Three to four weeks is what they will tell you if you call and ask. My own experience was about two for 50K and a full month for defect test results. I sent off three HD50K and one NH on October 15 (Thursday). The HD 50K's were received at AAA and sent to the lab on Monday the 19th. The single NH test was sent to the lab on the 20th. On Wednesday Nov 4th (16 days later) my results were received back from the lab. I did not receive results on the NH test until Tuesday Nov. 17th, so that one took almost a full month. She came back a carrier, so perhaps that test was run twice to be sure.
I had some interesting results on one of my young bulls HD50K tests. This bull was sired by a calving ease bull with a -.6 BW Epd. He is out of a cow line of mine that has consistently had big calves. This is in spite of using generations of light BW epd bulls on those cows. I have never had to assist with any of them, so calving ease is not an issue, but 90 pound plus calves seem to be the normal. The mother, grandmother, and great grandmother of this bull along with many other descendants of that grandmother are still producing in the herd, and I greatly value this cow line. When this bull calf was born last summer he weighed 104 pounds. I was in need of a bull to put with my heifers, so he was not one I planned to keep. I figured no one else would want a 104 pound bull calf as a breeding animal either. I kept back two bulls, who by pedigree and by their own birth weights should make good heifer bulls. I ended up keeping the 104 pound calf because he was such a stand out at weaning that I just could not bring myself to cut him and sell him as a feeder/stocker. His mother is a pathfinder cow with an average weaning ratio of 115% on 4 calves, so you can see why I find value in him even though I expect everyone else will dismiss him due to my honest reporting of his birth weight. I sent in the blood work and did the HD50K on all three bulls. The two bulls I chose to put in with heifers both tested well on CED and BW as expected. What I did not expect was that the big bull would beat them both in BW, testing in the top 7% of low birth weight. He also did well for CED, testing very similar to the two young bulls who had calving ease on both sides of their pedigree for many generations.
The accuracy of these genomic profiles has increased dramatically since I first became interested in them. A few years ago, I had I would have laughed this off as proof of that inaccuracy. Today, as I look through thousands of profiles available on the websites of places like ABS, Genex, Select Sires, Accelerated Genetics, Origen etc. it is pretty obvious there is value here. Those profiles match well proven bulls and have given me the first hint of inaccuracies in the Epd's of new up and coming bulls.
