Breeding Notes: AllForage

[inyati13]

Ryan, you and I are friends. I appreciate that you and I are capable of conducing a civil discussion. I learned from your comments on the visit Kris and I made to Misty Meadows Farm. I learned more about your disenchantment with the state of breeding practices in the cattle industry. You expressed some of your personal "beefs" about breeding practices. For example, the use of AI bulls by commercial producers. It is easy to observe your frustration when you characterize it as "people picking bulls off the glossy pages of a book".

I think that is a little unfair. Some folks like Kris go see those bulls. They look at videos of the bulls moving. They study the sons and daughters of those bulls. I know Kris is not enamored easily by a bull. She is very critical in her judgment and in matching of the bull to her cow/heifer. She is striving to meet the objectives of her program. I am using Kris but I could use many other producers that I am becoming familiar with. For example, Kris has children that employ cattle she produces to participate in a demanding show agenda. She has been successful each year at producing a group of show cattle out of her herd. But those cattle perform well in a herd like mine. I have one of her show girls and I will tell you in a few years how that worked out but right now, I think she has high prospects.

Ryan, your comments are premised on a industry-wide view of the breeding of beef cattle. But on an individual producer basis, what a producer is seeking to accomplish may not require or occur by pursuing breeding on the general tenets you proffer.

You sometimes make comments like these people are all "fluff and puff". Or that all they do is put the semen catalog on the wall and throw a dart at it. Would you agree that might be an unfair characterization. Please do not take that to mean your points are wrong. I have learned from your messages more than you seem to appreciate. You and I have exchanged Private Messages. Like you, I am busy and do not get time to investigate some of the excellent sources you have sent me. What I would ask is for you to provide a little more detail in your comments so they are beneficial to me and other users who do not have your experience and knowledge.

I was wondering if you would be interested in a more detailed presentation of your concerns with the state of breeding in the cattle industry. I have grasped the main tenets of your concerns, like prepotency. Keep in mind Ryan that those are subjects that college level undergraduate genetics deals with but it does not make one a breeder because he can define these terms. Here are some definitions I picked to provide a basis:

DEFINITIONS:

Breeding: Breeding is the reproduction of plants and animals. A beef producer manages breeding for the purpose of producing beef cattle.

Breeder: A breeder is a person who practices the vocation of mating carefully selected specimens of the same breed to reproduce specific, consistently replicable qualities and characteristics.

Heterosis: Heterosis refers to the phenomenon that progeny of diverse varieties of a species or crosses between species exhibit greater biomass, speed of development, and fertility than both parents.

Prepotency: the ability of one parent to impress its hereditary characters on its progeny because it possesses more homozygous, dominant, or epistatic genes.

Line breeding: Line breeding is a term commonly used to describe milder forms of inbreeding. Typically it involves arranging matings so that one or more relatives occur more than once in a pedigree, while avoiding close inbreeding

 

[inyati13]

Hey Ryan, I was hoping the original post would get others involved. It would have been exciting to hear what goals and objectives others set for their breeding programs. I learned as a result of your comments about Misty Meadows Farm. What looks like a conflict between us is not. It is a learning and teaching opportunity. I bet our exchange made you think. I bet you reviewed your position on breeding. That was a purpose in my challenge. Get you to broaden your thoughts.

I was recently thinking about whether I am correct in saying I am not a breeder. Everything is relative someone once pontificated. In a relative sense, anyone who breeds a cow via AI or a bull is certainly thinking about the characteristics he wants to produce in the calf. Considering that fact, I guess we are all breeders of some magnitude although in my case, a low magnitude. I am not a breeder whose goal it is to produce a genetic line of cattle that will have a major impact on the breed. My goals are small ones. I am too old to stay at this long enough to make those kind of changes. Therefore, I am more than happy to stand on the shoulders of breeders like Rocking P folks and employ what they have worked for years to achieve.

 

[inyati13]

I have another thought on breeding. The methods and practices that producers employ to produce cattle is guided by multiple goals and objectives. In example, the Phillips who operate The Rocking P Enterprise. The Phillips are involved in every facet of the cattle industry. They have commercial herds, they have seedstock herds, they have donor cows, they do embryo implants, they produce show cattle, etc. To produce show stock, producers are going to use AI and Embryo implants and all the other glamory and shire to meets their goals.