EPD?

[Dale L]

So if I understand correctly every breed has its own epd averages so you can't really compare from one breed to the other. Right now we are looking at a maine bull. I noticed the milk epd is a little below average for the breed 16.4. This bull would be used mostly for terminal crosses but we do keep a few of the better heifers from time to time. I am thinking he would be fine for our program. The cows he would be running with are mostly angus and heavy angus crosses. Would you be concerned about the milk epd if you were keeping heifers? The average from what I saw is around 19. Also my dad just bought 6 Saler cross heifers. Anyone have any thoughs on a Maine x Salers cross. We haven't ran a lot of purebred stuff so we are pretty new to epds. Thanks for any help!

 

[Lucky_P]

US MARC releases a yearly updated 'across-breed' epd chart, which allows one to make some generalized comparisons between breeds, based upon breed averages.
Look here:
http://beefmagazine.com/breeding-system ... epd-tables

 

[J&D Cattle]

Seems like an EPD app would be a great idea. Something you can plug and play with different bulls of different breeds. Maybe AAA has something like this on their app???

 

[cbcr]

The best thing to do is to see how the bull you are looking at ranks within his breed. If he ranks in say the top 10% of his breed for a trait, then he should be close to that in comparison to all breeds.

While the MARC adjustments are available, they are not as accurate as they should be and they do not cover all of the traits.

 

[B&M Farms]

You can't just look at one trait selecting a bull. If all his other numbers complement your cows and they are really good milkers I would not worry about keeping heifers from him.

 

[Dale L]

His numbers look pretty good overall. Low BW good YW and WW. We are going to go look at him sometime this week hopefully. I have only seen a picture and his epds so far. Just tryin to do the homework so we can pick a good bull for the herd. Thanks for the replies.

 

[pdfangus]

calving ease and birth weight would be my first concern....because you mentioned using on heifers.....
second would be what the bull looks like....feet and legs and body type and dimension.
third would be individual performance and ranking among contemporaries.
fourth would be disposition....
fifth would be his mama....would like to see her....and her record.
if you have not decided yet......
then look at his epds and go on home.....

 

[Dale L]

We are going to Richmond KY tomorrow to look at some maine bulls. Looked at one local Wednesday and didn't really like him. But the search has begun hopefully we can find a good one.

 

[pdfangus]

We are going to Richmond KY tomorrow to look at some maine bulls. Looked at one local Wednesday and didn't really like him. But the search has begun hopefully we can find a good one.

biggest problem with using some of these less popular breeds is the distance between qualifty breeders.....
good luck in your search....
Is AI an option and use an easier to obtain bull as cleanup?

 

[Dale L]

We have wanted to try a maine bull for some time now so we thought we would try and scratch our itch. I have talked to the guy a couple times on the phone and he seems to be knowledgeable. He has reputable bloodlines as well (Sooner, Hotline, Ali). And they look like well made animals in the pictures. He wasn't a bit shy about inviting us down to look at them and gave me all the reg. #'s on the phone so I could look at the pedigrees online. I tried to narrow the search as much as possible before starting to travel all over the place. If we don't like these we have one more place to possibly check out and after that may just have to fall back on an angus.