DiamondSCattleCo
Well-known member
la4angus":2r96su7j said:No. 1 I have never heard of a baseline being used when talking about EPD's.
#2 On average, An animal with +150 YW EPD should produce an animal 3 lb heavier than an animal with a +147 YW EPD under same conditions.
1) Okey doke. I thought I'd seen something about it.
2) Ok, thats how I thought they worked. But now folks on this thread are posting that EPDs are not necessarily environment independent. So that +150 bull in my example may have had all his calves on hot feed to get that little extra, whereas the +147 bull may have had all his calves running on grass/hay/light oats. So when I drag the +150 bull home, breed him, his calves may not be all that great, whereas the +147 bull, because his calves were weighed and indexed in an environment similar to mine, may actually perform as advertised.
So in other words, the EPDs are no more useful than performance indexing based on offspring, and modifying it for environment, which we've done for hundreds of years.
Color me confused. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Rod