REPLACEMENT BREEDING

[KNERSIE]

Just because you use a bull with a high YW doesn't mean you can't retain heifers. Frame creep won't happen overnight. The first thing you should do is check the actual frame of the heifer you produced. Is she above your target frame? Just because a bull has a high YW doesn't mean every calf he throws is going to have a higher frame size. YW can also be attributed to muscle and capacity.

If she IS a higher frame than you like, use a smaller frame bull on her if she fits into your program from other regards.

This is the best response so far IMHO. Look at your frame scores. There are a lot of Hereford (particularly Horned Hereford) bulls that have over a 100 YW EPD, but have a frame size of 6 or less. Lots of spine and growth potential horizontally will bring your YW EPD up a lot fast than vertical growth. If it was the other way around, there should be Polled Hereford bulls from the 80's that have a 200 YW EPD by todays standards. Like angus said, a lot of the YW EPD can be contributed to weight gain and muscle accumulation, something you don't get much of, very fast with a giraffe-built steer.

That is one of the reasons why EPD's alone won't do the trick. If you use EPDs in combination with visial traits you'll have a much more accurate way of determining if the animal will mature into a too tall animal for your program. The cannon bone give a very good indication if the animal is early or later maturing and how tall the animal will mature to be. A long cannon bone indicates a taller later maturing animal, a shorter cannon bone a shorter earlier maturing animal. If you really start looking at this you'll soon get the hang of it and have a much better idea of expected mature size.