.

On the cow side, if you can find a consistant set that is already doing what you want then jump on them. Otherwise I'd pick and choose cows with performance. Research on the dairy side shows that the bottom 30% of the herd performance wise will almost always give progeny who are on the bottom 30% of the herd for as long as all of your cows are bred similarly. Knowing that, I'd rather have a high performance cow that doesn't fit the mold that I can change over time and keep the performance rather than a bunch of dinks that fit the mold that I set. Take performance and flex it over time to get it to fit the mold.
A cheap way to do it is to buy good quality older cows that are yesterdays news genetically for alot less than what a young registered cow would be worth and then breed them to your chosen bulls for two seasons. Keep the daughters, cull the cows, and your herd is first generation genetics. The calf crop from the daughters will have two generations of your decisions backing them and should start to match.

 

[Warrior2154]

Sorry for delayed response. That makes sense about consistency. How though can you build a name with commercial cattleman starting out? I mean I am new to is so I don't have any backing saying I consistently have good bulls.

 

[pdfangus]

i PUT MY BULLS THRU THE STATE PREFORMANCE TEST TO SEE HOW THEY STACKED UP.....
FORTUNATELY THEY DID WELL....

 

[Massey135]

Sire selection has lots of varibles A I or natural service. With A I you can make different decissions on each cow. Look at each cow and see what improvements they need then use the EPDs to improve on that trait and keep going down the line like that.Or you can just use the bull of the month.

These are both terrible philosophies to subscribe to.

A much better approach would be to "pick an ideal and always breed toward that"