Hidden Longevity Numbers

[HerefordSire]

I'm not trying to defend associations for not making the effort to produce a longevity/stayability EPD, but it has become a very difficult thing to estimate. The information to generate an estimate with any degree of accuracy would have to rely heavily on relatives and pedgree estimates. As many of the animals with lots of relatives/progeny are the result of flushing donors, longevity data is greatly skewed. A donor is most often not treated like the rest of the herd in a normal environment. She may be overly pampered or her reproductive life may be cut short because of over exposure to hormones.

Without including data from donors, it becomes very difficult to get enough information to produce an estimate with any real accuracy.

Hi whitecow! How do I find a bull that has the highest probability to live longest?

 

[dun]

I'm not trying to defend associations for not making the effort to produce a longevity/stayability EPD, but it has become a very difficult thing to estimate. The information to generate an estimate with any degree of accuracy would have to rely heavily on relatives and pedgree estimates. As many of the animals with lots of relatives/progeny are the result of flushing donors, longevity data is greatly skewed. A donor is most often not treated like the rest of the herd in a normal environment. She may be overly pampered or her reproductive life may be cut short because of over exposure to hormones.

Without including data from donors, it becomes very difficult to get enough information to produce an estimate with any real accuracy.

The single biggest issue is the lack of mandatory whole herd reporting

 

[Brandonm22]

Maybe I am confused. I thought the Canadian Hereford Association already had a Stayability EPD. Most of the popular sires should have a number on this.


http://abri.une.edu.au/online/cgi-bin/i ... 9=5B5B5D58

I think Huffhines is promised that the AHA will add the EPD sometime soon.

I am probably wrong, but after my figuring, the longer a cow lives the more profit is made, all other things being equal. Since we are guessing at how long a prospective bull will live, what do you suggest? Should we guess by adding the number of calves for the last five generations and compare to other bulls so we can err on the same side as the masses?

Since we are all one happy Hereford Hemisphere and we know (from the Hereford World) that a stayability EPD is coming and since we are sharing EPD data with the Canadians I suspect that the AHA EPD (at least in it's first gyration) is going to be pretty much what the Canadians now have. Use the Canadian data for (at least) the popular AI sires. The problem with using the Hereford data to estimate stayability like you suggest is that most people today periodically hold either these fancy production sales or mature cow herd dispersals so most registered mama cows end their careers as commercial cows rearing black baldies, buckskin charolais, or F1 tiger stripes. Just because a reg. cow only has five records in the database does not mean that she died or got culled.