fargus
Well-known member
I read through the herd management thread, and it was a super discussion. I wanted to add some thoughts, but they didn't really fit wholly in that topic.
To answer the original question about retaining vs purchasing females, we (almost) exclusively retain our own. I will purchase replacements only if I know the genetics and the price is right. With that said, we retained 9 of 14 heifers born in 2009 to calve next year. One was a free-martin and culled immediately, the other 13 were exposed to our jr herdsire and 10 caught. The three open females were culled, and one fence-jumping PITA also took a ride to town. That has us retaining 65% of our females from the purebred herd, and culling 2/29 mature cows this year. Our replacement rate is 7%, but we are trying to grow our herd as quickly as possible.
This may seem like it is counter-productive as we retain an overall lower quality of female. I understand only wanting to keep your top 10-15% of potential replacements, but there are reasons I believe that is limiting your future productivity. The goal for our herd of cows is to make steady genetic gain, both year over year, and as measured generation to generation. The balance we are trying to strike is to make steady progress, without limiting our potential genetic ceiling. It's been proven over and over that if we select too hard, too early in a breeding program we eliminate a lot of genetic diversity from our population. We have a few "deal breakers" as discussed previously in other threads that earn any animal a one-way ticket down the road. By maintaining that minimum standard we don't go backwards in terms of genetic gain. It also means that we sacrifice larger year over year improvements. The trade-off is keeping more cow families, and thus genetic diversity in play that we can pull potentially positive traits from down the road. My wife and I are both young (26) so compromising on our rate of genetic gain to give us a higher ceiling makes sense to me. As we retain more of our own sires, we get the genetics from our very best cow families mixed with the rest of the herd. Over time, we distill the most positive alleles, and combinations of those traits into more individuals within the herd. By starting with more diversity, we can "gather up" more positive dominant and recessive traits and express them in more individuals within our herd.
As the herd grows, the minimum standards will also rise. If they don't, we will stagnate, and our gains will go flat. This is a different take on the scatter-bred vs line-bred discussion, but I'm interested in what others on here think of my assumptions.
To answer the original question about retaining vs purchasing females, we (almost) exclusively retain our own. I will purchase replacements only if I know the genetics and the price is right. With that said, we retained 9 of 14 heifers born in 2009 to calve next year. One was a free-martin and culled immediately, the other 13 were exposed to our jr herdsire and 10 caught. The three open females were culled, and one fence-jumping PITA also took a ride to town. That has us retaining 65% of our females from the purebred herd, and culling 2/29 mature cows this year. Our replacement rate is 7%, but we are trying to grow our herd as quickly as possible.
This may seem like it is counter-productive as we retain an overall lower quality of female. I understand only wanting to keep your top 10-15% of potential replacements, but there are reasons I believe that is limiting your future productivity. The goal for our herd of cows is to make steady genetic gain, both year over year, and as measured generation to generation. The balance we are trying to strike is to make steady progress, without limiting our potential genetic ceiling. It's been proven over and over that if we select too hard, too early in a breeding program we eliminate a lot of genetic diversity from our population. We have a few "deal breakers" as discussed previously in other threads that earn any animal a one-way ticket down the road. By maintaining that minimum standard we don't go backwards in terms of genetic gain. It also means that we sacrifice larger year over year improvements. The trade-off is keeping more cow families, and thus genetic diversity in play that we can pull potentially positive traits from down the road. My wife and I are both young (26) so compromising on our rate of genetic gain to give us a higher ceiling makes sense to me. As we retain more of our own sires, we get the genetics from our very best cow families mixed with the rest of the herd. Over time, we distill the most positive alleles, and combinations of those traits into more individuals within the herd. By starting with more diversity, we can "gather up" more positive dominant and recessive traits and express them in more individuals within our herd.
As the herd grows, the minimum standards will also rise. If they don't, we will stagnate, and our gains will go flat. This is a different take on the scatter-bred vs line-bred discussion, but I'm interested in what others on here think of my assumptions.