Ollie said:
Frankie you are distorting the argument and you are smart enough to know that. Is a +5 bull weighing 10 pounds more than a -5 bull not a measure of preformance..
In your testimonie you left out how your stocking rate, bw, ww, yw personally have improved over the last 10 years. Then how have your feed inputs, longevity, etc faired?
When doing that frankie, I am not expecting actual figures. I beleive you know your cattle and I trust your judgement. Just tell me have all areas been consistant preformance wise with the increase or decrease of your epd's?
Yes, the +5 bull weighing ten more pounds than the other is a product of THEIR OWN PERFORMANCE, not their own EPDs. Their EPDs indicate what you would EXPECT from their calves, not their own performance. Their own performance and the performance of their calves is greatly affected by management. That's why we use contemporary groups where all animals are managed the same to produce EPDs.
I'm not going to get into details of my operation here. Our bottom line has improved as the EPDs on our cattle's have improved. Since no one on the place has an outside job anymore, we can't afford to support the cow herd. No, they don't support us, but we, for sure, can't afford to support them.
As for consistency, we've made mistakes in selecting animals, bulls and cows. But I don't blame EPDs for that.
I'm totally convinced that the dominance of the Angus breed today is because of EPDs. CAB has helped, but, as we all know, any black animal that meets the USDA specs can be CAB, but they don't have Angus EPDs. I've said before that EPDs was one of the reasons we bought our first Angus bull to use on some heifers.
Today at consignment sales, a good looking, well bred heifer can come through the ring without EPDs and she'll take a $2-300 discount compared to similar heifers with EPDs. Basically, if you don't have EPDs on your Angus cattle, you're raising commercial Angus. That's not necessarily all bad, in my area, there's a good demand for commercial Angus heifers.