I've got 14 ME cows that are easy fleshing, not high milking, good cows. I've got hard keeping -7 ME cows. I've got heavy milking 5 Milk cows and low milking 35 Milk cows. I guess I'm more for looking at the animal instead of paper. I sure don't care for 13 ME, but the ones I've seen didn't seem that bad to me.
MLK CRK CUB 722
- Thread starter Loch Valley Fold
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BA":1pvpmnu4 said:
Confirms what i have suspected for a while now that a lot of these EPD's are worthless!........and you know i respect your opinion. Hope you did well on your bulls this year buddy!
BA":tn9813j3 said:
You know i am a fairly stubborn fella so I am going to ask this question. If you have an animal who is at the absolute bad extreme of an EPD or in this case several EPD's and his accuracies are high to the point of being almost absolute then why would you ever breed to him for maternal when it's his maternal EPD's that are so outrageous. This bull has right at 1000 progeny on the ground and his EPD's have gotten progressivly worse his whole life.
I don't doubt that he has some dtrs that buck the trend but that still begs the question. What's the point of the EPD's if they are this close to absolute and we still ignore them. If the answer is that he brings other qualities to the table that we want then why not look for those qualities in a less damaged package. When a bull like this is used his genetics are ALL transfered not just the ones we want. To me at least this means that they will pop up at the times when we least want to see them.
Like an outstanding grandson who like you said Brian starts out looking like a calving ease bull and after he kills a few heifers his EPD's for CED fall thru the floor.
as far as having cows with a -11 EPD for ME that are easy keepers, the first thing i would do in that case is wonder if they were a throwback to an ancestor that was actually an easy fleshing cow that was used in a fire and ice mating to hide some of these horrible EPD's like some folks do. The other thing I would look at is whether or not she was actually who it says she is on her pedigree.
The first case scenario is not that improbable in the sense that fire and ice might produce a cold campfire on paper but in reality you are more likely to get 3 or 4 that blend those traits out of 10 and the rest that express them at the opposite ends of the spectrum
Out of curiosity, why isn't Cherokee Canyon well liked by you? I have some of my own opinions on him, but would like to hear someone else's?
I have a few cows that are out of Doc Holliday (sired by Cub for those who don't know) that are pretty hard doing cows. They haven't passed that on to their calves or their calves' calves, which is good. Whenever I've purchased, I've made sure the ones I've seriously considered have Cub as far back as possible, or not at all.
We have a cow who is a ME 14. She wasn't that low (she was in the 50th percentile) until Simmental EPDs were thrown in the mix. That cow is one of the soggiest cows we have, never loses condition, and weans one of the heaviest calves every year. I wonder a little on the EPDs sometimes. Milk for example, I realize it looks at the weaning weights of calves, but how can you really measure the amount of milk a beef cow produces without going out and milking her? And ME, how can they calculate that when I have never weighed my cows and sent that info to the assoc.? And they don't factor in what I have been feeding my cows, I mean they could be fed a corn ration for all they know. I realize an AI sire is one thing, since there should be enough data from offspring to have high enough accuracies, but how seriously can you take some cow EPDs when they have accuracies in the 30s? Sorry to turn the thread down a different trail...
I have a few cows that are out of Doc Holliday (sired by Cub for those who don't know) that are pretty hard doing cows. They haven't passed that on to their calves or their calves' calves, which is good. Whenever I've purchased, I've made sure the ones I've seriously considered have Cub as far back as possible, or not at all.
We have a cow who is a ME 14. She wasn't that low (she was in the 50th percentile) until Simmental EPDs were thrown in the mix. That cow is one of the soggiest cows we have, never loses condition, and weans one of the heaviest calves every year. I wonder a little on the EPDs sometimes. Milk for example, I realize it looks at the weaning weights of calves, but how can you really measure the amount of milk a beef cow produces without going out and milking her? And ME, how can they calculate that when I have never weighed my cows and sent that info to the assoc.? And they don't factor in what I have been feeding my cows, I mean they could be fed a corn ration for all they know. I realize an AI sire is one thing, since there should be enough data from offspring to have high enough accuracies, but how seriously can you take some cow EPDs when they have accuracies in the 30s? Sorry to turn the thread down a different trail...
