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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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Which $Value Fits Your Operation
Open a sale catalog and it is easy to do one wrong thing. You run your eye down the page, find the biggest dollar figure, and circle that bull. Bigger has to be better, right?…
