Farmer's View: Time to tell the truth to keep the data right

Last month, the Aberdeen-Angus Youth Development Programme, which involves youngsters from all breeds, visited Roxburgh Mains.

The main point of interest was our feed efficiency trial on last year's bull calves. John jnr explained how the system worked, then Ian Watson, of Performance Feeds, talked about the ration we feed the young bulls on test.

As every kg each bull eats must be weighed exactly, we can’t feed silage or straw in a ring feeder, which we normally do, so they are fed a 14.3% protein mix, comprised of a protein pellet with roughage included, together with home-grown oats. The ration has a pH of 8.34 and replicates a high performance TMR without silage.

Boomer Birch, bull buyer from Cogent Genetic Services – which operates the largest bull stud in UK and is a valued client – spoke of present trends in the cattle industry and about the kind of bulls the stud required.

The first step in the selection process is entirely data based and, after the field has narrowed, the potential purchase is assessed visually. An increasing player in Cogent’s market is sexed semen.

This is, after decades of being ‘almost there’, now a realistic proposition, with both huge implications and potential for both the dairy and beef industries. The dairy breeder can now put his top cows to a dairy bull to breed herd replacements and AI his lower producers to beef bulls.

These will have bull calves which are replacing pure-bred and low value dairy bull calves, with 50% of beef calves of better conformation. Successfully satisfying the current market demand is critical to Cogent’s profitability and dictates the type of bulls the stud buys.

Of its customers, an average order from pedigree beef breeders is 12 straws, from commercial breeders 50 straws and from milk producers, 300 straws. The common factor is that all sectors require genetics which will result in an easily born calf which will develop into a productive dairy heifer or a high value beef bull or steer.

The easily born part is proving to be a significant challenge. Despite every bull Cogent buys having excellent EBVs for calving ease, when information is returned about their actual experience on farm – involving thousands of births – customers report that many of the bulls they have used are anything but easy calving. This reflects badly on the data supplied to their breed societies by the breeders of these bulls.

As an aside, I remember a comment made by the owner of a very large Aberdeen-Angus herd in USA, that he could sell five easy calving bulls for every high growth bull and another by the owner of an AI stud in Australia, that he imported significant amounts of semen from America and none from Britain because of unreliable data on calving ease.

The world has changed. No longer is it sufficient merely to breed a big bull with a good back end, even if judges reward that in the show ring.

Pedigree animals must have accurate EBVs. It is encouraging that breed societies – or some of them anyway – are grasping the nettle of false birth dates.

It is now time that breeders themselves recognise that glossing over difficult calvings when they provide calving data to their breed society, might help sell a bull but at the same time it affects every aspect of the beef and dairy industry adversely and damages our reputation abroad.

Boomer told us of a calculation made by Cogent, which compared the economic outcome between using the easiest calving Angus sire in the stud with their most difficult calving British Blue.

Despite the fact that the Angus calf, which slipped out unassisted, had a low value subsequently and the BB calf was worth much more, the extra cost of a tough calving, sometimes a Caesarean, the long gestation and delay in getting the cow into milk, heavy wear and tear on the cow and difficulty getting her back in calf came to more than £400.

In the real world, using something in between the two bulls would be more likely, depending on whether a cow or a heifer was being inseminated, nevertheless it puts a financial value, which has hitherto been masked, on calving ease.

Later, we showed our guests three heifers which had calved around the same time last spring. Their weights at weaning were 720kg, 690kg and 566kg.

The birth weights of their calves, weighed on a scale, in the same order as their dams, were 40kg, 34kg and 36kg. The weights of the calves on November 1, 2022, were 387kg (53% dam’s weight), 338kg (49% dam’s weight) and 342kg (60% dam’s weight).

If, as some suggest, the efficiency of a cow is the relationship between her own weight and that of her calf at weaning, the last heifer did best. The weights of the respective calves (all female) on January 6, 2023 was 435kg, 396kg and 378kg, with post weaning gains of 48kg, 58kg and 36kg.

The smallest heifer, which is actually about 100kg heavier than our own mature Angus and Angus cross Shorthorn cows were in the 1970s, did fine, but her calf will never grow like the other two.

No-one wants the tonne-plus cows, but the 650kg cow, which some regard as ideal and which the small heifer of the three will be when she matures, is also a false god. I think of HL Mencken: “For every complex problem, there is a simple solution ... and it is wrong."

As a generalisation, a small cow eats less than a large cow. Another generalisation is that a large cow’s calf grows faster. The weaning weight is not the end point.

Post-weaning gain is just as important and one of the objectives of our feed efficiency trial is to breed a cow which eats the same as a small cow and whose calf grows as fast to the market weight as the calf from a big cow.

Who knows what size she herself will end up. Does it really matter?