AGam in Kansas - Dr. Mark Enns with Colorado State University - July 7, 2016

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• published: 07 Jul 2016
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(Sam Capoun) Hello and welcome to AGam Kansas. Today, we are at the BIF Convention in Manhattan, and I am here with Dr. Mark Enns. Tell me a little bit about your job duties. (Mark Enns) My job duties, I am a professor at Colorado State University. In theory, my job is 35% research and most of that is primarily on beef cattle genetics. And then, half of the time, I am supposed to spend teaching and the other half is to do service and outreach, specifically talking to producers, offering service to beef industry. (Sam) You are going to be talking tomorrow at the convention about understanding cow efficiency and profitability. (Mark) Yes. (Sam) Tell us a little bit about that. (Mark) What we want to do is taking into account the fact that in most cow-calf operations and in the beef industry from a whole, 50% to 75% of your costs are associated with feeding and maintaining the beef cow. Okay, if that’s the case, it seems to be a good opportunity for something that if we could select and make genetic improvement, that we could reduce cost and improve the profitability of beef production. What I am going to talk about tomorrow is how do we evaluate, how do we select sires that will produce daughters who have lower maintenance costs, and talk about some of the current tools that we have in the industry that are available, some of the weaknesses of those. (Sam) What are some of the tools that you are using? (Mark) The tools that we are using depend on what breed association you work with, but we have mature weight and mature height EPDs, and a number of breed associations have those. We also have the dollar energy value produced by the American Angus Association. Some associations also produce what we call a Maintenance Energy EPD. All of those, depending upon which breed you prefer, are available to make selection decisions on bulls you might use, or purchase to bring in a new program to reduce your overall cow cost in the future. (Sam) How does this all come back full circle for profitability, efficiency and sustainability for the beef producer? (Mark) That’s a very good question because the way it comes back is in the form of how do we use that realizing that we are selling a product. So, if you are a producer retaining ownership, and selling on the grid basis, you are worried about carcass weight and marbling and yield grade, and if you are producer selling weaned calves, but keeping replacement females, you are still worried about selecting the right bulls to put females back into your program. But you’ve got to do that in context, because you are getting paid for weaning weight, and if you are just selected for increased weaning weight, you are going to increase mature size. So, we have to have some way to balance that. These tools, we can use those in a system’s context to reduce maintenance cost while still being able to select for improved income, if you will. And the best way to do that, what I am going to talk about a little bit tomorrow is through the selection index, and I’ve got an example of an organization that did use an index and was able to maintain mature size while increased carcass weight over time, which is not easy because bigger cows produce bigger carcasses, and if you are selected for heavier carcass weight or heavier weaning weight, you are probably going to get a bigger cow. So, how do we stop that increase in cow size? It’s a good illustration of use of selection index to achieve an objective that might not otherwise be possible. I liken this to one of the trends in the industry is selection for high spread bulls -- bulls that have low birth weight EPD, but a lot of yearling weight growth. Those are unfavorably related because typically birth weight will go up as you improve yearling weight. But with the tools we have, we’ve been able to -- if you break that correlation and select animals that have a low birth weight and still have higher growth, if we have the tools available for selecting for reduced maintenance energy, we could do the same thing. Some of the weaknesses we currently have is the fact that we are not getting enough data from a lot of our seed stock producers on cow size to help us choose the right bulls. That is going to be an emphasis of my talk, too. We need to get better reporting rates in the seed stock industry to help us make a better tool. And then, I’ll briefly touch on how we might use genomics in the future to make more accurate selection decisions. (Sam) Thanks for the information, and hopefully, producers start using those genomic tools that are available to them, and hopefully they’ll take some information on your talk tomorrow. (Mark) Thank you very much. (Sam) Thanks for joining us. (Mark) My pleasure.