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How a Modern Operation Uses the Numbers
You are standing at the pen with the sale book open. The bull’s page is in front of you: his EPDs down one column, his dollar indexes down another, an accuracy beside each one. You…
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Planning Matings to Manage Inbreeding: Using a COI Before the Calf Is Born
You have a bull picked out and a cow in mind. You pull both pedigrees and a name shows up on each side, a few generations back. Same good sire, once through the bull’s line…
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Figuring a Mating on Paper
You have a bull picked out and a cow in mind. Before you ever turn them out together, you want to know what the calf will be, on paper. Not the color, not the look.…
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Reading Inbreeding Coefficients: What a COI Tells You, and What It Can’t
Pull up a pedigree and you may see an inbreeding coefficient printed next to an animal, a number like 3.1% or 6.25%. That number is the output of a calculation older than EPDs. And unlike…
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From a sale book to a short list
The sale book landed in your mailbox this week. A hundred bulls in it, maybe more. The sale starts at one o’clock Monday, and your coffee is already cold. You cannot lay eyes on a…
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Genetic conditions and recessives: reading carrier status
Two of the best-looking cattle you own can throw a calf that never stands. The bull is sound. The cow is sound. Neither one ever showed you a thing wrong. Then their calf comes weak,…
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Calving Ease and Picking a Heifer Bull
You lost one this spring. A first-calf heifer, up half the night, and by the time you got a chain on that calf it was too late for both of them. And the part that…
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Genomics explained plainly
A yearling bull stands in your pen. He has never sired a calf. All his numbers rest on his sire, his dam, and his own growth so far. Then someone pulls a few hairs from…
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Accuracy and the range behind it
You are leaning on the rail at a bull sale. Two bulls in the catalog both read +90 for the same weaning weight trait. On paper they are twins. But one is a proven herd…
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Contemporary groups: why you cannot buy a number with a feed truck
You have heard the gripe at the sale barn. A man’s bulls read high, and somebody leans over the rail and says, “Sure they do. Look how he feeds them.” Pour the groceries to a…
