A
Anonymous
Our Perspective Hybrid Vigor Is The Industry's Only Free Lunch At the recent Beef Improvement Federation meeting in Lexington, KY, one breeding specialist after another trumpeted the benefits of hybrid vigor and utilizing breed complementarity. Yet, statistics show that nearly 1 in 5 commercial cows are still straight breds. Why has the industry been so slow to utilize the tools of cross breeding, breed complementarity and planned mating systems?
Colorado State University's Tom Field provided some well-documented points on the value of and need for crossbreeding:
No one breed does all things well and no one breed is without weaknesses. Careful matching of breed strengths and weaknesses can yield optimal trait combinations. Hybrid vigor provides a buffer against environmental stress, and allows crossbred animals to excel the average of their parents. Heterosis is most advantageous in the lowly heritable traits like reproductive performance, calf survival and cow longevity. So, given that and all the years of research documenting that crossbreeding systems improve net income from 11-19%, why haven't these techniques been more fully exploited?
The most common reason is perhaps simplicity. Many of these mating systems are too complicated to implement. Crossbreeding requires a plan, and a breeding program built on the bull-of-the-month club can actually take a program backwards. Plus, when it comes to the benefits of hybrid vigor and heterosis, many producers tend to think in terms of the highly heritable traits like growth.
In addition, within-breed selection has made the advantages of hybrid vigor in relationship to growth less advantageous. In fact, a major challenge of implementing a sound crossbreeding program is in getting too much — too much milk, too much birth weight, too much growth and too much mature size.
The cattle industry has just begun to develop expertise to measure genetic differences in crossbred cattle and provide composite/hybrid/F1 seedstock. This eliminates the need for multiple breeding pastures and wide swings in biological types.
Also, crossbreeding can't be considered a substitute for applying selection pressure. In many cases, crossbreeding systems have been utilized not to improve economic performance but rather to maintain performance while incorporating inferior but inexpensive genetics.
The bottom line is that any commercial operation that isn't leveraging the benefits of heterosis and breed complementarity should take a close look at what that decision is costing them in efficiency. That's especially true considering that the industry has developed the tools needed to make more informed breeding, management and marketing decisions and measure their economic impact on an individual operation's profitability. -- Troy Marshall
Colorado State University's Tom Field provided some well-documented points on the value of and need for crossbreeding:
No one breed does all things well and no one breed is without weaknesses. Careful matching of breed strengths and weaknesses can yield optimal trait combinations. Hybrid vigor provides a buffer against environmental stress, and allows crossbred animals to excel the average of their parents. Heterosis is most advantageous in the lowly heritable traits like reproductive performance, calf survival and cow longevity. So, given that and all the years of research documenting that crossbreeding systems improve net income from 11-19%, why haven't these techniques been more fully exploited?
The most common reason is perhaps simplicity. Many of these mating systems are too complicated to implement. Crossbreeding requires a plan, and a breeding program built on the bull-of-the-month club can actually take a program backwards. Plus, when it comes to the benefits of hybrid vigor and heterosis, many producers tend to think in terms of the highly heritable traits like growth.
In addition, within-breed selection has made the advantages of hybrid vigor in relationship to growth less advantageous. In fact, a major challenge of implementing a sound crossbreeding program is in getting too much — too much milk, too much birth weight, too much growth and too much mature size.
The cattle industry has just begun to develop expertise to measure genetic differences in crossbred cattle and provide composite/hybrid/F1 seedstock. This eliminates the need for multiple breeding pastures and wide swings in biological types.
Also, crossbreeding can't be considered a substitute for applying selection pressure. In many cases, crossbreeding systems have been utilized not to improve economic performance but rather to maintain performance while incorporating inferior but inexpensive genetics.
The bottom line is that any commercial operation that isn't leveraging the benefits of heterosis and breed complementarity should take a close look at what that decision is costing them in efficiency. That's especially true considering that the industry has developed the tools needed to make more informed breeding, management and marketing decisions and measure their economic impact on an individual operation's profitability. -- Troy Marshall
